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Sometimes, very rarely, impossible things just happen, and we call them miracles. So says the Eleventh Doctor back in Doctor Who season 5 episode “The Pandorica Opens”. But it’s very applicable to how many fans are likely feeling, now that two more classic episodes thought to have been lost forever have been rediscovered.
One of the best things about Doctor Who is how long-lived the franchise is. But one of its great tragedies is the fact that we can’t actually watch all of it. Though nearly 900 episodes have aired since the show first premiered in 1963, many of its earliest installments have been destroyed or lost, thanks to the BBC’s tendency to erase, tape over, or even throw out previous broadcasts in the name of saving money on space and storage costs. (And before archive rules were put into place.) Many classic era Who episodes from the William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton eras are missing, and 26 of their stories are incomplete. But, miraculously, we got a little closer to fixing that problem today.
The previously lost installments were discovered in a private collection by Film is Fabulous, a charitable trust and preservation organization run by film collectors and vintage television enthusiasts. They were recovered from a posthumous collection of hundreds of film reels, which were donated to the charity, and are the first to be returned to the BBC archives since several episodes were found in Nigeria in 2013.
The two episodes, “The Nightmare Begins” and “Devil’s Planet,” feature First Doctor William Hartnell are part of twelve part story “The Daleks’ Master Plan”, which was only ever broadcast in the U.K. Written by the creator of the Daleks, Terry Nation, and Dennis Spooner, the serial also starred former companions Peter Purves and Adrienne Hill, alongside an early appearance by Nicholas Courtney as Bret Vyon. (Courtney would later go on to play the Brigadier.) The story revolves around (what else?) a Dalek plot to take over the Earth, the solar system, and the galaxy.
Seven of the 12 episodes that comprise “The Daleks’ Master Plan” remain missing, including “The Feast of Steven,” the first Doctor Who episode to be broadcast on Christmas Day. This story has been assumed to be especially difficult to recover, as it was never sold to international broadcast markets, presumably due to its surprisingly violent content. (“The Enemy of the World and of The Web of Fear”, the last two lost episodes to be rediscovered, were found in a television relay station.)
The BBC has worked to restore these newly found episodes, and they’ll be available to stream as part of BBC iPlayer’s “Whoniverse” this Easter. How or when they’ll make their way to fans in America remains to be seen, but if this incident proves anything, it’s that there’s always hope.
The post Two of the Most Sought After Missing Doctor Who Episodes Found at Last appeared first on Den of Geek.
