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No Longer Lost in Time and Space: Two Recovered Doctor Who Episodes

August 8, 2023December 15, 2011 by Chris Baer

Screenshot from The Underwater Menace via the BBC Good news from a jumble sale. The BBC reports that two presumed lost episodes from Doctor Who have turned up in the care of a retired television engineer who bought them in the 1980s.

As noted in our examination of the only partially extant “Marco Polo,” the BBC routinely wiped the expensive video tapes for re-use, resulting in the presumed loss of quite a few episodes from Doctor Who‘s early years. As Shaun Ley of the BBC observes:

The find makes only a modest dent in the number of missing episodes, with 106 instalments broadcast between 1964 and 1969 still being sought.

The two episodes, “Air Lock” from William Hartnell’s Season Three opener “Galaxy Four” and the untitled part 2 of Patrick Troughton’s “The Underwater Menace,” will apparently be made available via DVD at some point in the future.

I’d certainly prefer sooner rather than later, as I’m slowly closing in on Season Three in the Doctor Who Project. I have the novelization ready to go, but being able to see at least one of the four episodes of “Galaxy Four” would be of some help, as I don’t think the novelizations capture all of the Hartnellizations in the televised script. Until then, I’ll have to make do with the short clips the BBC has made available.

(Image via the BBC)

Doctor Who Project: The Romans

August 8, 2023October 25, 2011 by Chris Baer

Oh, something else I forgot to tell you. I think I poisoned Nero.

Fresh off a literal cliffhanger of an ending in “The Rescue,” the tipping TARDIS lands on its side…and no one seems to care. After our time travellers flail about on the TARDIS, we find them lounging in ancient Rome, in a villa they’ve somehow managed to take over in its owner’s absence. They themselves have become “The Romans” (Story Production Code M).

Gradually it becomes obvious that a month has passed since the Doctor’s poor landing, and having for once not landed in a terrible situation that requires immediate action, everyone decides to take a holiday, leaving the TARDIS stuck on its side in a ditch. While the jump from the crashed TARDIS to our Roman revelers seems a bit jarring, the discontinuity allows for Vicki to have been integrated into the daily routine behind the scenes. She is at ease with everyone, particularly the Doctor, with whom she shares a blend of nonchalant curiosity and optimism. Throughout the story, Vicki will follow the Doctor around, accepting orders yet not allowing the Doctor to take himself too seriously. Where Susan had a certain reverence for her grandfather, Vicki respects the Doctor but retains a very real independent streak.

Still, we can’t have a Doctor Who story without something happening beyond character development (the thin plot of “The Rescue” notwithstanding), so the travellers split up (of course) and intrigues abound. All roads, indeed, lead to Rome.

Doctor Who Project: The Rescue

September 9, 2022October 6, 2011 by Chris Baer

I think we have landed. But the Doctor’s never slept through a landing before!

After an epic story in which the Doctor and his companions save Earth from the Daleks (for the first of many times), our stalwart travellers move on to a thin wisp of a story designed, seemingly, for one purpose only: to replace Susan, who stayed behind with the human resistance to help rebuild a Dalek-ravaged Earth. “The Rescue” (Production Code L) introduces us to Vicki, a young woman who is one of two survivors of a spaceship crashed on the planet Dido.

From the first, Maureen O’Brien portrays Vicki as optimistic and independent, uncowed by the fate that has left her an orphan on a strange planet. And the fact that she is an orphan is key here, for it allows her to become the next companion, unencumbered by any emotional ties to her twenty-fifth century Earth (notably, an Earth in which there is still a United Kingdom, as the wrecked spaceship bears the markings “UK 201”).

As always, the TARDIS lands somewhere strange, the party gets split up, Ian and the Doctor eventually find Barbara—who has managed to kill Vicki’s giant monster pet in the interim—and the Doctor unravels the central narrative mystery (why the peaceful Dido people have apparently killed all the other human survivors of the spaceship crash).

But to focus overly much on the plot of this two episode story is to miss the character development that takes place over the story’s forty-five minute length. Both Howe and Walker and Wood and Miles (whose About Time series of Doctor Who guides I’ve only recently discovered) point out that while the story is perhaps not gripping stuff, it establishes Doctor Who as a series where continuity matters. It’s not planet- and time period-of-the-week; it’s an ongoing story with characters who grow and change and remember what happened the week before.

Doctor Who Project: The Dalek Invasion of Earth

August 9, 2023August 14, 2011 by Chris Baer

What’s worse? The alligators down here or the Daleks up there?

At last, they return! The Daleks appear once more after their resounding first season success in “The Mutants,” invading Earth in Terry Nation’s “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” (Story Production Code K). This time, the Daleks want nothing more than to, um, empty out the core of the planet and replace it with an engine of some sort.

But whatever! It’s the Daleks! And they’re in London!

This story, which Howe and Walker claim “surely ranks as one of the series’ all-time greats” in their Doctor Who: The Television Companion, starts in familiar enough style, which is to say that our travellers leave the TARDIS, become separated from it because of Susan—this time she brings an entire bridge down upon it—and then become separated from each other. Even Ian comments upon the party’s tendency to split up: upon realizing Barbara and Susan are missing from the landing site, he exclaims, “Why, why do they do it?”

Still, the separation works to good effect in this six-part story, as Susan and Barbara are spirited away by the human resistance to the Daleks and Ian and the Doctor are captured by the Robomen, the human semi-cyborgs enslaved as footsoldiers by the Daleks, who are few in number on Earth. The development of the resistance figures adds depth to the story, as thus far in the series, our sympathies have been almost entirely on our travellers finding their way back to the TARDIS. Very few secondary characters have been roundly developed in the series so far, and as will become obvious, the development of one resistance figure in particular takes on real significance.

The capture of the Doctor and Ian gives good reason to explore the Dalek saucers and to see lots of Daleks rolling around. There’s probably a good ten minutes of scenes showing nothing but Daleks moving back and forth in this story. The audience wants what the audience wants.

That said, Terry Nation wisely holds off on revealing the Daleks until the very end of the first episode, where one rises ominously from the murky Thames…

Doctor Who Project: Planet of Giants

August 10, 2023June 14, 2011 by Chris Baer

Oh, please don’t keep talking on the twentieth century level. I’m talking about time travel!

Having escaped the French Revolution with his head (if not his fancy hat), the Doctor tries yet again to get Barbara and Ian back to the twentieth century. Given that they’re so close, just a few hundred years off, he attempts to “sidestep” into the 1960s with a simple frequency change on the TARDIS controls. And it works! They’re in England even. Of course, they’re about an inch high when they leave the ship, starting the second season of Doctor Who on the “Planet of Giants” (Story Production Code J), but hey, it’s a start.

Because the TARDIS door opens mysteriously upon materialization—a time Susan declares “the most dangerous moment” in the operation of the TARDIS—the “space pressure” exerted upon the TARDIS at this point shrinks the Doctor and his three companions, a fact they finally realize when they confront giant ants and earthworms and matchboxes.

The travellers split up upon arrival, with Barbara and the Doctor going one way and Ian and Susan the other. This particular grouping allows both Susan and the Doctor independently to come to the realization that they have landed on Earth in a shrunken form.

Indeed, this story presents Susan as a canny and calm time traveller, piecing together clues about their predicament, showing knowledge of TARDIS operations, clambering up corroded drain pipes, striking oversized matches, and even reminiscing with her grandfather about that time they suffered through a World War I zeppelin air raid together.

Until, of course, she screams and screams when she sees the dead giant ant and the not-dead giant cat. In her defense, it is a very giant cat.

Doctor Who Project: The Reign of Terror

August 10, 2023June 3, 2011 by Chris Baer

I get the impression they don’t know where they’re heading for. Come to that, do any of us?

And so the first season of Doctor Who concludes with a six-part story set in far off and fantastical…France?

Revolutionary France, to be precise, during the period of Robespierre’s rule that gives our story its title, “The Reign of Terror” (Story Production Code H). The Doctor has brought Ian and Barbara “home,” as he promised (or rather threatened) to do after dealing with the Sensorites. France seems to be close enough to England for the Doctor, but by the time he realizes he’s off by two hundred years, he’s already been knocked unconscious, dragged out of a burning building by a French ragamuffin, and forced to work on a chain gang. And then he winds up looking like this:

Not entirely sure which is the greater indignity…

The Doctor has the sensible notion not to leave the TARDIS at the beginning of the story, but then, persuaded by Ian’s offer of a drink to make their parting amicable, off they go. Once Ian realizes that they’re not in England (or even the twentieth century), it’s his turn to wish to return to the TARDIS:

Ian: You know, I think we ought to get back to the ship while we still can.

Doctor: Nonsense. It was your idea to explore, anyway. Besides, that might be very interesting. Walk will do us good.

Once again, the writers contrive to split up the travellers, with Ian, Susan, and Barbara (who instinctively change into period clothing they find alongside bread, wine, maps, and daggers in a trunk in an abandoned house) captured by revolutionary soldiers and dragged off to await the guillotine; the Doctor, meanwhile, has been knocked senseless by royalist sympathizers hiding the house and remains undetected by the soldiers, who set the house ablaze. Then you get the kid, then the long walk to Paris, then the chain gang (from which the Doctor escapes by smacking the road works overseer over the head with a very large shovel). It’s a six-part story for a reason.