Review of The Hand of Fear (#87)
DVD Release Date: 10 Aug 09
Original Air Date: 02 – 23 Oct 1976
Doctors/Companions: Four, Sarah Jane Smith
Stars: Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen
Preceding Story: The Masque of Mandragora (Four, Sarah Jane)
Succeeding Story: The Deadly Assassin (Four)
There are many memorable things about The Hand of Fear: the disembodied hand, “Eldrad must live,” Sarah Jane’s outfit, and—of course!—her touching, somewhat precipitous farewell. Unfortunately, plot is not among them.
Perhaps that’s why io9’s Best-to-Worst list ranked it in the bottom 30%, at #187 of 254. While plenty of other stories I’ve reviewed have fared far worse (see, for example, The Monster of Peladon, Terminus, and Timelash), HoF is the lowest-ranked of the Fourth Doctor’s remaining titles on my “to be reviewed” list, so here we are.
It all starts out promisingly enough, with a quarry actually acting as a quarry, for once. The Doctor and Sarah Jane land there accidentally just as some charges are set to detonate, resulting in Sarah Jane being buried. She reaches for a hand held out to her that turns out to be a piece of the remains of an alien being known as Eldrad.
As the story progresses, however, more of the tension (not to mention the location filming) revolves around radiation danger in a nuclear power plant than around the mysterious entity at the heart of it all. There’s even one point where the “good guys” decide to drop a tactical nuke on the plant, and stop to “shelter” from the blast at a point that can’t be more than a mile or two distant. Although the plant survived the bombing, my willing suspension of disbelief didn’t.
From about the middle of Part 3, things improve some, as the focus shifts directly to Eldrad. Eldrad’s unexpectedly feminine form is perhaps one of my favorite creature designs ever, and the story of how she came to be on Earth in the first place provides some interesting twists.
But the heart of this story is Sarah Jane. Lis Sladen is fabulous both in her possessed-by-Eldrad form and her usual Sarah Jane determination. I particularly love that Sarah Jane refuses to let anyone cast her aside. When the Doctor tries to return to the nuclear plant alone after the failed RAF strike, she watches him go for a moment before trying to slip through the gate after him.
Catching her, plant director Watson admonishes her, “I think you’d better do as he says this time.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right,” she replies, apparently cowed. “I should. … But I’m not going to!” she finishes, sprinting after the Doctor.
It’s a fitting way for their final story together to play out, since that is kind of the essence of their relationship: he tries to protect her by leaving her behind, she grabs the bull by the horns and wrestles it aside.
For those of you who might not have seen it yourselves, I’ll not spoil her farewell scene, but it’s definitely worth a tissue or two. I’d even go so far as to say that Sarah’s departure makes watching the rest of this story worthwhile. Though I still think Eldrad just needs to get on with it.