This one’s late, and it’s not really about Doctor Who and the Hand of Fear. The reason for the latter is that there’s not much to say about Doctor Who and the Hand of Fear; the reason for the former is because, in writing instead about Sarah, I had an idea that I’d still stand by but an argument I found increasingly unconvincing the more I pursued it.
To boil it down to basics, I think Sarah feels far less keen on travelling in the books than she did on TV. I also think that her status as a Tardis day-tripper, the position she effectively held in Season 11, continues into the Tom Baker novelisations in a way it didn’t onscreen, albeit one whose return to their desk at Metropolitan is now constantly frustrated by the Doctor’s erratic navigation. Trouble is, a significant number of the lines that create that impression in the books were also delivered onscreen. It's true that Lis Sladen played against those lines very effectively, but I don’t think that sufficiently explains why Sarah’s character feels so very off in several of the books.
Anyway, I don’t know if I’m fundamentally wrong or basically right but looking in the wrong place in my attempt at an explanation, and, in case anyone can help, here’s some bits I couldn't fit in, both from Doctor Who and the Sontaran Experiment.
Gasping with terror, Sarah started to scramble recklessly over the uneven ground. Just before she reached the brow she slipped and pitched forward with a scream. She glimpsed a huge black space yawning in front of her like a monstrous mouth, and then everything exploded as she cracked her head on a boulder
Probably included in the novelisation simply to make the timings of the Doctor's absence from the transmat on Sarah's return make sense and, frankly, to help meet the book's page count, but it's an odd bit of Sarah being rather bad at her adventuring with the Doctor, the likes of which I can't ever recall happening onscreen barring her budget-induced tumble down a mild incline and need to be towed back up in 'The Five Doctors'.
Sarah found that anger and contempt were beginning to conquer her fear. “That was senseless,” she cried. “He was harmless”
This, on the other hand, delivered when Styr kills Roth, is an example of Sarah stepping truly into the Doctor's shoes in a way she didn't often get to do onscreen. Those sound like words straight out of his mouth and contrast with her dialogue in the broadcast episodes:
(Roth starts to run away, and Styre shoots him with his red-beam hand weapon. Sarah screams.)
STYRE: Why did you make that disagreeable noise?
SARAH: You killed him!
STYRE: That is my function. I am a warrior.
SARAH: Murderer. Murderer!
STYRE: Silence! The moron was of no further use to me
On which note, if you still want to read something I've now introduced as a struggle to get through and possibly just plain wrong, here’s something that's not a look at Doctor Who and the Hand of Fear.
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