The Hand of Fear

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087 – The Hand of Fear
Doctor Who serial

The reconstituted Eldrad discovers that he is not quite the man he used to be.
Cast
Doctor Tom Baker (Fourth Doctor)
Companion Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith)
Production
Writer Bob Baker
Dave Martin
Director Lennie Mayne
Script editor Robert Holmes
Producer Philip Hinchcliffe
Executive producer(s) None
Production code 4N
Series Season 14
Length 4 episodes, 25 mins each
Originally broadcast October 2–October 23, 1976
Chronology
← Preceded by Followed by →
The Masque of Mandragora The Deadly Assassin

The Hand of Fear is a serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four weekly parts from October 2 to October 23, 1976. The serial was the last regular appearance of Elisabeth Sladen in the role of Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who.

Contents

[edit] Synopsis

When the TARDIS lands on Earth in a quarry, the Doctor and Sarah are caught in a mining explosion. She is found clutching what appears to be a fossilised hand, buried in 150 million-year-old stratum. Analysis shows the hand to be silicon-based and inert, but when Sarah begins to act as if possessed, the Doctor suspects that it may still be alive...

[edit] Plot

Millennia ago on the planet Kastria, a traitor and criminal named Eldrad is sentenced to death for his crimes, including the destruction of the barriers that have kept the solar winds at bay. The pod containing the criminal is obliterated – but his hand survives. In the contemporary period the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith arrive in the TARDIS in a quarry and are caught up in a quarrying explosion. Sarah is rendered unconscious but in that state makes contact with the fossilised hand, its ring alive, and this has a hypnotic effect on her. The Doctor takes her to the local hospital, where the mesmeric power of the hand becomes more complete and both Sarah and a pathologist called Dr Carter are brought under its control. Carter later dies trying to prevent the Doctor getting to Sarah and the hand.

Sarah heads for the nearest nuclear generator, the Nunton Complex, where she causes a crisis by breaking into the reactor with the hand. It seems to thrive on radiation and begins to regenerate, growing back its missing finger and moving around unaided. The head of the complex, Professor Watson, displays great bravery in remaining at his post when the reactor goes critical, and offers the Doctor aid and advice in trying to get to Sarah. All of a sudden the radiation has been absorbed and the crisis is over. The Doctor retrieves her from the reactor, but Sarah has no memory or understanding of what she has done.

The hand now takes over a nuclear operative called Driscoll, who is manipulated into feeding the hand ever more radiation. An RAF bombing raid simply adds to the available radiation and allows Eldrad to regenerate into a fully humanoid form. It is crystalline, female and silicon-based. Eldrad uses her powers to persuade the Doctor to take her back to Kastria, saying she helped her race thrive by building the solar barriers which were subsequently destroyed when Kastria was caught in the middle of an inter-stellar war.

The Doctor, Sarah and Eldrad travel to Kastria in the present time in the TARDIS – 150 million years after she left. They find a barren and frozen world, with the few signs of civilization many floors below ground. Eldrad is caught in a series of traps left behind by King Rokon who appears in hologram form to denounce Eldrad as the destroyer of Kastria. She perishes in one trap but regenerates as a male, crazed psychopath who reveals that he created then destroyed the barriers himself after falling out with Rokon and the Kastrian leadership. When he tries to exact his revenge he finds Rokon and the other Kastrians all dead, the race banks containing the Kastrian's genetic prints destroyed, and no possibility of a new Kastrian future. Eldrad finds a recording of Rokon that explains that the species decided to all die rather live a miserable existence underground and they destroyed the race banks to prevent any descendants from being part of Eldrad's army of conquest. To prevent Eldrad now returning to Earth and conquering it instead, the Doctor destroys the tyrant by engineering a fall into an abyss – without the ring needed to regenerate ever again.

Not long after departure in the TARDIS, the Doctor is summoned back to Gallifrey and declares he cannot take Sarah with him. She has been bluffing about wanting to leave the TARDIS and is totally taken aback, and quite unready to be returned to Earth in her own time.

[edit] Cast

[edit] Continuity

  • Sarah Jane mentions giving the Doctor's love to Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and Harry Sullivan at the end.
  • Elisabeth Sladen would reprise the role of Sarah Jane Smith in K-9 and Company, and later appear in the 20th Anniversary special The Five Doctors and the 30th Anniversary charity special Dimensions in Time. While Sladen pulled back on her acting career after the birth of her daughter Sadie in 1985, she continued to appear as Sarah in various Doctor Who-related spin-off media, including a series of Sarah Jane Smith audio plays by Big Finish Productions, the Tenth Doctor episode "School Reunion" (in which Sarah's departure point was revealed to be Aberdeen rather than Croydon), and her own spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures.
  • The Doctor's hypnosis of Sarah Jane Smith by putting his hands on the sides of her head is similar to what he does in the new series episodes of Fear Her and The Shakespeare Code. However, unlike these two more recent episodes, in The Hand of Fear, he does not lay Sarah down after commencing the hypnosis, and in fact, Sarah walks around and makes facial expressions for part of the conversation.
  • The Doctor explains that the TARDIS is in a state of "temporal grace" meaning that no weapons are able to be used inside it. This function appears not to work later in both Earthshock and Attack of the Cybermen as weapons are fired inside the console room in both stories.

[edit] Production

  • Working titles claimed for this story were The Hand of Death and The Hand of Time. However, the production notes on the DVD release state that there were no working titles for this story.
  • At the time, in terms of seasons, Elisabeth Sladen was the longest serving companion with any Doctor, appearing for over three seasons and surpassing Katy Manning's record as Jo Grant. Sladen held the record until Janet Fielding played Tegan Jovanka for three years and one month. Frazer Hines as companion Jamie McCrimmon holds the record for the longest serving companion in terms of the number of episodes he appeared in.
  • When Sladen expressed her intention to leave the series, Sarah was originally supposed to be killed off in a pseudo-historical story involving aliens and the Foreign Legion. However Douglas Camfield, who was supposed to write the scripts, was unable to do so, much to Sladen's relief, as she did not want Sarah to be killed off or married off. Sladen also asked that Sarah's departure not be the main focus of the story, as she felt the program was about the Doctor, not the companion.
  • A real-life quarry explosion was filmed for the episode. Unfortunately the crew badly underestimated the power of the explosion, and a rumour persisted for many years that a camera was totally destroyed in the blast. However, in the DVD commentary it is made clear that this is just a fan myth.
  • The nuclear power station was originally supposed to be the Nuton Power Complex of The Claws of Axos but was renamed the Nunton Experimental Complex instead. The real-life location was the Oldbury nuclear power station in Gloucestershire.
  • In the original script, Miss Jackson was a nameless male. Director Lennie Mayne built up the part, changed the gender, and cast his wife, Frances Pidgeon.
  • Eldrad's home was originally supposed to be the black hole of Omega 4.6. When Robert Holmes pointed out to Bob Baker and Dave Martin that the name Omega had already appeared in Doctor Who (in The Three Doctors; ironically this story was also written by Baker and Martin), they changed the name to Kastria.
  • The original script for the story featured an aging Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, who had been moved from UNIT to the Extraterrestrial Xenological Intelligence Taskforce to study UFO activities. He was to be killed when he steered his spaceship into an Omegan kamikaze ship to prevent that ship from crashing into Earth. This plan did not go through due to Nicholas Courtney being unavailable for filming. The original script also featured Harry Sullivan.
  • Baker and Martin intentionally did not write Sarah's departure scene. The script for that scene was rewritten by Sladen and Tom Baker from Robert Holmes's original version.
  • In the final scene, Sarah Jane whistles the tune "Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow-Wow". Since Sladen is unable to whistle, director Lennie Mayne provided the whistling while she mimed to it.

[edit] In print

Doctor Who book
Book cover
Doctor Who and the Hand of Fear
Series Target novelisations
Release number 30
Writer Terrance Dicks
Publisher Target Books
Cover artist Roy Knipe
ISBN 0 426 20033 0
Release date 18 January 1979
Preceded by Doctor Who and the Sontaran Experiment
Followed by Doctor Who and the Invisible Enemy

A novelisation of this serial, written by Terrance Dicks, was published by Target Books in January 1979.

[edit] Broadcast, VHS and DVD releases

[edit] External links

[edit] Reviews

[edit] Target novelisation

[edit] References

  • Cornell P., Day M., Topping K. The Discontinuity Guide Doctor Who Books (1995)
  • Haining P. Doctor Who: 25 Glorious Years W H Allen (1988)
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Doctor Who season 14 serials