The Hand Of Fear is the 2nd serial of the 14th series. It aired October 2-23 1976 and it was the last regular appearance of Sarah Jane Smith on the original series. She'd return in the 20th Anniversary special The Five Doctors and eventually have her own show. Sadly Elisabeth Sladen would pass away before finishing the 5th series of The Sarah Jane Adventures. There was a plan to kill Sarah Jane off in her last Doctor Who serial but the writers, Bob Baker and Dave Martin, couldn't do it. Lucky for us. Also lucky was Nicholas Courtney being unavailable to return to the series. His character, Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, was to be killed saving the Earth in that earlier version of the script. The Brig and Sarah Jane would turn up again in the future.
The show starts with some hooded aliens blowing up a spaceship. The Doctor and Sarah Jane pop out of the Tardis in a quarry where some men have just set some explosives. It goes off and The Doc and SJ are knocked out and covered in rubble. The Doctor wakes up and with the aid of a worker digs Sarah Jane out. She's clutching a stone hand with a ring on it. The Doc and SJ wind up at a hospital. The Doctor meets a real doctor who tells him that Sarah Jane will be ok. Sarah Jane awakes with a voice in her head. "Eldrad must live." She grabs the hand and runs off. She breaks into a local nuclear electrical power station where her intrusion causes a huge hubbub.
The hubbub continues when the Doctor and that real doctor from the hospital show up. They're arrested but quickly escape their guards and go looking for Sarah Jane. The real doctor tries to kill the Doc but fails when he falls to his death. The hand takes over a technician and he takes it down to the reactor. After the reactor is opened the director evacuates the place. He calls in a nuke strike by the RAF. The hand gobbles up all the radiation and turns into a shapely woman like creature, covered in metallic bits, named Eldrad. Judith Paris plays the female version of the character. She talks the Doctor into taking her back to her home world. They figure out that she's been gone for 150 million years. Luckily it's only a bit dusty on Kastria. Some of the dust turns out to be the Kastrians and they've been walking in them. Ewww!
Eldrad turns into his real self and plans to take over the planet again. Sadly all the Kastrians are dead and Eldrad hasn't anyone to rule over. No matter, he'll take over the Earth. The Doc tricks Eldrad into falling into a bottomless pit. Ha ha. Soon after the Doctor gets a call from Gallifrey. He has to return and he can't take Sarah Jane with him. They have a bit of a goodbye and he leaves her in what he says is South Croydon. It's really Aberdeen. That Tardis, huh. Not a bad episode for the most part. It moved along briskly and there was a fairly good villain who gets a good doom.
The commentary has Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen, Judith Paris, co-author Bob Baker, and producer Phillip Hinchcliffe. It was recorded in 2006 and it's fairly good. There's an info track that drops facts on the screen while the serials plays. I didn't read it. The 50-minute featurette, Changing Time, talks about the Doctor and Sarah Jane. It was entertaining. There's a nice 10 minute clip from Swap Shop with Noel Edmonds. It's a kid's show that seems like Blue Peter from the limited info. There's a photo gallery, a PDF of the Doctor Who listing in the Radio Times, a PDF of the 1977 Doctor Who Annual. I glanced at the Annual but there are a lot of words and I didn't read them. The pictures are a mixed lot, some of the art is pretty good and some not so good. A pretty good bunch of extras.
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