Caught in an explosion after landing on present-day Earth, Sarah comes across what appears to be a fossilized human hand but which the Doctor soon realizes is a still-living fragment of a silicon-based alien life form. Soon Sarah has fallen under a mind-control influence from the ring on the alien hand’s finger and is compelled to take the relic to a nearby nuclear reactor where it absorbs the radiation and slowly begins to regenerate the whole organism…
Not as obviously based on a classic horror movie as most of the recent stories (although there have been some with crawling detached hands), this is a spooky and suspenseful story for two and a half of its four episodes, but loses its drive when the action shifts to Kastria, home world of the hand’s owner, for the climax. Elisabeth Sladen does a brilliant job playing Sarah under the hand’s control, essentially being allowed to take on the alien/villain role for the first half of the story. Sarah wears a distinctly childlike costume for this story, and Sladen plays her with a wonderfully creepy mix of sinister intent and childish uncertainty, carting the hand around in its plastic box, blasting people with an energy beam from her ring, and then nervously biting her fingernails or twisting her hair while trying to figure out what to do next. All the while she’s carrying the hand directly into the heart of a nuclear reactor, where its radiation-sucking properties threaten to cause a meltdown and panic erupts all around her.
Unfortunately, once Eldrad (the real alien) is on the scene and no longer a disembodied hand, the story loses its way. It doesn’t even feel like the same story as the Doctor and Sarah take Eldrad back to her home planet, and the story that takes over is pretty ordinary, the final twist predictable. The costume for the part-crystalline Eldrad looks good (the changed costume after Eldrad finally reveals her/its true form less so) and actress Judith Paris does a good job playing Eldrad as she/it tries to restrain her underlying villainy in order to gain the Doctor’s sympathy, but the whole final episode just fails to live up to the building suspense that came before.
Details
- Then again, it hardly matters because the ending of the main story is entirely overshadowed by the fact that in the final scene, Sarah departs the series. Her departure is a beautifully written scene, not quite as sentimental as Jo Grant’s departure three seasons earlier, but perfectly suited to the best-pals relationship of the Fourth Doctor and Sarah. The initial draft was penned by Robert Holmes, and includes a bit of a cliffhanger into next week’s story (written by Holmes). Then Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen were allowed to sit down together and revise it (they say no one could have stopped them from doing so):
- Back in the TARDIS, Sarah is feeling grumpy and starts complaining about all the trouble they get into, and about the fact the Doctor never listens to her— as he proves by having his head stuck inside a maintenance panel on the console. She finally says she’s had enough, “I’m going to pack my goodies and I’m going home!” and storms off further into the TARDIS. The Doctor hasn’t heard a word of it but suddenly gets a telepathic summons from Gallifrey and knows he’ll have to answer, and that he can’t take Sarah with him. She comes back into the console room with all her belongings packed and says she’s going now. The Doctor asks, “How did you know?”
- And then, just look at Sarah’s face as the meaning of his question sinks in. “Know what?” she asks, but she already knows, even if she doesn’t know why. Of course she didn’t mean it about leaving. The Doctor was supposed to talk her out of it. Now suddenly it’s going to happen. The Doctor explains about the call from Gallifrey. She tries briefly to argue, but already knows it’s no good. She and the Doctor say awkward goodbyes— the greatness of the scene is all the things they don’t say, but communicate to each other all the same. The TARDIS lands and the Doctor says it’s in South Croydon, Sarah’s home, and even her actual street. She leaves, the TARDIS vanishes, and then with a rueful laugh realizes that the Doctor messed up the navigation one last time, and it isn’t South Croydon at all. With a wistful look back to where the TARDIS disappeared, she walks on down the road. Farewell Sarah Jane Smith, the best friend the Doctor ever had.
“I bet it isn’t even South Croydon!”
- When she decided to leave the series, Elisabeth Sladen asked not to be written out in the “usual way” of having Sarah leave to marry someone. That was already viewed as the standard reason for a companion to depart, although in fact to this point only Susan and Jo Grant left the Doctor for that reason. She also asked not to have Sarah killed off— although that would be the kind of drama actors love to play, she felt it wouldn’t be fair to the show’s younger viewers. In fact a script was in the works that was to have ended with Sarah dying, but it fell apart for other reasons. The Hand of Fear had been written to be the season finale of the previous season but for some reason wasn’t used, so Hinchcliffe and Holmes brought it forward to fill the gap, with Sarah’s departure scene added. That Sarah survived her departure was good news for future spin-offs (and for fans who loved it when Sarah Jane Smith returned to the WHOniverse in recent years).
- Sarah’s last scene gives us an intriguing little glimpse of life on board the TARDIS. Not since the first season gave us scenes with “space-age” beds set into the walls of a room off the console has this question been addressed. Obviously the Doctor’s companions must have had somewhere to live but nothing’s been made of it. (The Third Doctor’s companions probably never needed on-board quarters since he was so based on Earth.) But Sarah has clearly been living aboard and even brought some of her stuff with her. The “goodies” she packs up at the end include a couple of coats draped over one arm, a suitcase, a potted plant, a stuffed owl and a tennis racket. The stuffed owl, I must say, is especially cute, and fans must now debate whether there’s a tennis court somewhere inside the TARDIS.
- Speaking of the TARDIS, this is the first story in which the Doctor claims the interior of the ship exists in a “state of temporal grace” where weapons can’t be fired. He tells this to Eldrad to explain why her/its attempt to use an energy beam against him fails. This idea will be played with frequently in the future, where we’ll see that this “temporal grace” is about as reliable as the ship’s chameleon circuit.
- Most episode guides will tell you the show plays with its own conventions in the opening to this story, specifically the use of gravel quarries for alien planets. The usual story goes that the TARDIS lands and Sarah wonders what alien planet they’re on when— surprise! —it turns out they’re actually in a gravel quarry on Earth. In fact, it doesn’t happen that way. Although Sarah at one point says “I bet we’re not even on Earth,” that’s mostly just her teasing the Doctor for the TARDIS’ bad navigation. The dialog indicates that she and the Doctor both know from the start that they’re in a gravel quarry (although they’re a bit slower to realize there’s about to be blasting). I won’t say the production crew didn’t smile a bit at using a gravel quarry as an actual gravel quarry, but they don’t play up the joke in nearly the way it’s usually reported.
- The phase-out of UNIT is now complete. We have a story set on present-day Earth (or at least UNIT-timed Earth, since it’s the time Sarah comes from), in which an alien threatens a nuclear power plant, and at one point the RAF are called in to bomb the plant, and not only does UNIT not appear, they aren’t even mentioned. The Doctor doesn’t even try to use UNIT credentials to get into the nuclear plant, relying instead on the force of his personality— as he would with the authorities on any alien planet. Sarah does mention that she’ll say hello to Harry and to the Brigadier, but that’s only in her departure scene. Sarah’s departure also puts a final period to the Doctor’s association with Earth: dialog between her and the Doctor has indicated he was still primarily based on UNIT-time Earth, even though we saw that far less than with the Third Doctor, but with Sarah’s departure he finally severs all ties. Even his companions will mostly be from elsewhere for some time to come.
Next Week:
“The Deadly Assassin” 4 episodes, by the incomparable Robert Holmes
