Favorite Characters: Luke Smith (The Sarah Jane Adventures)

“I was born running…”  Does it get much more companion than that?

Anyway, this is Luke, adopted son of the one and only Sarah Jane Smith.  In some ways, he’s the “sci-fi shortcut” character, the easy way to fit in some technobabble or do the unexplainable on occasion.  But he’s also a great kid learning about the world and who he is within it, and his lovely relationship with Sarah Jane is made of win.  (A few pilot spoilers.)

Luke is “born” in the first episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures.  Though made from human DNA, he was bioengineered by a nefarious race called the Bane for the purposes of studying humans.  He’s been growing but dormant for some time, and it’s not until Sarah Jane and Maria come along that he’s activated and finally wakes to the world.

Given his unconventional origins, Luke isn’t your typical kid.  His Bane-made mind is both photographic and off-the-charts brilliant (shades of Zoe, without the occasional arrogance,) while his social skills are non-existent.  The latter isn’t surprising, since he’s experiencing everything for the first time and doesn’t know how people behave.  Now, socially-awkward geniuses are a dime a dozen in fiction, but the characterization really works for Luke.  Understanding people is his Achilles heel, and in interactions, he can be sweetly ignorant, startlingly earnest, or shyly hesitant, depending on the situation.  The difficulty of saying or doing the right thing can be a source of worry for him; while he’s not especially concerned with the usual teenage preoccupation of “fitting in,” he sometimes equates his social struggles with proof that he’s not “properly” human. 

These fears and frustrations really add to the character.  This archetype has a tendency to be portrayed as largely emotionless – particularly when you get up to walking-supercomputer-level geniuses like Luke – but he has a ton of emotions he’s still trying to figure out.  He can be scared, confused, and concerned, he can feel like an outsider who doesn’t know where he belongs, he can be curious, he can laugh, mess around, and be reckless, he can be stubborn and hyper-focused, and he can be caring, brave, and selfless.  He has intense reactions to getting into a quarrel or having to say goodbye because he’s never experienced these things before, and he’s not sure what’s going to happen.  In this way, despite his brilliance, he’s still kind of childlike.  His relationships with Sarah Jane, Maria, Clyde, and later Rani are so important to him, because to them, he’s not a lab rat or a weirdo or a freak.  He’s just Luke, and whoever that is, it’s okay.

Oh yeah, and he saved the world on the day he was born, did I mention that?  Luke is an instrumental member of the team, and, sci-fi shortcut or not, his knowledge is often the key to saving the day.  Whether he’s remembering a crucial, little-known fact of vital importance, doing insane mathematics in his head under extreme pressure, or rigging up neat bits of cool technology, the gang would rarely get the job done without him.