There’s not a lot to say about Doctor Who and the Hand of Fear. The only thing that really caught my eye was Professor Watson’s call home, made as he awaits certain death. There’s a rawness to his instinct to yell at his young child to get off the line, biting his tongue and listening ‘patiently’ as his final moments tick by, keen to make ‘his daughter’s last memory […] of him’ a nice one (3), followed by a gentleness to the way he can’t bring himself to tell his wife what’s happening, preferring to ‘Let her be happy for a while longer’ (4). To be honest, this is already easily the stand-out scene from the broadcast episodes (5) and it’s difficult to judge which is more effective, the gentleness that’s revealed in the prose or the underplayed dignity onscreen, but, either way, Dicks does a lovely job with it, especially in how he underlines what a ‘futile gesture’ Watson’s remaining in the plant is whilst still making his stance sympathetic (6).

    So, with Doctor Who and the Hand of Fear dealt with, it’s time to look at Sarah. A feeling that comes across very strongly in the novelisations is that she’s an unwilling companion in the vein of Ian and Barbara before her or Tegan after her, only adopting a life of adventure thanks to the Doctor’s inability to get her home. The back-cover blurb of this book, which singularly fails to promote ‘The Hand of Fear’ as Sarah’s last story, states rather baldly that Sarah ‘looks forward to going home’ (7), something the novelisation’s opening reinforces, suggesting the Tardis has landed on Earth because Sarah had ‘asked to be taken home’ (8).

    What’s odd is that I don’t think Sarah’s unwilling status is an invention of the Target range. ‘The Hand of Fear’, though it doesn’t explicitly say Sarah has asked to return home, opens with Sarah’s withering assessment that the quarry in which the Tardis has landed ‘isn’t South Croydon’ (9), hinting that the Doctor is supposed to be returning her home. There’s a similar situation at the start of ‘The Android Invasion’, the novelisation stating that Sarah is ‘looking forward to returning home’ (10) and the TV episodes hinting the same, Sarah asking whether ‘the Tardis [has] brought us home or not?’ (11) in a manner that suggests it’s supposed to have done so. There is, as far as I can find, only one clear request to return home in the novelisations that didn’t happen on TV (12), but then there’s also a discussion about Sarah going home at the end of ‘The Android Invasion’ that doesn’t make it to the page (13), so it all sort of balances out.

    To an extent, the split between books and TV starts with ‘Terror of the Zygons’ and the Doctor’s promise

to use the Tardis simply to save

Sarah a train journey to London.

‘Planet of Evil’ opens with what

feels like gentle joshing on Sarah’s

part, pointing out the Doctor’s

promise to ‘be back in London five

minutes before leaving Loch Ness’

(14) more as a contrast to their

landing in the far future at the edge of the universe than as an expression of actual disappointment. The Planet of Evil, however, presents the Doctor’s faulty navigation as genuinely ‘upsetting’ to Sarah (15). This sense that Sarah has in fact been engaged in one long quest to return home since Harry’s departure is reinforced at the close of Doctor Who and the Hand of Fear, Sarah commenting that the Doctor’s ‘finally managed’ to get her home (16), a line completely absent from the broadcast episodes (17). Of course, were Sarah truly desperate to return home, her failure to do so at the end of ‘The Android Invasion’ or ‘The Seeds of Doom’ would need to be explained away, as well as her decision at the close of ‘Terror of the Zygons’. The broadcast episodes make it clear she’s perfectly happy taking the scenic route – she might extract the same promise to 

go straight back to London from 

Loch Ness as in the book, but her

resigned shrug demonstrates

clearly that she doesn’t expect the

Doctor to deliver – but the

novelisations, by never addressing

the contradiction at all, maintain a

stronger sense that her calls to

return home are in earnest.

    There is, to be fair to the books, a deeper logic to the portrayal of Sarah as an unwilling companion, at least beyond the odd daytrip in the Tardis. She was introduced as an Earth-based companion, following hot on the heels of Jo who had, in Doctor Who and the Green Death, left the Doctor, at least partly, because she really didn’t have any interest in gallivanting off around the universe and castigating the Doctor for not paying more attention to the issues of 1970s Britain (18). True, the Doctor was already free to travel when Sarah met him, but her first trip with him was accidental and, though tempted back into the Tardis for a quick holiday on Florana (19) and, slightly more confusingly, a look at the citadel of Peladon (20), her life beyond the Tardis clearly continues unaffected, starting ‘Planet of the Spiders’ independent of the Doctor, merrily pursuing stories for Metropolitan and only involved in the story at the behest of Mike Yates because he can’t directly approach UNIT himself.

    But ‘Robot’ seemed to change all that. When Sarah accepted the Doctor’s invitation to run off in the Tardis, she appeared to ally herself with his desire to be ‘childish’ and run away from the grown-up world of ‘deadlines’ and ‘commitments’ (21). Most importantly, in contrast to Harry, a truly accidental companion whose Tardis travels are prompted by an unintended dematerialisation, she chose to head out into the universe.

    Which makes the roles her and Harry adopt at the start of Doctor Who and the Sontaran Experiment rather strange, Harry forging ahead while Sarah holds back (22), ‘reluctant’ and ‘anxious’ (23) in new surroundings. Their dialogue isn’t quite the same as on TV either: Sarah’s comment that the uninhabited planet is ‘creepy’ and ‘Doesn’t seem like Earth’ (24) becomes the rather more categorical statement that she doesn’t like the planet because ‘it’s not like Earth’ (25); Harry’s joke about ‘our feathered friends’ being long gone, which had simply been a reply to Sarah’s sarcastic reflection upon the Doctor’s directions (26), becomes

an attempt to reassure her when

she thinks she hears movement

(27); and Sarah’s cheeky suggestion

that the Earth might now be home

to ‘Mutations, creatures’ (28)

becomes a serious observation on

Harry’s part regarding the

vegetation, drawing a genuine and

fearful gasp and widening of the

eyes from Sarah (29).

    Were this characterisation confined to Ian Marter’s novelisation, it could just be a case of him slyly reconfiguring Harry, but it turns up elsewhere too. Terrance Dicks’s The Planet of Evil sees Sarah show a surprising streak of xenophobia, confessing a preference for ‘more human types’ of alien because it makes it ‘easier to tell the goodies from the baddies’ (30), which echoes her dislike of the alien future Earth. The same story sees her react to adversity with the hope that her and the Doctor might just ‘Go back to the TARDIS and go home’ (31), an attitude to other worlds she hadn’t shown on TV since ‘The Monster of Peladon’ (32), back before she dropped the day job and ran off with the Doctor at the end of ‘Robot’. To be fair, she does express a similar sentiment in ‘Pyramids of Mars’, which followed soon after ‘Planet of Evil’ on TV, but even then the novelisation manages to amp up the sense that she just wants to be at home, the ‘tune up 1980 and we can […] leave’ (33) of the broadcast episodes, which suggests a concern for the safety of herself, the Doctor and Laurence, transformed to a request to ‘take me back to my own time’ (34), hinting more towards a feeling that she doesn’t see any reason why she should have to be involved in the events of 1911. It’s even explicitly stated that ‘She hated the thought of returning’ to the battle against Sutekh (35) – this is not someone who’s having a whale of a time travelling the universe.

    Doctor Who and the Hand of Fear, fortunately, captures Sarah rather better than these other novelisations. She gets a ‘little joke’ as the jet-planes come in to bomb the atomic energy complex (36), suggesting she’s rather better adjusted to life in a series of action-adventure escapades than she was in Doctor Who and the Sontaran Experiment and The Planet of Evil, and, rather more importantly, she’s now clearly signed up to the job of saving lives/worlds, reflecting that, however much she may wonder why she’s risking her life to ‘save […] someone [she] had no great reason to like or trust’, she has a ‘natural reflex’ to help those in need (37), specifically dismissing the option of just leaving and returning to Earth that she had raised in The Planet of Evil and Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars. There’s even, at long last, a hint that ‘the promise of a trip to some fabulous planet’ has proved instrumental in keeping her on board the Tardis and away from south Croyden (38).

    It still has its odd moments though. For a start, Dicks rewrites the Doctor’s confrontation with the possessed Driscoll so that Sarah’s decision to follow him is responsible for Eldrad getting to the atomic furnace (39), turning her into a liability. Then there’s his taking Sarah’s reluctance to cross the bridge of Kastria (42) and turning it into a need to be conned into crossing (41). Twice (42) – just to make sure she also looks like an idiot. Charitably, that might be an echo of ‘The Ark in Space’, part of a greatest hits-style package for Sarah’s final story, in which case maybe the call-back to ‘Robot’ and her Pertwee-era characterisation, taken aback that their opponent is female and throwing in one last reference to Women’s Lib (43), can also be excused that way. Even if that’s why Dicks has done it, I’d question his verdict on Sarah’s best bits.

    By contrast, over the course of

just three part-three minutes, Lis

Sladen manages to capture

everything that’s going to make

everyone miss Sarah so much, from

her bemused, face-making

performance of the instructions for

preserving her eardrums in an

explosion, through her childish

insistence on not following the

Doctor’s advice (see video in right

column), to her bouncing up and

down like an excitable puppy as

she and the Doctor express their

concern for each other (44), all

wrapped around her insistence on

being involved and facing danger 

together with the Doctor. As with 

Leela after her, that childlikeness is 

what allies her with both the

Doctor, at least this Doctor, and

the audience, who can see

themselves in her, imitate her

mannerisms and recognise her

persistent joy in new experiences.

Unlike with Leela, unfortunately,

the people writing the books seem to have only occasionally noticed this.