 |
| Revenge of the Slitheen |
|
 While a small organisation with no official status and virtually completely independently sustained, the ‘Bannerman Road Gang’ nevertheless have very close ties to The Doctor, as they were ‘established’ by his former companion Sarah
Jane Smith, a journalist who had travelled with The Doctor in his third and fourth incarnations. After leaving The Doctor ("The
Hand of Fear"), Sarah returned to her life as a journalist, inheriting a small fortune from her aunt after her death that allowed her to sustain herself relatively comfortably while working freelance on stories that took her interest, gathering a significant collection of alien artefacts during her travels. Initially, Sarah’s resources and allies were limited to K9 Mark III - a robotic dog that the Fourth
Doctor had sent to her as a gift ("K9 and Company"), investigating various minor problems such as a rumoured coven of witches in a nearby house.
Although K9 sacrificed himself to defeat a Krillitane invasion that Sarah stumbled across during a reunion with the Tenth
Doctor ("School Reunion"), he was then replaced by K9 Mark IV, rebuilt by the Doctor with various new features, although the new model spent most of his early months with Sarah trapped in a pocket dimension to contain a miniature black hole that could destroy Earth if left unchecked. Sarah’s other ally at this time was a Xylote supercomputer that she named ‘Mr Smith’, powered by an alien crystal that she had recovered a few years ago. While her aunt’s inheritance allowed Sarah to support herself fairly comfortably, only taking on what stories interested her, she had only limited contact with anyone outside her old friends at UNIT, apparently never managing to find a family of her own due to her old feelings for the Fourth Doctor leaving other men with a ‘tough act to follow’, but this status quo was forever altered when Sarah investigated the BubbleShock! soft drinks factory.
 |
| Eye of the Gorgon |
|
While exploring the factory for potential alien intervention, Sarah not only encountered Maria Jackson, the daughter of her new neighbour, but also encountered ‘The Archetype’, a genetically engineered teenage boy created by the Bane from various DNA samples to determine the flaw in BubbleShock! that meant that 2% of humanity didn’t like it, hoping to use the drink as a brainwashing tool to facilitate their conquest of the planet. After Maria and Sarah had driven the Bane off, Sarah used Mr Smith to create false adoption papers for the Archetype, naming him Luke Smith as it was the name she would have given her own son if she’d had one, Maria remaining in touch due to her fascination with Sarah’s life ("Invasion of the Bane").
As Luke began to attend school with Maria, they were joined by Clyde Langer, another boy at the school who took it upon himself to act as Luke’s ‘guide’ in understanding human social anomalies, Luke possessing a keen general intellect but limited understanding of how humans interacted with each other. At the same time, the group also began their alien-hunting activities, Sarah preferring to tackle aliens using her wits and ingenuity rather than resorting to the more violent tactics of UNIT or Torchwood. Confronting such diverse enemies as the Slitheen ("Revenge of the Slitheen"), an alien Gorgon ("Eye of the Gorgon"), or the time manipulating Trickster ("Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane Smith"), Sarah and her new group quickly proved themselves capable of meeting whatever challenged faced them. Even when Mr Smith was revealed as a traitor and attempted to use Luke’s latent psychokinetic abilities to crash the Moon into Earth in order to release his crystalline species to conquer humanity, Sarah was able to defeat him by using K9 to distract Mr Smith while Clyde and Maria infected Mr Smith with a virus that erased his original programming, reverting him to his program of protecting Earth with them ("The Lost Boy").
 |
| Secrets of the Stars |
|
Despite Sarah’s brief reunion with The Doctor during the Dalek theft of Earth - during which Mr Smith and K9 helped Torchwood Three use the Cardiff Rift as a ‘towrope’ so that the TARDIS could take Earth back to its original location - ("The Stolen Earth/Journey's End"), the team continued to remain primarily independent of others, even after they found themselves confronting a Sontaran ("The Last Sontaran") that had survived their recent failed invasion of Earth ("The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky"). Although Maria left to live in America shortly afterwards as her parents reconciled their old differences ("The Last Sontaran"), the team swiftly found a new member in the form of amateur teenage journalist Rani Chandra ("The Day of the Clown"), Rani proving to be a worthy replacement for Maria as they faced such threats as an alien clown that had influenced Sarah’s past fear of clowns in preparation for its fight with her. During this time, Sarah experienced a particularly personal crisis when a temporal rift gave her a unique chance to meet the parents who’d died when she was a baby, only for her actions to change history so that her parents lived, resulting in the Trickster conquering Earth until her parents learned the truth and voluntarily sacrificed themselves for the sake of their daughter’s world ("The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith"). While Luke and Rani proved their worth as independent investigators by saving Clyde from the control of an alien pendant without Sarah’s aid while she was away ("The Mark of the Berserker"), the team as a whole also fought the Bane and the Sontarans in a dark alliance as their old enemies sought to release an ancient evil that had been imprisoned on Earth, requiring Sarah to contact her old friend The
Brigadier for help accessing vital information from the UNIT archives in order to protect Luke from UNIT scrutiny ("Enemy of the Bane").
 |
| The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith |
|
During their third year active, the gang’s cases continued to be diverse, ranging from an attempt to aid The Judoon find escaped prisoner Androvax ("Prisoner of the Judoon") to an encounter with a trapped alien ship that could grant wishes - the same crisis freeing K9 as the black hole keeping him trapped was drained to power the ship - ("The Mad Woman in the Attic"), as well as a haunted house ("The Eternity Trap"), an alien life form trapped in the Mona Lisa ("Mona Lisa’s Revenge"), and the Blathereen - a rival family to The
Slitheen - attempting to infect Earth with a mutating plant ("The Gift"). However, their most crucial crisis in this time was when Luke, Clyde and Rani encountered The Doctor when the Trickster attempted to manipulate Sarah Jane into marrying his minion, Peter Dalton, a lawyer who had died in an accident, in the hope of ‘tricking’ Sarah into abandoning her old life of defending Earth to create more chaos for the Trickster to feed on, the Tenth Doctor only managing to materialise the TARDIS on the day of Sarah’s wedding due to the Trickster’s interference after he discovered the Trickster’s scheme. Although the meeting was brief, the team nevertheless impressed The Doctor with their dedication to Sarah and her cause despite their youth, Clyde managing to injure the Trickster due to his brief exposure to the artron energy that powered the TARDIS, although Peter was forced to sacrifice himself in order to end the Trickster’s attempt to trap Sarah and the rest of the gang ("The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith").
 |
| Death of The Doctor |
|
Although the group dynamics were slightly altered when Luke left to attend Oxford early, accompanied by K9, they nevertheless continued to be an effective team, with the three children facing an alien that tried to trap them in their nightmares before Luke left by trapping the alien in Clyde’s nightmare of a useless future ("The Nightmare Man"). Even with the ‘team’ restricted to Sarah, Clyde, Rani and Mr Smith, they continued to excel, helping Androvax restart his species by recovering a ship containing cryogenic survivors from an alien vault ("The Vault of Secrets"), and taking an unexpected trip through time to recover three vital artefacts ("Lost in Time"); Clyde and Rani even managed to track down a half-alien boy who was now the last heir to his father’s throne after the rest of Earth’s population were removed by robotic searchers via teleportation in their attempt to find him (The boy had been hidden by equipment left by his parents and Clyde and Rani were ‘grounded’ by the Judoon after their last meeting) ("The Empty Planet"). A particularly crucial adventure saw Sarah meeting her predecessor as The Doctor’s companion, Jo Grant, when the two of them were tricked by the alien Shansheeth into attending The Doctor’s ‘funeral’, resulting in them meeting the Eleventh Doctor when he intercepted the Shansheeth’s attempt to steal the TARDIS with the aid of a corrupt UNIT colonel so that they could rewrite history ("Death of The Doctor"). Sarah was briefly replaced by the mysterious Ruby White as Earth’s defender after Ruby quickly dealt with a threat that had trapped Sarah, Rani and Clyde, but it was later revealed that Ruby was actually an alien that was absorbing energy from the imprisoned Sarah - identified as the most exciting human on the planet - via her ‘stomach’ in the cellar of her house, having faked the disasters to discourage Sarah. After Sarah’s allies learned the truth, they defeated Ruby by using her equipment to overload her with emotional bombardment, creating a fake meteor shower that inspired terror in the population, before trapping her in her original prison ship and sending it into the sun ("Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith").
 |
| Sky |
|
A few months after these events, Sarah found another child in the form of Sky Smith, a young girl who was genetically engineered by the ‘Fleshkind’ of a distant star system to be the ultimate weapon against their robot-like enemies, the ‘Metalkind’, the gang draining off the electrical energy that would have turned Sky into a bomb to render her useless to both sides while leaving her free to live with Sarah ("Sky"). Despite her youth and inexperience, Sky played a vital role in the group’s next crisis when an alien entity trapped in a totem pole cursed Clyde’s name; having accidentally awoken the alien, Clyde was now the only person who could trap him once again, but the alien’s curse forced Clyde to retreat to the streets as his friends and family turned against him, only for Sky’s non-human status to leave her immune to the curse as she realised that something was up ("The Curse of Clyde Langer").
When last seen, the Bannerman Road Gang were continuing their activities, Sky and Luke beginning to establish their new relationship as brother and sister during Luke’s first visit home after her adoption, while Clyde and Rani grew closer together when circumstances required them to pose as a married couple to infiltrate the release of a new computer system ("The Man Who Never Was"). |
