The Hand Of Fear: Ranking - 160

    The Hand Of Fear

(Season 14, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane, 2-23/10/1976, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes, writers: Bob Baker and Dave Martin, director: Lennie Mayne)

Rank: 160

'Now that we've worked out how to do creepy independently moving body parts in Tupperware using CSO here's my new line-up for the next season of Dr Who: ‘The Leg of Legends’ in which part of a Cyberman runs after our heroes, ’The Arm of Armageddon’ in which an invisible Sontaron randomly scratches himself, ‘The Eye of Horus’ in which Sutekh goes to the opticians and ‘The Big Toe of Doom’ where the Doctor stubs his toe on the Tardis console'

Eldrad must live! That’s all you need to know. Next! 

Err, sorry about that, just a spot of your usual alien brainwashing that seems to have got past my alien anti-virus software (compatible with Terrileptil Black Death, intergalactic leprosy, the nucleus of the swarm and general space plague). It’s sturdy stuff this Kastrian interloper. Or maybe it’s a nuclear leak caused by leaking excess radiation from a local power station that’s gone into high alert. Neither are what you might call ‘handy’. But that thing is..keep it away from me…aaargh!!! 

All three plot strands (intelligent alien menace, not terribly plausible but tense nuclear drama, downright silly yet creepy horror hand) are woven together in this memorable and beloved story, albeit one that maybe hasn’t aged quite as well as some of the even more memorable and beloved ones around it. For ‘Hand Of Fear’ is one of those stories that never seems to quite settle on what it wants to be, sticking five alien fingers up at any reviewer who tries to categorise it as one thing or another, shifting from the more grown-up end of the Dr Who spectrum to the most childish. Even the villain is in a state of perpetual flux, the original Dr Who character that’s non-binary and gender fluid with pronouns of she/he/it, as a side effect of being a crystal based life-form rather than a carbon based one. At times Eldrad is an intelligent alluring scheming female so intent on rescuing her own people that she pushes the Doctor to his absolute limit and holding all human life beneath her. At others they’re a ranty shouty male intent on survival and world domination at all costs. And at others they’re a hand that crawls on its own after being discovered lying dormant on Earth since the Jurassic time, with the aid of a magic alien ring with supernatural properties (sort of ish but not really making Eldrad Dr Who’s first trans character). You have to hand it to the writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who even on about draft fifteen of the production team constantly asking them to calm things down and write a script that can actually be made on a BBC budget, decide to go all-out on what their villain means to them. What do you do with a story like this one that keeps changing? You just have to do your best to reflect all of it: the good, the bad and the ridiculous. 

On the plus side the plot is easy to follow: Eldrad must live! This Kastrian native has one of the best character arcs of any Dr Who villain, going from all-conquering unstoppable villain to tragic pitiable figure with each throw of the plot dice. There Eldrad is in the beginning with impossible powers, having survived for 150million years after crash-landing on Earth and being buried under the rubble until the Doctor and Sarah happen to land the Tardis in just the wrong place and find it – well Sarah is in need of a hand at the time (honestly, they say Ncuti’s 15th Doctor is always putting his foot in it, but that’s nothing compared to these two walking through a quarry being detonated and assuming the foreman is waving to them in greeting rather than telling them to get out the way!) Though just a hand it’s clearly a being of immense power that defies all Earthly knowledge and assumptions about live and has a mind of its own that makes it go walkabouts! Then when it possess Sarah it really seems to be about to blow up all mankind, taking over a nuclear power station and holding the Earth to ransom. Even after a misguided attempt to hurl missiles at it Eldrad merely absorbs all the radiation and uses it to grow bigger and stronger, an impossible God the Doctor so fears he’s forced by blackmail to take her back to her own planet. Only there do we learn the real truth: Eldrad is a victim, the last survivor of his/her/it’s race that were so fed up living life underground in a nuclear war that they died despite Eldrad’s best attempts as their local insane scientist to keep them alive, even changing their DNA over hundreds of years from carbon to silicon. Eldrad was banished from the world he’s tried to save so they could all die in peace, banished to Earth in a life capsule and left for dead, with the planet he tried to save empty and devoid of life. By the end Eldrad has been reduced from the level of a God of with impossible powers to a comedy stooge that trips over the Doctor’s scarf and falls down a hole, a trap of its own making from millennias past that it had forgotten all about. Oops! What are we to make of an alien like this? What is our correct response? Fear? Pity? Tears? Laughter? 

 Even this story’s morals keep shifting. The scenes set on Kastria, with Eldrad discussing the fate of their people, are moving (even if it takes up a whole chunk of the story that’s just sitting round talking, killing off the tension – but at least it comes in the middle not the beginning for a change). ‘The Hand Of Fear’ is clearly a warning from our possible future, with the idea that any of us mere earthlings could be foolish enough to play around with nuclear energy enough to send us round our nearest power station with placards demanding that we stop then and there or we’ll end up fossilised crystals on a dead world. This is, after all, a mere nineteen years since the Windscale disaster where the nuclear power plant we all now know as Sellafield in the Lake District had a chain of nuclear disasters of its own and came very close to being Britain’s Chernobyl; maybe not quite as close as the papers made out at the time but enough to make people seriously re-think the use of nuclear power. Not least because this is the mid-1970s with a new era of terrorist alert where everyone from the IRA to Russian agents to European terrorists fighting their own civil wars through the media of the day wanted to scare the world by taking over something powerful and important for blackmail purposes. A nuclear power station seemed the obvious place to attack. 

Only writers Bob and Dave have had a bit of a re-think by the time of their last draft. You see, they pitched this story after their regular trips from their home in Bristol to London for BBC story meetings and spying the direction signs on their way which mentioned the Oldbury Power Complex. Dropping in on the place one day to ask if they’d ever even vaguely consider hosting a BBC production team for the day they were surprised (given the hostility of other shoots on their stories) just how friendly the staff were, even getting their own personal tour round the complex. This was the post-Windscale era when nuclear power was desperate to win the public over and any way of getting children on side with the idea of nuclear energy was a great way to encourage their standing in the public. So Bob and Dave were there, clipboard in hand, taking notes while the processes were explained to them and every possible help was offered to the BBC when and if they came to film (in the end they provided most of the costumes seen in the episode as well asn many of the props and their ‘safety zones’ kept aside from radiation and contamination were set aside for cast and crew for three days of filming. Although they and their equipment did have to be tested for radiation levels, which was a first for filming). Bob and Dave clearly took something in as they softened their initial approach: nuclear power was the future and incredibly safe (when it wasn’t being held hostage by alien terrorists with impossible powers which, lets’ face it, could happen to anyone anywhere!) and the people who worked there were heroes. Just check out how different Dr Carter is to the scatty brained Dr Tyler, written for the writers’ earlier story ‘The Three Doctors’, despite being played by the same actor Glyn Houston, not as a scatter-brained madman but as a rational heroic scientist whose just like us. Check out Professor Watson too, who as scientists in Dr Who go is positively friendly and brave (he even gets to phone up his wife and kids when he thinks there’s no hope of rescue, just to have a last conversation with them before the end – a little detail that sells the danger in this story that I wish other writers had used more). Oldbury even offered their technical knowhow by looking over the script and tweaking it for scientific fact and offering up oodles of research. All that said, Bob and Dave are the sort of people whose minds tend to wander off on a tangent whenever there was…Oh look, radioactive squirrel!!! So I’m not convinced by how much they were paying attention to the actual science: I mean, nobody bats an eye when the RAF think the only plausible thing to do when the nuclear station is being held ransom is to chuck a load of missiles at the radioactive core and the Doctor’s response to this great threat is to…duck behind the nearest jeep (yeah, sure, because that’s going to save him from a radioactive explosion). I’m also not entirely sure the plant thought this through: for all the changes and the emphasis on them being the innocent party the security at the fictional plant is easily over-powered and makes them look like morons and the whole of planet Earth nearly dies in a nuclear holocaust which isn’t technically their fault but doesn’t exactly make them look good (once again, I’m amazed at how far a proper company is prepared to lean backwards to accommodate a Dr Who story that turns them into the villains). Even so, a fact that often gets lost: they actually shot this inside a real nuclear power station! This wasn’t just a set, clearly cobbled together in the studio, but an actual place that looked just like it did in documentaries. This story felt real in a way few Whos did, at least in its first half. Nowadays filming places like this is almost the norm (indeed three years later the BBC will be back to shoot Blake’s 7 in the same place)but back in 1976 it was a real surprise and added to Dr Who’s growing reputation for harder science. Or at least it did until all the very obvious mistakes anyway. 

Now all the location production team needed was a quarry somewhere near…and they found one just five miles away! What’s more Cromhall Quarry were also incredibly accommodating – despite the fact they don’t exactly come out of the story that well either – even going to the trouble of setting off a real explosion for use in the story. It’s easily the best explosion in Dr Who that was actually meant to turn out like this (a special mention for the one in ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ that was way stronger than anyone meant it to be!), with multiple locked-off cameras positioned round the quarry and locked in demolition-protective boxes (a longstanding rumour went around that the cameras were broken and the film retrieved during a hasty repair job at television centre, but no, apparently that one’s a myth). I’m amazed the quarry went to such trouble just for a Saturday tea-time children’s show. It’s worth it though: that gag about the alien planet turning out to be a real quarry on Earth is one of the best, despite the weather getting in the way of the gag. Only the RAF let the side down, refusing any filming, so stock footage of one of their missiles (shot for documentary series ‘Tomorrow’s World but actually broadcast in Who first) had to be purloined instead. 

So, then, that’s an ever-shifting alien menace who can’t even stay the same gender two episodes running in a story whereby the moral of the story can’t sit still either. Is there anything in this story to get a hold of? Yes, the acting, which mostly makes up for the sometimes dodgy scripting. A big old ‘hand’ to the first incarnation of Eldrad, judged to perfection by actress Judith Paris, who defies the endless hours in the makeup chair covered in crystalline paint to be as worthy an opponent for the 4th Doctor as any we see, belligerent and sarcastic. As the first strong female this particular regeneration has faced since debut story ‘Robot’, intuitive, smart and elegant with a quiet power, she’s also an interesting parallel for Sarah Jane’s early years with the 3rd Doctor when she was less of a friend and more of a nosey feminist reporter, following him to find out what he was up to and finding his alien tendencies less weird than his male ones (I so wish Lis Sladen had lived to be in a 13th Doctor story, commenting on the Doctor’s ‘upgrade’ to being a woman and taking all the credit for giving her the idea, before asking why she hadn’t done it sooner! Although truthfully Sarah Jane is a much more likeable and believable feminist character than Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor, so often playing the victim and re-acting rather than doing). It’s no surprise Eldrad gets defeated only when she ‘regenerates’ to the more tried and trusted male shouty type, played by Stephen Thorne (radio Sherlock’s Inspector Lestrade plus Azaal in ‘The Daemons’ and Omega in ‘The Three Doctors’) in the exact same way he played Omega, all bluster and ranting, with all the nuance of, well, an explosion in a quarry. The cliffhanger to episode three is pretty great mind and unique in Dr Who circles for causing the baddy to change gender (would that more Dr Who villains changed sexes during the cliffhanger: ‘Davros! You look different. What’s happened to your skirt? It’s now a...skirt’ ‘Not Cybermen Doctor but...Cyberwomen!’ ‘My name was Yartek, leader of the alien voord, but now I’m...Miranda. Do you like my high-heeled flippers?!’) The scientists tend to be a good bunch too, especially Glynn Houston as Professor Watson who moves quickly but believably from being protective of his plant against mad curly-haired interlopers to doing the right thing for king and country. Less convincing is Miss Jackson, the secretary who was originally written as male before the director made her female, added extra lines and then mysteriously cast his wife Frances Pidgeon in the role: she’s not great. 

 It’s a shame that Sarah spends so much of her last story possessed by Eldrad. Who, y’know, must live. Thanks to the powers of a ‘special ring’ (which is so much more generic scifi than a buried ancient hand).Nowadays when an alien says ‘I’ll give you a ring’ they’re usually inviting Captain jack out on a date but here, by chance, the ring has survived 150million years intact in an English quarry (typical though: Sarah hasn’t been back on earth five minutes before she stumbles across it). Sarah has been possessed so many times across the series by now I’m surprised the aliens aren’t queuing and waiting in line for her brain, yet Elisabeth Sladen finds new ways to make it work, impressively chilling when taken over. She gets a nice lot to do in her finale, from playing Sarah as cold and hard to being warm and emotional, her best scene coming right at the end in a piece Lis Sladen improvised in rehearsals but that director Lennie ‘Lovely’ Mayne liked so much he left in, teasing the Doctor post-hypnosis with one last ‘Eldrad Must Live’ in an attempt to make Tom Baker corpse. It’s a strong story for the 4th Doctor too as he gets to have more of a 3rd-Dr style role here, acting like a local and trying to shout at heartless big businessmen to see the error of their ways to help save lives before rushing around being dashing and heroic, rather than funny and offbeat. Though Tom Baker will excel at the sort of alien eccentric Doctor who never quite connects with the human race he can also sell emotional scenes such as the ones where he keeps thinking he’s lost Sarah, over and over again, and is close to losing his temper with the people getting in his way not because they’re mere humans this time but out of his worry for his friend. It’s a shame we didn’t see more of that before his character settles down to the more familiar archetype (probably because of his companions – Sarah is more of a best mate, whereas Leela and Adric are more like pupils to his teacher and Romana more a teacher who sometimes knows less than the Doctor and sometimes more). 

 As for the story itself it alternates between being silly, being tense and being flipping weird. ‘The Hand Of Fear’ starts off slow in episode one, being more of a character piece, then builds nicely across two action packed episodes in the middle climaxing in that brilliant cliffhanger...then has nowhere to go for the last part except a runaround a particularly fake looking alien planet, losing all the momentum and goodwill by going from an intriguing and different sort of Dr Who story to being just like all the others. It’s a real blow in so many ways: the opening episodes set up so much drama, so much tension, so much that seems unsolvable and has such promise: I mean, an alien being made out of crystals that’s grown organically, their DNA fused over time to the point where they’ve become impervious to carbon-based health issues and can absorb radiation. Their lives must be so different to ours in so many ways and their home world must be amazing – yet every time Eldrad metamorphosis it becomes less and less interesting and more like the usual shouty man in a costume and when we see Kastria (all pathetic boxes painted crystal, clearly made for human hands and a bit too much like the Earthly power station we’ve just left, compete with levers and buttons) it’s just like every other alien homeworld, fake and hollow. The fact that the opening mystery of an alien hand that’s impossibly old so quickly becomes yet another story about hypnotism and brainwashing is depressing, but not as depressing as the ending that turns a plausible villain into a pantomime act. The plot ideas run from the great (an alien that can absorb radiation!) to the ghastly (seriously, another ring with special powers?) The dialogue alone goes from being inspired (the joke about a doctor asking our Doctor where he studied and on being told Gallifrey says ‘oh is that in Ireland?’ A throwaway gag first heard here and repeated less successfully in ‘The Invisible Enemy’ and ‘Human Nature’ before Chris Chibnall took at face value and turned into an hour of my life I will never get back watching ‘The Timeless Child’) to tired (Eldrad’s rants are quite something: ‘You traitor, you cheated me of my…revenge!’) If any writer ever wanted to study the difference between serious drama and melodrama they should check out how Eldrad changes between the first half of this story and the second. 

 There are quite a few Dr Who stories down the years that tend to go wrong in their final act when the imagination and budget run out and the hard science can’t quite square itself to explain everything (many of them also stories by Bob Baker and Dave Martin) but you have to hand it to ‘The Hand Of Fear’ as it might well take the main prize. It’s hard to square the intriguing slow-burn opening with the action-packed second episode with how quickly the story goes downhill in the second half with a plot that drops the ball on all the interesting ideas it’s been juggling. Those scenes with Sarah acting all weird and alien, shot with a fish-eye lens to make everything normal seem strange and spooky let loose in an actual nuclear power station, are really atmospheric but by the end we’ve got a shouty man in a flimsy costume on a flimsier set ranting and raving. The writers have been around for five years by now and should have known how Dr Who stories worked and whole their constant playing with the structure confounds the usual structure and keeps us on our toes about where it will go if you’re going to do that you really need a stronger ending than the villain tripping over and falling into a hole we didn’t even know was there. The blame lies too with script editor Bob Holmes though who could and should have tightened it or asked for a re-write purely for the ending: he scrapped this story once (it should have been the finale of season 13, in the slot that became ‘The Seeds Of Doom’ and stretched out to six episodes to help pay for it) then revived it against producer Hinchcliffe’s better judgement as he considered it a better alternative to another story the producer really wanted which wasn’t ready on time. It’s a moot point whether this tale, written by former Who director Douglas Camfield around the Foreign Legion, abandoned when Lis Sladen asked not be killed off (unknown to her Douggy had written a big finale where Sarah was laid to rest with a full burial with honours) would have been a better finale or not. Certainly many fans were confused by the ending at the time and felt a little cheated that, after so much jeopardy, Sarah leaves in the most nonchalant of ways. 

 You see, most fans don’t remember this story for the alien or the plot. They remember it for it being the end of much-loved companion Sarah Jane Smith and even though it’s the end the moment has been prepared for in the general press across several months of trails and much discussions about how they can possibly severe the ties between the Doctor and his best friend. In the end the way she leaves it a bit suspect (the Doctor ends up being called back to Gallifrey and reckons he can’t take his best friend with him which is odd for two reasons – one because he’ll be quite happy taking the far less suitable savage companion Leela with him – where she stays till the time war given the end of ‘Invasion Of Time’ and an entire Big Finish range ‘Gallifrey’, two because the Doctor has a pretty good grasp on his space/time machine by now and Sarah is his first companion to have a life outside the Tardis and a job as a journalist, so the Doctor is forever picking her up and dropping her off at will). Until then, though, the best way to view is story is to avoid all the gubbins around in guidebooks that give this plot detail away (err, umm, ah, sorry – forget you read that. How does this alien artefact work again? ‘Eldrad must live’ that’s better – contact has been made and memory has been wiped!) and see it through the eyes of a viewer on first broadcast in 1976 as the Phillip Hinchcliffe-era production team constantly play with our emotions across this shifting piece. How is Sarah going to leave in her last story? Opening scene: let’s bury her in an explosion at a quarry and leave her for dead – not a quarry pretending to be an alien planet for once either, but an actual quarry! Nice joke there guys (sadly the planned idea of the Doctor and Sarah simply assuming its an lien planet and the cameras pulling back out to reveal very Earth greenery was dropped because the weather was so bad). Then after Sarah Jane has survived that let’s see her be possessed by an alien fossilised hand! Still alive? Well, let’s march her into a nuclear reactor while brainwashed and let the radiation kill her! Still around? OK, how about a trip to a booby-trapped alien planet. Really? Survived that too? The end (spoilers), when it does come, is nicely lowkey and apparently entirely re-written by Elisabeth Sladen and Tom Baker from the rather lame and simple goodbye script editor and Sarah creator Bob Holmes gave them to the kind of gentle playful banter their characters always had which works much better (so much so you wish they’d re-written the rest of the story in places. Sample of the original dialogue: The Doctor gives Sarah a lucky squirk’s foot – which is kind of like a squonk, but squirkier - for safe keeping but Sarah refuses on the grounds that the Doctor needs it more than she does; their final dialogue ‘It’s been fun hasn’t it? Well, cheerio…’ Not Bob’s best work it has to be said, but then he knew full well by now they’d re-write it whatever he came up with).

 Sarah makes the entirely reasonable argument, given what’s happened to her that day, that she wants to go home and have a rest and a bath and avoid being killed every five minutes but we know and she knows and she thinks the Doctor knows that she’s only bluffing. The Doctor, though, has been summoned to Gallifrey and even though in the future it will seem just as simple as popping to the shops, up to this story it’s a life-changing decision to go and the Doctor has to go alone (a shame in so many ways – not least because Sarah won’t get to meet The Master for another seven years and never with this Doctor. And because of all the quips she might have made about timelords being less decadent than the sort of civil servants she covered during her reporter years. You suspect she’d have seen through ol’ Borusa a bit quicker in the next story ‘The Deadly Assassin’ too). Sarah’s last moments in the series sum her up: she talks out loud to a dog then walks off for the nearest station home, whistling ‘daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me A Bow-Wow’ (it could be that the Doctor is still watching her on the monitor, which is why she gets K9 Mark III as a present a few years later: see the ‘K9 and Company’ pilot for what happens to Sarah next. Warning: if you think this story is mad…) That’s the director whistling in post-production, by the way, as they only discovered during rehearsals that Lis Sladen couldn’t whistle (by now she’s a pro at miming though so you can’t really tell). Rather sweetly she was given her own replica Tardis key as a leaving present ‘in case you should ever need it again’ then had a wrap party in the garden of Tom Baker’s then-girlfriend Marianne, decked out specially with fairy lights. 

 Lis Sladen was consulted a lot about what she wanted to do with her character: she left with lots of warning (she’d hung around an extra year just in case her pals Tom Baker and harry Sullivan ever got their act together to actually sit down and write the film they’d been planning, ‘Dr Who Meets Scratchman’, later published as a book instead) and in pure chronological time she’d been around longer than any of the Doctor’s companions except the Brigadier (though Jamie was in more episodes), long enough for an entire group of children to grow up thinking that she was the only companion the Doctor had ever had. The only thing Lis could decide on, though, was that she didn’t want to be married off (too soppy) or killed (too brutal) and a good job too – of all the Dr Who companion goodbyes this is the most natural, emotional and in character. Especially the bit when the Doctor gets his co-ordinates wrong and dropped off Sarah and her stuffed toy owl and house plants several miles out of her way (in Aberdeen as opposed to Croydon, according to future episodes; honestly it’s a lot more uncharacteristic he got the time right and she isn’t in the middle ages or meeting her great-grandchildren). 

 Overall, then, ‘The Hand Of Fear’ is a tricky story to get a handle on. The best bits are far too good to put it down the lower end of the rankings where the disasters of the series lie, despite having some of the ropiest acting and set design and weaker plot resolutions of the entire original era. Then again the worst bits are too bad to put it near the top, despite the strengths of the best acting and the tension of the opening, the sadness of the goodbye and the fact they actually shot it in a real nuclear power station, with part four one of the cheapest and silliest looking episodes for a long time. Around the middle seems fair: this story deserves marks for all its promising ideas and the way so many people worked so hard to make this story feel real without sending it up the way they could, with its hammer horror hand and its nuclear explosions, but loses many for throwing out all the things it was getting right for turning into yet another Who-by-numbers story where the Doctor does something not particularly clever to stop a shouty villain and then goes home for his tea. If nothing else ‘The Hand Of Fear’ is a story that positively radiates ideas and imagination: arguably a few too many for one four-part story to hold. Something was always going to collapse with a story like this and the production team should have had their Geiger counter of Dr Who silliness out to catch it, but instead it seems to have caught everyone by surprise. Overall, then, ‘The Hand Of Fear’ is indeed like nuclear power itself: useful beyond measure when used in the ‘right’ way by the ‘right’ ‘hands’ but such a danger when used in the ‘wrong’ hands due to incompetence, nonchalance, blackmail and the ‘its only Dr Who innit?’ mentality that you find yourself asking whether it was worth it all in the end. p.s. Eldrad must live. 

POSITIVES + The effect of the hand, an idea of Holmes’ that was inspired by about the only hammer horror influence he hadn’t covered yet during his time with the show: 1942 film ‘Les Mains D’elorc’ in which a pianist loses his hands in an accident and has a pair from a recently-dead murderer sewn on in their place. Although the writers themselves had never seen this German horror they had seen the similar British equivalent from 1946 ‘The Beast With Five Fingers’ in which a left hand cut off from a body is found crawling around playing the piano! The idea of limbs having a life separate from their original body is a staple of the genre though, from ‘The Twilight Zone’ to ‘The Addams Family’ to Dr Who’s own ‘The Brain Of Morbius’, so it was inevitable it was going to end up in the series’ most derivative era somewhere. You have to say, though, that Dr Who does rather better with the effects on a BBC budget than the vast majority of Hollywood and big film studio versions. This is the early days of CSO (Colour Separation Overlay) – let’s face it, in 1976 it’s still fairly early days for UK colour television – and most shots of things on a different set mixed into the action tend to come a cropper, filled with fuzzy lines, wrong dimensions or mis-communication as to what’s meant to be happening. What could have been Dr Who’s silliest CSO shot of them all, an independently walking hand, is genuinely creepy and perfectly blended with the action, especially when – in true Who tradition of having the most extraordinary things happen in the most ordinary of backgrounds – it starts moving on its own inside...a Tupperware box. Sometimes (especially when there’s a finger missing) the hand is a prop, sometimes (when it has all the fingers) it’s a puppeteer’s hand in a specially made set, but the blends between the two are done awfully well. So much of this story revolves around the hand that getting such an important model shot right is, well, very handy at making the rest of the story seem convincing. 

NEGATIVES - Thumbs down for most of the other effects in the story though, which are more in keeping with how 1970s Dr Who special effects tended to be more ambitious than believable. The crystalline Kastrians really don’t work well on screen, the Kastrian homeworld seems full of really dodgy effects the production team would never have been allowed to do (you’d think the writers would have learnt to calm down on the special effects a bit after five years of seeing how their work always comes over on telly) and even the timelords’ summons is a wonky purple line that looks as if someone has been scribbling over the print in purple crayon rather than a missive from the most powerful beings in the cosmos. Plus, a crossbow? Seriously? One of the most technologically advanced civilisations seen in the series, with a culture based on crystal, and that’s the booby-trap? Still, at least they got the hand right. And Eldrad lived. For a while.

 BEST QUOTE: Rokon: ‘So now you are King, as is your wish. I salute you from the dead. Hail Eldrad King…of nothing!’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The 4^th Doctor did return to see Sarah Jane at some point in between the end of ‘The Deadly Assassin’ and ‘Logopolis’ for the Doctor and after ‘K9 and Company’ for Sarah, at least according to the 1993 Dr Who Yearbook in a ‘Brief Encounter’ short story, with Terrance Dicks writing for his co-creation one last time. Sarah is a bit sniffly having just buried her family pet cat in the back garden when the Doctor turns up, describing himself as ‘All teeth and curls’ (so this must be post-Five Doctors for her too…this gets complicated!) The Doctor admits he came back to say goodbye ‘because I made rather a botch of it last time’. To be honest he doesn’t do a much better job this time: his comfort for Sarah’s lost cat is to quote a Rudyard Kipling poem about a dead dog! Sarah’s more upset at being left behind. ‘We could have gone on?...’ she asks him to which he replies ‘Not forever’ as they stare at the dead cat. ‘It never ends you know’ is the Doctor’s new last words ‘Not really’. Too short to be really substantial, nevertheless it’s a neat little coda.  

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