The Hand of Fear (TV story)

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Eldrad must live!Sarah Jane, under the influence of Eldrad

The Hand of Fear was the second story of Season 14. It was perhaps most significant for being Elisabeth Sladen's final story as a member of the regular cast of Doctor Who.

Synopsis

When the TARDIS lands on Earth in a quarry, the Doctor and Sarah are caught in a mining explosion. Sarah is found clutching what appears to be a fossilised hand, buried in 150 million-year-old strata. 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...

Plot

Part 1

File:Handoffear part1.JPG
The Doctor examines an x-ray of the mysterious hand

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 its hand survives.

The Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith arrive in the TARDIS in a modern-day 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.

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.

Part 2

File:Handoffear main.JPG
Sarah releases the hand of Eldrad

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 goes to retrieve her from the reactor, but en route he encounters Carter, who tries to kill him, himself under the influence of the hand, but he accidentally falls to his death. When the Doctor reaches Sarah, he knocks her out and removes her from the reactor room, failing to notice the ring falling to the floor as they leave. When she comes to, 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, threatening a nuclear explosion.

Part 3

File:Handoffear part3.JPG
Eldrad lives

An un-explosion takes place instead. 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 persuades 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 civilisation many floors below ground. Eldrad is caught in a series of traps left behind by King Rokon. One such trap sees Eldrad impaled by a tube containing poisonous acid.

Part 4

Sarah Jane walking away from the TARDIS

Eldrad pulls out the acid tube and tells the Doctor it is deadly to Kastrians. Eldrad appears visibly weaker and tells the Doctor she needs to go to the regeneration chamber in the Kastrian city. They arrive there and Eldrad gets into the machine. Eldrad appears to perish, 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. Rokon appears in hologram form to denounce Eldrad as the destroyer of Kastria. When Eldrad tries to exact his revenge, he finds Rokon and the other Kastrians all dead, their race banks destroyed, and no possibility of a new Kastrian future. To prevent Eldrad now returning to Earth and conquering it instead, the Doctor defeats the tyrant by engineering a fall into an abyss. The Doctor is uncertain if this is the end of Eldrad, noting that silicon-based lifeforms are very hard to kill.

After they depart in the TARDIS, the Doctor sets about making some repairs. Sarah says she needs a bath and her hair washed, and bemoans the life style that she has traveling with the Doctor. Realizing that he is apparently not paying attention to her complaints, Sarah storms out of the control room declaring that she is going to pack her things and go home. After she leaves the room, the Doctor receives a summons to return to Gallifrey. As Sarah returns to the control room with her things, he tells her that he cannot take her with him. Aliens are not allowed on Gallifrey. Sarah has been bluffing about wanting to leave the TARDIS, and is totally taken aback. She is quite unready to be returned to her own time. The Doctor brings the TARDIS to Earth. Sarah asks the Doctor not to forget her. He responds by asking her not to forget him. It is only when the TARDIS dematerialises that Sarah notices the Doctor hasn't returned her to Croydon at all. She amusedly remarks to a nearby dog that once again, "He blew it!"

Cast

Crew

References

Story Notes

  • 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. These records do not take audio adventures into account.
  • 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.
  • 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 Elisabeth Sladen is unable to whistle, director Lennie Mayne provided the whistling while she mimed to it.
  • Sarah's clothes make her look 'just like Andy Pandy'.
  • 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 two radio dramas with Jon Pertwee (BBCR: The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N-Space), and a series of audio dramas from Big Finish Productions (BFSJS: Sarah Jane Smith (audio series)). She returned to television in the Tenth Doctor episode DW: School Reunion (in which Sarah's departure point was revealed to be Aberdeen rather than Croydon), and her own TV spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures.
  • The fly that can be seen walking across Glyn Houston's brow in one scene was swallowed by Elisabeth Sladen in an out take.

Ratings

  • Part 1 - 10.5 million viewers
  • Part 2 - 10.2 million viewers
  • Part 3 - 11.1 million viewers
  • Part 4 - 12 million viewers

Myths

  • 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.

Filming Locations

  • Cromhall Quarry, Cromhall, Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire (Quarry where the TARDIS arrives at the start of the story)
  • Oldbury Nuclear Power Station, Oldbury Naite, Thornbury, Gloucestershire (Location of the 'Nuton Experimental Complex')
  • Stokefield Close, Thornbury, Gloucestershire (Where Sarah is dropped off by the Doctor)
  • Rickmansworth Road (A412), Croxley Green, Hertfordshire (This was reused stock footage of an ambulance)

Discontinuity, Plot Holes, Errors

  • The Doctor and Sarah seem unable to comprehend clear signs of danger in the first episode (sirens, man waving, etc.) (TYhey do comprehend them, just too late to get out of danger.)
  • There's lots of bad nuclear physics on show, including the air strike against the complex and hiding behind a jeep from an exploding reactor.
  • According to 'E=MC[squared]' the amount of energy released in a simple nuclear fission reactor would be infinitesimal compared to the energy released by the complete annialation of matter, and conversely the amount of energy required to create matter from pure energy. Therefore, even if every ounce of radiactive material went into meltdown, there wouldn't be enough energy in the reactor to create an entire new body for Eldrad. Creating new matter was not necessary. The energy from the reactor only provided the source of power by which matter already present in the reactor room was re-structured to provide the female Eldrad with her temporary body.
  • The Doctor's statement of Time Lord policy in intervening when the indigenous population of a planet is endangered by the aggression of an alien power seems in contradiction to the Time Lords' existing policy of strict non-intervention. And how did Eldrad know of it having been dormant in a quarry for millions of years? (This may be a policy of the Time Lords instigated since the Doctor's last trial. Additionally, it has been shown that the Time Lords do have a strong anti-genocide policy. That policy likely would compel them to prevent the destruction of an entire indigenous population by an outside aggressor. Eldrad knew of the Time Lords and some of their policies from before he was executed. It is stated in The Ultimate Foe that they are the oldest civilization in the Universe.)
  • The entire Kastrian race committing self-genocide on the tiny off-chance that Eldrad might return seems a little excessive. Surely, Eldrad's capture and partially successful execution was proof that they could at least mount some kind of resistance against him should he ever return? (Suicide can be revered in some cultures. Without knowing the culture behind the Kastrians, it's difficult to judge the likelihood of such a decision.)

Continuity

DVD and Video Releases

DVD Releases

Handoffear region2.jpg
Handoffear region1.jpg

Released as Doctor Who: The Hand of Fear.

Released:

Contents:

  • Commentary by Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen, Judith Paris, Bob Baker and Philip Hinchcliffe.
  • Changing Time - A 50-minute documentary, looking at the making of the story and the special relationship between the Doctor and Sarah.
  • Swap Shop - Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen are interviewed by Noel Edmonds and callers on the Saturday morning children's show.
  • Continuities - Rare surviving continuity announcements relating to the story.
  • Photo Gallery
  • Doctor Who Annual 1977 (PDF DVD-ROM)
  • Radio Times billings (PDF DVD-ROM)
  • Production Information Subtitles

Notes:

VHS Releases

  • This serial was released on VHS in February of 1996. It was the final video tape to include the diamond logo on the cover artwork, and was deleted along with much of the rest of the Doctor Who video range only a few weeks after its initial release, making the original tape something of a collectors' item.

Novelisation

Hand of Fear novel.jpg
Main article: Doctor Who and the Hand of Fear

External Links

Template:Season 14 Template:Wikipedia

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