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| The Hand of Fear (DVD) |
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 Name: Eldrad
Format: Television
show
Time of Origin: Began life on Kastria
approximately 150 million years in the distant past; confronted
The Doctor on Earth in the 1970s.
Appearances: "The
Hand of Fear"
Doctors: Fourth
Doctor
Companions: Sarah
Jane Smith
History: One of the more ancient and durable beings
The Doctor has ever encountered, Eldrad operated on a scale of
evil that was so terrifying that his entire race actually committed
suicide en masse rather than risk the chance that he would return.
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| The Hand of Fear (VHS) |
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Although
precise details of Eldrad’s history are unknown, it is
known that he was the ruler of the planet Kastria and the silicon-based
Kastrians in the distant past, responsible for creating the barriers
that his people depended on to protect their surface population
from the solar winds. However, when his people objected to his
plan of galactic conquest, Eldrad destroyed the barriers, his
people subsequently rebelling against him as their planet began
to freeze to death. The Kastrians placed Eldrad in an obliteration
module with the intention of remotely detonating it, but when
circumstances forced them to detonate early, Eldrad’s hand
and the ring containing his genetic signature managed to survive
the explosion, eventually being discovered on Earth in a quarry
in the 1970s during a dig.
When Sarah
Jane Smith accidentally came in
contact with the hand after she and the Fourth
Doctor materialised
in the quarry, the ring was able to exert control over Sarah’s
will, prompting her to take the hand to the nearby Nunton Research
and Development Complex, a power plant with at least two nuclear
reactors, after she regained consciousness. While the reactor’s
excess radiation after Sarah triggered an overload was enough
to animate the hand - which absorbed all the radiation without
affecting Sarah in the slightest -, it took a nuclear missile
strike by the RAF and the subsequent destruction of the reactor
to release enough energy for Eldrad to make a new body for himself,
although this new form resembled a human female as Eldrad had
been using Sarah’s form as a template as she was the first
person to come in contact with the hand.
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| The Hand of Fear (Target Novelisation) |
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With
Eldrad’s regeneration complete, The Doctor and
Sarah confronted ‘her’, Eldrad using unspecified
mental powers to determine that The Doctor was not responsible
for the attack against her, as well as determining that
he could be trusted. Learning that The Doctor was a Time
Lord, Eldrad requested that she be taken back to Kastria
at the moment of her destruction - claiming that the
solar barriers were destroyed by an interstellar war
rather than by her and that she had been executed by
the same race -, but accepted The Doctor’s compromise
offer to take her back to Kastria in the present when
he refused the original request on the grounds that it
would violate the first law of time. Arriving on the
now-barren Kastria, The Doctor, Sarah and Eldrad travelled
through a series of traps that King Rokon, Eldrad’s
successor, had left in the underground thermal buildings
- perpetually powered by the heat from the planet’s
core - that were all that remained of the Kastrian civilisation.
Although one trap managed to fatally wound Eldrad by
infecting her with an acid that would eventually cause
her molecular structure to collapse, she was able to
make it to a regenerator chamber that was able to restore
her to her true, male form, subsequently revealing her
true past and agenda to The Doctor and Sarah.
Investigating the throne room, Eldrad activated a recorded
message left by King Rokon, which revealed the final fate of
the Kastrians. Despite the fact that there had been only a one
in three million chance of Eldrad surviving in some form under
the circumstances of the module’s destruction, the remaining
Kastrians had nevertheless elected the option of final oblivion,
allowing themselves to die rather than continue to live a miserable
existence underground, even destroying their species’ race-banks
- a store of 100 million crystals that could be used to create
a new race of Kastrians -, committing mass suicide rather than
take the chance that Eldrad would return to try and take control
of their species once again. Outraged at Rokon’s last message
hailing him as the King of Nothing, Eldrad pursued the fleeing
Doctor and Sarah, intending to force them to take him back to
Earth in the TARDIS so that he could conquer it, but they were
able to get far enough ahead of Eldrad to set up The Doctor’s
scarf as a tripwire, causing Eldrad to fall into a deep chasm
a short distance outside the throne room, ending his plans of
conquest once and for all. |
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| The Hand |
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| Sarah Jane Smith With Eldrad |
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| Eldrad |
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| Eldrad's True Form |
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