The Hand of Fear Part Two

The one where a nuclear power plant is evacuated twice in one day...

For once, a central control room in Doctor Who is a hive of activity, a hubbub of noise, mild panic and ferocious industriousness. The moment we see Nunton's control centre, it is awash with chatter, alarms and movement, which makes a change from all those sparsely furnished and staffed control rooms we usually have (my mind immediately goes to Space Control in The Ambassadors of Death, or the Space Defence Station in The Android Invasion). In particular I like the gentleman at the front right of shot who frantically taps away at his typewriter like Liberace, then flies from the room with his haphazardly prepared report!

Miss Jackson is rather striking too, a woman who seems unflappable in a crisis and manages to look stunning at all times, played by model and dancer Frances Pidgeon (also director Lennie Mayne's wife). She seems very loyal to her boss Professor Watson, refusing to leave him alone when everybody else has evacuated, but in the end rather haughtily obeying his order to get out. Brave, loyal, beautiful, and with an attitude to boot - she'd have made an ideal Romana!

Professor Watson is played with much-needed spirit by Glyn Houston, who bursts his way into the story and is never less than convincing as the man in charge. He refers to Sarah as a "suicidal maniac" that has "infiltrated the complex", but it must be said that security at Nunton is next to nil. I get the feeling that almost anybody could simply wander into Nunton Nuclear Power Complex virtually unchallenged, and make their way to the outer chamber of the nuclear core just as easily as Sarah does with her Tupperware box.

Compounding the fact Nunton's security is rubbish is the way Elgin so easily loses the Doctor and Carter, who then manage to wander the corridors of Nunton freely until finding the control room and setting up shop there. Professor Watson does ask who they are, but Carter's explanation that they're from the hospital Sarah escaped from is far from satisfactory. This is a nuclear power plant under lockdown and in a state of emergency, from where 99% of the staff have been evacuated. Why is the Doctor and his pathologist friend allowed to wander round at will? It echoes the Doctor's assumed freedom within the local hospital in episode 1, and it all smacks rather strongly of writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin willfully ignoring realism in favour of getting on with the story at hand.

Dr Carter must have a very lax attitude to professional responsibility too, as he's abandoned his day job at the hospital's pathology department to accompany the Doctor to the local power station. No wonder NHS waiting lists are poor.

But Dr Carter isn't all he seems, because he was affected by Eldrad's ray in episode 1 and is now under the influence of the Kastrian renegade. "Eldrad must live!" we're repeatedly told, leading to Dr Carter trying to kill the Doctor with an extremely rubbery spanner. When his killer blow misses our hero, and Carter topples over the railing and plummets to his death on the gallery floor below, it's quite a shock. Dr Carter's death is a real surprise, and a real shame too.

It's hard to take "bad" Sarah seriously while she's dressed in silly pyjamas, but Elisabeth Sladen still manages to inject an otherworldly strangeness to her performance when possessed, cocking the head sideways in an animalistic way, and moving her eyes before her head (always a good trick when portraying disturbed!). Sarah tries to open the reactor core door, and it amuses me that the door is secured with two huge bolts, like it's a garden gate or something. But before she can open the core, the Doctor flies in through a ventilation shaft (hooray!) and knocks her out with a punch to the jaw. That's the violent Doctor we've come to know since Tom Baker took over, and punching his companion is probably his lowest point, even if it is in an effort to prevent a nuclear disaster. Eight years later a future Doctor would try to strangle his companion, but at least he had post-regenerative trauma to blame.

The scene where Watson calls his wife because he believes he's going to perish in a nuclear explosion is a lovely piece of writing and acting. Houston takes this quiet, tender scene very seriously, and he's directed sympathetically by Mayne, who gives close-ups on Houston's face which is lit with the red glow of the alarm system. Watson chit-chats with his daughter Susan about her day at school, before telling his wife that he'll be late home from work. He doesn't tell his wife that he thinks he's going to die horribly from radiation poisoning, and won't be coming home ever again, he just asks her to kiss the children for him, making her final exchange with him a tender, loving moment, rather than a panicked scream for help. Beautiful.

No other scientific experts are called in to analyse this strange radioactive hand they discover. UNIT is not called in to help its erstwhile scientific adviser. It's all so achingly small-scale, which bothers me a little because we're dealing with situations of terrorism and national security here. Baker and Martin were always known for their big ideas, but here they're painting their ambitious narrative with the thinnest of brushes. I mean, Nunton is evacuated twice in a matter of hours, thanks to two emergency situations in a day. Wouldn't the Government be interested in what's going on, the Army or UNIT called in to supply security at this barely-guarded complex? Gone are the days of Pertwee when a stuffy civil servant would be deployed to sort the matter out. In the Hinchclife era, nobody really cares who isn't in the room at the time.

And isn't it a bit silly that the Doctor and Watson allow Driscoll to store the hand in the decontamination safe, where they keep irradiated material? They know that the hand is soaking up radiation like it's food and drink, so of course it's going to regenerate and strengthen. When it starts knocking on the safe door to get out, Driscoll answers the call, and when the hand suddenly grabs his, I admit I did jump slightly. A wonderful effect!

By the end of the episode, Driscoll has taken the hand deep into the reactor core to soak up as much energy as it can (bye-bye Driscoll), and all of the computers in the control centre blow up, sending Watson crashing to the floor unconscious. Why the computers blow up just because somebody's opened the reactor core door, I don't know. It doesn't make sense. And why the Doctor thinks shielding Sarah from the outpouring of radiation with his body will protect her, I don't know either.

This is Bob Baker and Dave Martin writing, not Kit Pedler. And it shows.

First broadcast: October 9th, 1976

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Glyn Houston's little scene where he phones his wife at home. Beautifully performed and written, a real moment of truth and humanity among the silliness elsewhere.
The Bad: The bit where Dr Who knocks his best friend's lights out.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆

"Would you like a jelly baby?" tally: 05

NEXT TIME: Part Three...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Three; Part Four

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-hand-of-fear.html

The Hand of Fear is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Hand-Fear-DVD/dp/B000FPV8KG