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Plot:
The Doctor, attempting to return Sarah to her home in South Croydon (presumably to pick up some more clothes, as she's reduced to wearing an Andy Pandy costume), materialises the TARDIS in a quarry instead. An actual quarry. A blast buries the Doctor and Sarah in rubble. Sarah reaches out for a hand, which turns out to be made of stone (except for a ring on one of its fingers). While Sarah is unconscious at hospital, the Doctor and pathologist Doctor Carter examine the hand, which seems to be alive and absorbing radiation. The Doctor theorises that it is the remains of a silicon-based lifeform that crash-landed millions of years before. Sarah wakes, zaps people in her way using the ring, takes the hand and breaks into the nearby Nunton Power station's nuclear reactor. The hand comes back to life, and scuttles around. The Doctor and Carter follow, and Sarah is saved, but Carter and then a member of the complex staff are taken over by power emanating from the ring; they chant "Eldrad must live" and then get themselves killed in various ways helping the hand absorb more radiation.
The reactor looks like it's going to go critical, but all the power is absorbed. Eldrad is trapped in the reactor core, and the director of the station orders an air force missile strike. It could have been very nasty that, blowing up a nuclear power station, but luckily Eldrad absorbs the radiation and emerges fully regenerated in a female form. Eldrad tells the Doctor that aliens invaded her home planet and turned the people against her, which caused them to shoot her off into space and blow her to bits. To avoid her being stuck on Earth, the Doctor takes Eldrad to her home planet Kastria, whereupon she turns into her real form, a bloke. It turns out that all the talk about an alien invasion was hooey, and Eldrad's own people rebelled against his tyranny. They have all committed suicide to deprive him of any victory. Eldrad wants to enslave Earth instead, but the Doctor and Sarah escape back to the TARDIS and leave him there alone. The Doctor gets the call to go back to Gallifrey, and can't take Sarah with him, so he says an emotional goodbye and drops her off somewhere that isn't South Croydon.
Context:
Full disclosure: I have overridden the controls and journeyed deliberately, not randomly, to land upon this story for the blog. From when it was announced, I had pre-ordered the Season 14 Blu-ray box set showcasing Tom Baker's third year on the job. It's a very impressive set of stories, and I've collected all the other previous sets in the series now; as per the psychology of the sunk costs delusion, I'm in for a penny, in for 40 pounds plus per set approx. Early in May when it came out, it sold out very fast. It looked a bit touch and go for me for a day or two as well. Many people were being disappointed, even those who like me had pre-ordered the set; perhaps this was due partially to Covid-19 disrupting distribution. In the end, I got the discs only a couple of days late. Then, having built up lots of anxiety about obtaining the set, I proceeded to not watch it. Progression through the set was sluggish; I'm not sure why exactly, but it may be something to do with the volume of other non-Who stuff I was viewing during lockdown (more on this below). I watched the first story The Masque of Mandragora early on, and have slowly been working my way through the special features since then, but have not been particularly enthusiastic about the episodes. As The Hand of Fear hadn't been blogged before, I decided that covering it here would be a good spur to progressing through it and the rest of the remaining stories on the set. So, this was watched from the Blu-ray disc over four consecutive evenings in the company of the whole family (the Better Half, boys of 14 and 10, girl of 8).
First time round:
This story has some memorable visuals and emotional moments, so is perhaps an obvious choice for clip packages. I remember seeing the striking clip from the end of episode 1 - the hand coming to life accompanied by Dudley Simpson's scuttling score and sirens blaring - in 1986 as part of a celebration of 50 years since the start of broadcast television (TV50). There were other Doctor Who clips too, but that's the one I remember clearest, so it must have stood out. I first got a proper look at Lis Sladen's infamous Hand of Fear outfit, which can't be seen in its full glory in the episode 1 cliffhanger, on Resistance is Useless, a filler documentary shown on BBC2 early in 1992 to usher in a series of Doctor Who repeats. I saw the final scenes saying goodbye to Sarah Jane Smith on The Tom Baker Years VHS, a clips compendium on two tapes released later in 1992. Finally, I saw the - slightly less impressive - connecting tissue of the story that contained these nice moments in February 1996 when the VHS was released. I snapped it up on its day of release, as was my manner at the time. This was a good move, as it turned out. The Paul McGann TV movie had recently been announced, and a decision was made to clear the decks of any old Doctor Who product - including deleting many titles on VHS - before the big merchandising push accompanying the broadcast of this, the first new Who since 1989, in May of that year. This was particularly harsh on The Hand of Fear, which was deleted when it had only been out a few weeks, and made it a very rare and sought after VHS for the many years until the DVD of the story came out.
Reaction:
There is a screenwriting maxim that states that a lacklustre beginning or middle of a dramatic story will be forgiven by the audience if the ending is good enough. This is usually taken to mean the climax of the plot, though, not any short resolution scene. The Hand of Fear's final sequence - the Doctor and Sarah (and Tom Baker and Lis Sladen) understating the emotion of their goodbye - is magnificent, one of the best moments in classic Who. It saves the story it completes, which for the rest of the running time is decidedly average; but, it doesn't actually have anything to do with the previous 90 minutes approx of story to which it is tacked on. It wasn't written by the authors of the story Bob Baker and Dave Martin, but instead was extrapolated by Baker and Sladen themselves from an original version set down by script editor Robert Holmes. Aside from a few mentions of Sarah's home being in South Croydon, and maybe a few teasing moments where Sarah is in great danger as if this could be the moment she bows out (though even that's pretty much par for the course for Sarah anyway, she holds all the records for jeopardy-friendliness) there's no build up in the story proper to Sarah's departure. The abruptness is what makes it even more poignant, though, so this isn't a problem... for the final few minutes. What that screenwriting maxim leaves unspoken, though, is that the audience has to reach the ending for this forgiveness to work. I couldn't blame anyone who'd bailed out of The Hand of Fear before the final episode, as it seems to run out of plot partway through.
The first episode is okay, with an intriguing enough premise of the Doctor and Sarah stumbling on the remnants of a pre-historic alien crash-down. The beginning sequence of Eldrad's botched execution on Kastria should probably have been snipped out, as it removes the last shred of doubt that Eldrad might be a good gal / guy, and removes some of the mystery about what happened for the hand to have been buried all those years ago. Better to keep the mystery and ambiguity going longer and explain all that later (they explain it all later anyway). The second episode is a belter: the fictional locale of an experimental nuclear reactor is pretty original, and the real world location is impressive too. The next stage of the fossilised hand - now energised and scuttling around - is very effective, and there's no better tension builder than the ramp up to a possible nuclear explosion. After the midway point and the end of episode 2, though, and there's nothing left to happen. All that really occurs in the second half is that Eldrad is revealed, whole, and the Doctor takes him/her to Kastria. From the start of episode 3, it could all be wrapped up in five minutes - there just isn't anything else of note left to happen.
Things are drawn out by a few different means. First, episode 3 spends a lot of time having the power station bombed, but that is just repeating the earlier story beat when the reactor was going critical, only not as good. The earlier beat has Glyn Houston's Professor Watson calling his family for a clichéd but nonetheless affecting final conversation. The reprise has everyone crouching behind a range rover as if that's going to protect them from the blast. It's silly, but even if it were as clinically accurate as the recent mini-series Chernobyl it would still not be very good, because the exact same thing happened last week. It's not a screenwriting maxim, but it really should be, that you can't have a nuclear reactor threaten to blow up twice. The next diversion to stretch the plot a little further towards the total running time is the gender swap that Eldrad goes through in episode 4. It is a nice idea, but doesn't add anything - apart from duration - to the piece; no value or circumstance of any character changes just because she becomes him. In its final attempt to reach the finish line, The Hand of Fear activates the episode 4 fail-safe of stories of around this period whose plot is petering out: the journey through a booby-trapped inner sanctum. If it weren't so obvious that the story has structural problems beyond this last episode, one might even think it was homage. The Doctor and Sarah had a part 4 spent avoiding such traps in Pyramids of Mars, and the same thing happened in Death to the Daleks too (Sarah only got to hear about that afterwards though, as the Pertwee Doctor didn't take her with him that time).
Aside from the long stretches of treading narrative water, the structure of the story is damaging at a character level too. We're introduced to interesting enough people (Doctor Carter, Professor Watson, even the bloke from the quarry) and then they disappear again never to return; it makes the story feel bitty and unsatisfying as every character arc feels prematurely cut off. In fact, when I later did my fan completist bit working though the Blu-ray, watching the episodes again with the information text, which gives details of the production as subtitles, I found that this was not bug but feature. Script editor Robert Holmes provided Baker and Martin with a structure that changed focus every episode, engineered so no character bar the regulars would appear in more than two episodes. I don't know if it was for budget reasons or artistic ones, but either way I think it was a mistake. This just shows that even the great Robert Holmes had his off days. It would need a bit of work to fix. The reactor just about to blow up is clearly your part 3 cliffhanger - it can't happen any earlier than that, and obviously can't happen twice. This means that Eldrad emerges at the start of episode 4, throwing the plot into a new direction with the trip to Kastria. That also means there's no time to faff about with sex changes, so just keep her as a female - it's more interesting anyway (Doctor Who baddies were almost always male during this period).
There's then the challenge of making the plot from the finding of the hand through to the build up to the reactor explosion cover three episodes. This is possible, though, if the action is slowed a little and a virtue is made of the gradual investigation and gradual change. The ring taking over Sarah and others would be better if not so sudden, with the Doctor unaware at first that his companion is working against him. The gentler it is - suggesting, not coercing - the better for not giving away just how evil Eldrad is too soon. A whole episode with a hand missing in a nuclear power station, scuttling in the shadows as our heroes search, then jumping out and strangling people, could have worked well (though it would presumably have put pressure on the effects crew). Despite the structure, the story still manages to be okay because of some memorable moments and visuals, and mostly high production values (the Kastrian dome model and the crystalline Eldrad costumes being particular highlights). It could have been so much better though, and then perhaps the extreme jolt upon entering that last wonderful sequence wouldn't have been so pronounced.
Connectivity:
Both The Hand of Fear and Love & Monsters feature a single villain who first turns up in a different form, then reveals their true self towards the end.
Deeper Thoughts:
My so called life in film. At the time of writing, I have been at home for isolation / lockdown / not going out because the rules are too confusing (delete as applicable) for twenty weeks. Right from the start, I had no illusions about learning a foreign language or writing a novel or any other fantasy achievement during this period. This is not least because I'm one of those lucky people who can do their day job from anywhere, so I haven't had a single day on furlough; the amount of extra time I had was never going to be significantly increased. Sometime in May, when I'd had the Tom Baker Blu-ray boxset containing The Hand of Fear for a while, and barely scratched the surface, I did wonder where all the time had gone. So, I retroactively created a viewing diary of everything I'd watched to date, and then kept it going thereafter. As cinemas are now opening (I listen to Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode's movie podcast, and for the first time in a long time within the last week, Kermode has reviewed a film he saw in a theatre rather than on a smaller screen, so punters will surely follow), I thought the moment had come to stop cataloging and look back over this period. From a Doctor Who point of view, I started the lockdown period still watching the episodes and extras on the Season 26 box set, and then rapidly received The Faceless Ones, then later the Jodie Whittaker series 12 box set, then the Tom Baker set. I've also watched various stories for the blog and some of the early twitter watch-a-longs.
Beyond Doctor Who, I've managed to see a pretty good tally of 67 films or TV movies, and 26 full series, the latter ranging from the three episodes of ITV's Quiz, which was an early lockdown distraction, to 20+ episodes of some series of Community, which the family and I have done a full re-watch of from beginning to end. We're doing a similar re-watch now of Red Dwarf, but are only partway through, having finished series 8, but still having all the Dave episodes left to cover. We've done all of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes too; we started in line with the similar twitter live watch-a-longs of LoM, but one episode a week wasn't enough for us, and we ploughed ahead and enjoyed them in about a month elapsed. Life on Mars only gets better with age, but Ashes to Ashes was the revelation for me - much better than I remembered (and I'd remembered it as pretty good). I used a mixture of methods for accessing these series, and the films. Aside from Doctor Who (and one other collectible which I mentioned in a previous blog post, the Pet Shop Boys film It Couldn't Happen Here) I no longer purchase anything on DVD or Blu-ray. Well, never say never. Sometimes, old DVDs were dug out of a cupboard to be watched over the weeks, but mostly - even if I did own something on disc - it was streaming services that were the more convenient to use. For me, that meant Netflix, Amazon Prime, the BBC iPlayer, and the BFI player (which I started subscribing to during this period).
I also used Apple TV for hiring the odd film, pay per view. Of these, and I know I'm very late to the party, but last year's Oscar winning best film, Bong Joon Ho's Parasite, was the best: slippery, uncategorisable, funny, scary, heart-breaking - believe the hype. I also enjoyed the Mister Rogers picture A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, and quiet British comic adaptation Days of Bagnold Summer. Good new films debuting on streaming services that I watched included The Vast of Night and 7500 on Prime; Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods and Will Ferrell-starring Eurovision comedy The Story of Fire Saga from Netflix; also, britflick psychodrama Lynn + Lucy on the BFI player. Series new to streaming that I caught in the last few months included Space Force, which I thought was underrated by most critics, and Staged, the quick turnaround Covid-era comedy starring David Tennant and Michael Sheen (or - if you've seen it - perhaps that should be Michael Sheen and David Tennant, or various other combinations). It already feels somewhat dated, with jokes about zoom etiquette and drinking too much during lockdown, but it's hilarious and surprising (don't find out anything about the cast list if you're coming to it fresh, just watch). I also caught up on lots of recent things I hadn't caught when they first came out: Bait, Ready Player One, both series of Derry Girls, Russian Doll series one.
The other way I consumed films was more old-fashioned: I recorded them off the telly. The aforementioned film podcast had always had a subscription free TV movie of the week feature; during lockdown, they expanded it out and recommended six films per week. I took the advice, and found other films too. Particularly good freeview channels in this regard are filmfour (where I caught up with Logan, Sicario, A Quiet Place and many others) and the peerless, essential Talking Pictures TV (where I saw This Sporting Life and Whistle Down the Wind for the first time, and quite a few more). A few rare things I had to watch by putting aside my concerns about copyright law as they weren't available anywhere else. But mostly, people would have got paid (the tiny amount that people get paid for me streaming something, or that they got when I bought the disc way back when). The whole period has given me a new appreciation for home viewing that I didn't necessarily have before. I wonder how much this will change things in the future. I've very rarely paid to view individual new films before this year. If I couldn't catch it at the cinema, I was happy to wait for it to hit streaming services. I wonder whether this is something that will just reset once things go back to normal. I also wonder whether I shouldn't be reading more books rather than watching the tube quite so much, but I don't have any time to muse on that right now - the DVD box set that I impulse purchased of every surviving episode of The Adventure Game just arrived. Never say never.
In Summary:
The Hand of Fear is all about the digits, so here goes: the first three episodes and first 20 minutes of episode 4: 3 out of 5; the final 5 minutes: 6 out of 5.
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