The Hand of Fear - Episode 3

It’s hard to believe that this is Elisabeth Sladen’s penultimate episode. After the previous serial, its good that Elisabeth Sladen is starting to get the story that she deserves. The main problem that I have felt that has been in four part adventures is that when it gets to the third episode it starts to go off the rail a bits whilst trying to get to the end of the story. The episode begins with things going off a bit and then nothing happens. It’s quite a clever way to get out of a cliffhanger and its done in a way that isn’t silly or convoluted. An unexplosion is a term used by the Doctor which is a great one.

The beginning of the episode see the nuclear base destroyed and the Doctor, Watson and Sarah hide behind a land rover. Even though the explosion doesn’t happen, its stretching things a bit beyond believability to think that hiding behind a car would provide any protection from a nuclear explosion. That’s a minor issue in the grand scheme of things really because its difficult to know exactly what the thinking was behind surviving this sort of thing in 1976 would be.

The reveal of Eldrad is quite fun as its put off for a few seconds after the camera pull into the shot. The idea that Eldrad starts off as a woman is quite a creative one because the instinct would have been to have Eldrad as a man from the start. The costume is quite effective. It shows what can be done even on what must be a relative budget and Judith Paris is a very good Eldrad and more than holds her own against Sladen and Baker.

The scene where Eldrad, Sarah and the Doctor are talking is a nice. It’s fairly good at explaining what is going to happen for the rest of the story. When they end up in the TARDIS its here that the idea of the temporal grace line is introduced. This is something that gets used occasionally for most of the Doctor’s time in the classic era and it seems like a convenient throw away line that only serves a purpose in this particular scene.

The cliffhanger again doesn’t feature the Doctor or Sarah but instead features Eldrad who gets the point of why her home world isn’t quite as good as she remembered. It’s a great ending and its another solid episode and I am really struggling to come up with any problems with this story. Ok so that there are things that could perhaps have been improved but they are minor things. Now there is just one episode left for Elisabeth Sladen and I hope that watching it in the way that I have been watching it doesn’t mean that Sarah Jane’s final episode is a disappointment.