Eddie Smith

Eddie Smith was the brother of Lavinia Smith, the husband of Barbara Smith and the father of Sarah Jane Smith. He was killed in a road accident shortly after the birth of his daughter.

Timeline 1
On 18 August 1951, the day of the Foxgrove village fête, Eddie and his wife drove off in their car, leaving their three-month-old baby Sarah Jane Smith behind in the street. Barbara and Eddie subsequently died when their car crashed into a tractor that had broken down in the road. Sarah Jane was subsequently reared by Eddie's sister, Lavinia.

Timeline 2
Sarah Jane and her son Luke travelled from 2009 to meet Eddie and Barbara, and Sarah Jane decided to save them by deactivating their car so they would not be able to escape. However, while this change in and of itself had no major effect on the timeline, meddling with history near an unstable rift in time caused the rift to open, allowing the Trickster to fully materialise on Earth and suck it of its life.

Timeline 3
After Sarah Jane returned to 1951 Foxgrove from the alternate timeline her parents' survival had created, Eddie and Barbara quickly worked out who Sarah Jane was and what they had to do. They decided to sacrifice themselves to save her world, restoring original timeline. (TV: The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith)

Behind the scenes

 * is not the first parent to sacrifice themselves to the "correct" version of history after having met an adult version of their child soon after giving birth. Pete Tyler made the same choice, for instance, in Father's Day.
 * Thanks to some good intra-series continuity planning, both and his actor made their debut not in The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith, but in a well-placed photograph in The Mark of the Berserker.