Missing Episode / Doctor Who

Perhaps the most famous example of a TV series with missing episodes is Doctor Who. In the 1960s and 1970s, a large number of episodes from the show's early years were destroyed to clear out room in the BBC archives — in those days, episodes were almost never repeated due to time limitations in the actors' contracts, and home video did not yet exist. And since nobody expected Doctor Who to have any commercial or artistic value in the future, the episodes were considered to be worth far less than the relatively expensive videotape they were stored on. ^note (In fact, there were two purges. The original videotape masters from the 60s were all erased, without exception. It is the 16mm film copies of these, created for broadcast and international sale, that survive because they were held by BBC Enterprises, the commercial wing. The purge of this separate archive began in 1972 and was made in a much more haphazard and informal manner, which is why so many survive. The archive there also held the extensive paper trail of which countries had bought serials, which is how they were tracked down again.) Eventually, in 1978, the BBC decided to end its wiping policy to take advantage of the growing home media market and created their BBC Film and Videotape Library. Chief archivist Sue Malden made Doctor Who one of her priority projects, starting a long project of searching for the series' lost episodes.

Every so often, a copy of one of the episodes that was sent to foreign broadcasters turns up — the most recent recovery was nine episodes in 2013 — but it is likely that many of these episodes are gone forever. Doctor Who fans have joked that, ironically, the only way to watch every episode of the series would be with a time machine. There are also the sometimes-bizarre rumours regarding lost episodes being hidden away, such as The Sun's absurd claim that then-incumbent Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe has a private stash of the entire first series. These purges resulted in the loss of episodes of other BBC series as well, but none seem to have similar notoriety. Some fans of other shows get quite jealous of the Doctor Who missing episodes getting so much media attention, and afraid that surviving copies from other shows might be neglected or destroyed because of people only being aware of the Doctor Who issue. There's not much evidence that this is the case, though; on the contrary, the search for Doctor Who episodes has turned up quite a few lost episodes of other series, including Morecambe and Wise specials, Steptoe and Son, The Sky At Night, and appearances by The Kinks on The Basil Brush Show and The Beatles on Top of the Pops (the latter of which survives, incidentally, because of its inclusion in Doctor Who). Additionally, the restoration techniques developed for recovered Doctor Who episodes was also transferred over to other BBC programmes that had been recovered over the years, most notably Dad's Army (which used the colour recovery processes developed for Doctor Who to restore episodes that only survived as black-and-white telerecordings).

The current list of missing episodes is as follows (ones marked with an asterisk are missing all episodes):

• "Marco Polo" episodes 1-7 of 7*
• "The Reign of Terror" episodes 4-5 of 6
• "The Crusade" episodes 2 and 4 of 4
• "Galaxy 4" episodes 1-2 and 4 of 4
• "Mission to the Unknown" episode 1 of 1*
• "The Myth Makers" episodes 1-4 of 4*
• "The Daleks' Master Plan episodes 1, 3-4, 6-9, and 11-12 of 12
• "The Massacre" episodes 1-4 of 4*
• "The Celestial Toymaker" episodes 1-3 of 4
• "The Savages" episodes 1-4 of 4*
• "The Smugglers" episodes 1-4 of 4*
• "The Tenth Planet" episode 4 of 4
• "The Power of the Daleks episodes 1-6 of 6*
• "The Highlanders" episodes 1-4 of 4*
• "The Underwater Menace" episodes 1 and 4 of 4
• "The Moonbase" episodes 1 and 3 of 4
• "The Macra Terror" episodes 1-4 of 4*
• "The Faceless Ones" episodes 2 and 4-6 of 6
• "The Evil of the Daleks" episodes 1 and 3-7 of 7
• "The Abominable Snowmen" episodes 1 and 3-6 of 6
• "The Ice Warriors" episodes 2-3 of 6
• "The Web of Fear" episode 3 of 6
• "Fury from the Deep" episodes 1-6 of 6*
• "The Wheel in Space" episodes 1-2 and 4-5 of 6
• "The Invasion" episodes 1 and 4 of 8
• "The Space Pirates" episodes 1 and 3-6 of 6

The "true" missing episodes (currently standing at 97) are all from the first six seasons from 1963-69, the eras of William Hartnell as the First Doctor and Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor — 44 of them are Hartnell's, and 53 are Troughton's. Of the first six seasons, none of which survive in full, the hardest hit by the mass erasure were the third (²⁸∕₄₅ missing), fourth (³³∕₄₃ missing), and fifth (¹⁸∕₄₀ missing) seasons (by contrast, the first is missing ⁹∕₄₂ episodes, the second ²∕₃₉ episodes, and the sixth ⁷∕₄₄ episodes). There are no complete serials from Season 4, while Season 5 has only two complete serials. The missing episodes from this era include some significant firsts for the series:

• "Mission to the Unknown" is the only standalone 25-minute episode from the original run, and the only story not to feature the Doctor at all; it was intended as a teaser for the forthcoming 12-part epic, "The Daleks' Master Plan".
  • Which, by the nature of not having any cast regulars, allowed a cast of enterprising media production class to remount the episode, using vintage television cameras and equipment. The end result? Not too bad!
• The final episode of "The Tenth Planet", the only missing episode from the serial, features the Doctor's first-ever regeneration scene, from Hartnell to Troughton. Famously, footage of the regeneration exists because it was broadcast during an edition of the BBC children's show Blue Peter (at a time when one of its presenters was Peter Purves, who had played First Doctor companion Steven). This same feature that saved Hartnell's regeneration also preserved the most dramatic chunk of Katarina's death scene from "The Daleks' Master Plan" Episode 4 ("The Traitors"), because Purves was Chewing the Scenery in it and the other Blue Peter presenters make fun of him (and his haircut) after it plays.
• "The Power of the Daleks", the Second Doctor's first serial, is completely missing. It's also worth nothing that his second-ever serial, "The Highlanders", is likewise entirely lost (doubly frustrating since it also features the debut of his longtime companion Jamie) and so the earliest surviving episode of the Second Doctor era comes from his third story overall, "The Underwater Menace", which is only partially missing (Episodes 2 and 3 survive).
• Episode 3 of the Second Doctor serial "The Web of Fear", the only lost episode of the serial, includes the introduction of the series' longest-running recurring character, Colonel (later Brigadier) Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart. Frustratingly, this episode was found along with the rest of the serial, but was lost again before it could be returned to the BBC (the belief being it was removed by a private collector when news of the discovery leaked out), the immediate end result being that it was announced that all future Doctor Who episode hunts would be more secretive from then on.
• Episode 1 of the completely lost "Fury from the Deep" features the first use of the Sonic Screwdriver (which, in its first appearance, was just that — a screwdriver which operated using sound waves); indeed, in the absence of episodes indicating the contrary, Jon Pertwee said in an interview in the 1980s that he believed for many years that he had been the first Doctor to use the Sonic Screwdriver until being told that Troughton had been the first.
• The "holy grail" missing episode, "The Daleks' Master Plan" Episode 7 ("The Feast of Steven"), is pretty much guaranteed to no longer exist. It is a bizarre, non-essential, and incomprehensibly British Christmas Episode; Christmas Day fell on a Saturday that year, and the production team decided to put a new episode of Doctor Who out on that date as per usual. However, they believed most regular viewers would not be watching, and that those who were watching likely wouldn't want their Christmas cheer dampened by the overwhelmingly-dark tone of the serial. "The Feast of Steven" was thus designed as an interlude rather than part of the serial, full of whimsical meandering in contemporary Britain and a 1920s film set, being capped off by the Doctor outright Breaking the Fourth Wall by wishing the viewer a happy Christmas. As a result of all this, the episode was excluded from overseas sales of the story, meaning no copy was ever made and once the original tape was wiped, that was that. ^note Restoration Team member Paul Venezis has theorized that "The Feast of Steven" might survive from a routine telerecording in the absence of specific instructions to not make one (which was how the unaired "pilot" version of "An Unearthly Child" survived), but the odds of this are slim. Despite all this, it still commands a great amount of attention from Whovians, not just because of its "permanently lost" status but also because it was the only Christmas special the show ever received before 2005.

Furthermore, two episodes from the First Doctor era had alternate versions produced before their initial broadcast. Episode 1 of "The Daleks" ("The Dead Planet") had to be re-recorded after it was discovered the microphones had picked up backstage voices; the cliffhanger from the original version in which Barbara is menaced by a Dalek still forms the opening scene of Episode 2 ("The Survivors"). Episodes 3 and 4 of "Planet of Giants" ("Crisis" and "The Urge to Live") were edited down into a single Episode 3 after filming; the extra footage was discarded. This resulted in a one-episode slot opening up at the end of the second production block, which was eventually taken by "Mission to the Unknown". ^note (For the "Giants" release on DVD, the missing scenes were recreated using the original scripts and a voice cast including Carole Ann Ford as Susan, William Russell as Ian, and soundalikes as the other characters.) The original versions of these episodes are lost.

Some of the First and Second Doctors' companions were hit particularly hard by the purges:

• Only 18 of Steven's 45 appearances have survived, including three complete stories (four if "The Chase", in which he appears only in the final episode, is included).
• Just one of Katarina's five appearances has survived ("Day of Armageddon", Episode 2 of "The Daleks' Master Plan", which was lost until 2004).
• Equally short-lived companion Sara Kingdom fares only slightly better, with two of nine appearances known to exist ("Counter Plot" and "Escape Switch", Episodes 5 and 10 of "The Daleks' Master Plan").
• Of Dodo's 19 appearances, only 11 survive, ^note (Which is actually not that bad when you consider she only appeared in Season 3, which was one of the worst hit by the purges) including three complete stories (in one of which she is absent for two episodes).
• A mere 12 of Ben and Polly's 36 appearances have survived, including just one complete story ("The War Machines", in which they were not yet considered "companions"; their most complete story as companions is "The Tenth Planet", which is three-quarters complete). However, thanks to the animated reconstructions, they've consequently jumped up considerably, with seven complete serials watchable without telesnaps.
• Victoria fares a bit better, with 20 of 40 appearances known to exist, including two complete stories ("The Tomb of the Cybermen" and "The Enemy of the World"). ^note (Until 1990, Victoria was the least-represented companion with just eight surviving episodes, but the recovery of Tomb in 1991 and a total of nine episodes from "The Enemy of the World" and "The Web of Fear" in 2013 have made her one of the better represented mid-1960s companions.)
• In absolute terms, Jamie was hit hardest of all, but only because he had the most to lose: of the 113 episodes in which he appeared in the Second Doctor era, only 66 have survived, including seven complete stories. One of the missing stories is his debut ("The Highlanders"), of which no episodes survive. ^note (Even of the ones not mentioned here, no companion has a complete set of episodes in the archive: Susan has 42 of 51 episodes accounted for, Ian 66 of 77, Barbara 63 of 74, with "Marco Polo" the only completely missing story from their tenures. Vicki has 29 of 38 appearances surviving, with only three of her serials affected — although one of them is her departure story, which is completely missing. Finally, 39 of Zoe's 49 episodes are held in the archives.)

Fortunately, audio for all of the lost episodes ^note (Episode 2 of "The Abominable Snowmen" had a small bit of missing audio which had to be manually restored using audio from other episodes. However, as every single known recording of the audio has this fault, it's generally believed that the original broadcast was like this) and many telesnaps ^note (a few missing episodes and full stories did not have telesnaps taken of them: "Marco Polo" Episode 4, "The Reign of Terror" Episodes 4 and 5, everything from "Galaxy 4" to "The Celestial Toymaker", "The Invasion" Episodes 1 and 4, and "The Space Pirates" Episodes 1 and 3-6. While a few of these have been animated, most haven't, which means reconstructions often have to utilise re-purposed shots from elsewhere, or even resorting to photoshopping some appropriate shots) still exist (although quality varies wildly), which has made reconstructing episodes possible. Loose Cannon Productions offered most of them for free (VHS only) — complete with bonus materials and interviews — and uploaded most of their catalogue to a Dailymotion account upon their closure in 2015. The BBC has also released a "Lost in Time" compilation DVD, containing most of the "orphaned" episodes ^note (anything that looked like it could be released by itself was excluded — for example "The Ice Warriors", which had four out of six surviving episodes, was not included), surviving material and clips plus a documentary, which is now somewhat out of date due to the shock rediscovery of "The Enemy of the World", most of "The Web of Fear", Episode 3 of "Galaxy 4" and Episode 2 of "The Underwater Menace" a couple of years after the DVD's release, as well as "The Moonbase" having a standalone DVD release with the missing episodes animated. All the completely missing or incomplete serials have been released on audio CD, with linking narration by some of the surviving actors (William Russell, Frazer Hines, etc.). The telesnaps have also been published alongside a commentary of events in several special editions of Doctor Who Magazine.

Missing episodes for several stories that mostly exist have been reconstructed in animation for a DVD release. The BBC commissioned Cosgrove Hall to reconstruct the two missing episodes of Second Doctor serial "The Invasion" for DVD, in an animated format similar to Scream of the Shalka and "The Infinite Quest". In 2013, "The Reign of Terror" was released with its missing episodes animated by ThetaMation for DVD, and "The Ice Warriors", "The Tenth Planet" and "The Moonbase" had their missing episodes animated as well. Animated reconstructions were in progress for "The Underwater Menace" but were apparently abandoned, as the DVD was finally released after a long delay with only telesnap reconstructions. In 2016, "The Power of the Daleks" was reconstructed with animation, marking the first time a serial missing more than two episodes (six in this case) was restored in this way, let alone a story that is missing entirely. This has been followed by six more largely or completely missing serials: "The Macra Terror" in 2019, "The Faceless Ones" and "Fury from the Deep" in 2020, "The Evil of the Daleks" and "Galaxy 4" in 2021 and "The Abominable Snowmen" in 2022. Due to funding issues on the part of US distributor BBC America, the future of animated reconstructions was put into doubt in 2022. However, the following year it was announced that they would continue, with the next release being the previously-abandoned story "The Underwater Menace". In a change from the previous practice, since "Power" all the episodes are animated, including the surviving ones.^note The sole exception is "The Web of Fear", whose only missing episode received animation in 2021 while the rest of the serial was left alone. They are also produced entirely in colour, since they found that the colour and the unity of presentation were easier to market and more popular with new and casual viewers. Nevertheless, a black-and-white version is always included on the home media releases.

Also, proving that God does have a sick sense of humour, a great many film segments from missing episodes come to us from the Australian and New Zealand censor boards. Bits of episodes unfit for daytime television were physically trimmed from the reels and sent to the censor board as proof they were excised... and now turn out to be the only footage in existence from those episodes. In the case of several episodes which still exist, the only known copies are ones which were censored and the cut material has not resurfaced; approximately two minutes of material is missing from "The War Machines", and the DVD release patches this by using audio taken from the soundtrack combined with recycling video from elsewhere in the story, which is a tactic used with other cut stories (the DVD for "The Time Meddler" presents a reconstruction of the censored portion as a separate special feature, as it could not be reinserted into the programme itself).

In October 2019, the BBC YouTube channel premiered a remake of "Mission to the Unknown" created by students and staff of the University of Upper Lancashire, with the Daleks voiced by Nicholas Briggs.

---

While the 1960s missing episodes are the most damaging and notorious, it doesn't stop there — a lot of 1970s Who featuring Jon Pertwee was also "lost" in the purges. Luckily, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (equivalent of the BBC) kept its copies of a number of episodes — except Australians didn't have colour TV until about 1974, meaning that while from 1983 every Pertwee episode existed in the archives, several of them only survived in monochrome.

Thankfully, modern colour recovery technology came to the rescue. The DVD releases of "Planet of the Daleks" in October 2009, "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" in January 2012, "The Ambassadors of Death" in October 2012, and "The Mind of Evil" ^note (Episode 1 of which had to be recoloured manually owing to the lack of usable chroma dots in the black-and-white copy) in June 2013 mark the first time the full stories have been available in colour for over 35 years. Some have theorised that, in some cases, the black-and-whiteness of the stories may have done them some favours, with the monochrome version of "The Mind of Evil" having a gritty, Film Noir kind of coolness that the colour version lacks.

Several more "mislaid" Pertwee stories were recovered from NTSC copies sent to the United States and Canada. The machine on which the BBC performed the PAL to NTSC conversion was an arcane analogue machine of such complexity that it could only be reverse-engineered by computer in 2005, although this reverse-engineering process restores almost all of the lost quality. Hilariously, the first serial to be converted in this way was "The Claws of Axos", featuring monsters called Axons with advanced analogue technology... and the BBC engineer who designed the initial machine was named Dr. Axon (a DVD extra on "The Claws of Axos" suggests that the missing episodes may have been part of an Axon conspiracy). Both this story and the earlier serial "Inferno" were further restored in 2012 and 2013, respectively, by combining the back-converted footage with luminance information from remastered black and white telerecordings before applying the VidFIRE process (which restores the interlaced look associated with analog videotape) to the studio portions, allowing for even greater visual accuracy.

However, the colour recovery process was not as successful for Episode 1 of "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" as it was for the others, owing to the lack of usable chroma dots in the existing copy. ^note (The colour recovery technology works because the missing colour information was inadvertently captured on the black-and-white copies as a sequence of visual artefacts or dots, but for this episode the information was found to be incomplete.) Therefore the DVD version had the monochrome version as the default with restored picture quality, with a "best efforts" recoloured (but unrestored) version as an alternative extra. A manual recolouring in the vein of Episode 1 of "The Mind of Evil" could hypothetically work, but because the serial isn't as fondly regarded, it's not particularly high on the BBC's list of Doctor Who-related priorities.

---

There is also even a small amount of missing Tom Baker material, though due to the wide distribution of his material and the halting of the BBC's purging policy during his tenure, the amount is very little and mostly down to odd reasons.

"The Ark in Space" had a Deleted Scene where Noah begs Vira to kill him rather than allow him to be turned into the Wirrn. The scene was filmed, but cut due to being too dark (despite being fairly crucial to the plot and explaining why Vira and the Doctor are so pale and distraught in the following scene). The cut footage was destroyed in the purges. "Terror of the Zygons" also had a deleted scene (abandoned after a change in light levels on location made the intended split-screen effect to depict an invisible TARDIS impossible) featuring Sarah and Harry discussing where they were and the Doctor showing off his Scottish outfit and UNIT tracking device that was cut — but survived as an audio recording, which was later married to a copy of the scene in black-and-white retrieved from the film editor's archive, which was hand-colourised and restored for "Director's Cut" insertion into the DVD edition.

Many Tom Baker-era incidental music has also been destroyed. All the stock music used in the early years survives, and Delia Derbyshire's theme and Malcolm Clarke's score for "The Sea Devils" are some Awesome Music that survives even in stem form, but the majority of music master tapes for Dudley Simpson's scores have been thrown away. Some were reconstructed in the 80s, on synths that have not dated particularly well, when the music was written for analog 70s synths and a conventional orchestra. If you want your soundtrack of "The Ark in Space" or "City of Death", you're going to have to put up with Tom Baker saying lines of dialogue over it.

The famous freeze-frame cliffhanger of the Doctor being drowned at the end of "The Deadly Assassin" Episode 3 drew so much outrage from the Moral Guardians that the BBC edited their master copy of it and now holds no copy of the originally broadcast episode in its archive. Repeat broadcasts of the serial now omit the cliffhanger as a result, as did the VHS version. The DVD release restored the cliffhanger, reconstructing it from off-air recordings of the original broadcast.

The Fourth Doctor serial "Shada" is not so much missing as incomplete: industrial action at the BBC caused filming to be abandoned while partly complete. Douglas Adams had taken a negative view of it in the years since its abandonment and wanted it to remain buried, and only signed the paper allowing the BBC to release what was available by accident; as penance, he donated all of his royalties from the VHS sale to Comic Relief. Several reconstructions exist: the first had Tom Baker (as a museum curator) narrating the gaps (which are sadly significant, especially towards the end), and the second was an animated remake starring Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor (which can still be seen on the BBC Doctor Who website). A fanmade reconstruction uses animation for the missing segments and most of the original cast, save for Tom Baker who declined to participate and is replaced by an impressionist. In 2012, Gareth Roberts published an official novelisation, working from Adams' scripts. Adams himself largely recycled the plot for Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency in 1987. The BBC released an animated version of the story in 2017, with the original cast (including Baker this time) reprising their roles; for all intents and purposes, the BBC seems to regard this as the canonical version of the unfinished story.

The Sixth Doctor serial "Revelation of the Daleks" was filmed to end with the Doctor telling his companion Peri that "I'll take you to Blackpool", the plan being that they would indeed visit Blackpool in the next season premiere. When Michael Grade put the show on hiatus, the episode was trimmed to remove the destination, being replaced by a freeze-frame in the finished programme. The complete footage now no longer exists.

During the show's 30th Anniversary, several audio reconstructions of missing episodes were released with later Doctors: Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, and Colin Baker. Tom Baker's reconstructions were the most notable, as he had only agreed to do it if he could do it in character as the Fourth Doctor recounting stories about his past, making it canonical Doctor material and the first time Baker had reprised the character in decades. These have since been superseded by the late-nineties and early-noughties releases of the soundtracks, which are of much higher quality, with new narration performed by a member of the original cast.

---

In an odd example by the standards of the series as a whole, the Fourth Doctor serial "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" has not been shown on KCET since 1985, likely due to pressure from a local sponsor of Asian extraction (the serial depicts some less-than-flattering Yellow Peril stereotypes). Notably, some on-air complaints from fans of the series prompted KCET to explain why the serial had gone unaired during a 1989 pledge marathon.

---

These missing episodes were referenced prominently in Queer as Folk (UK), in which the token Doctor Who fan Vince brags that he has a mate that got him "Planet of the Daleks" in colour, and Episode 4 of "The Tenth Planet". The former now exists, but there's a lot of people who'd like to talk to this mate of his about the latter...

Intriguingly, in 2020 veteran episode-hunter Philip Morris (finder of "The Enemy of the World" and "The Web of Fear" in Jos) claimed he knew of six missing episodes that were in the hands of anonymous private collectors, not counting Episode 3 of "The Web of Fear", which disappeared in Nigeria. This would bring the series down to just 90 missing episodes. That missing episodes secretly survived in private collections was a longstanding rumour dating back to the late 1980s, but Morris' comments reawakened interest in which ones might still be out there. We can only await further developments...

---

I'm sure I left the Live-Action TV page around here somewhere...