For years, almost one hundred episodes of classic Doctor Who have been lost to time, the long shadow of a history of archival negligence that means many tales from the earliest years of the show are either partially missing or lost entirely. Now, for the first time since 2013, that number has gone down.
The BBC has confirmed that two more previously missing episodes of Doctor Who‘s third season in 1965 have been recovered: the first and third episodes of the 12-part epic “The Daleks’ Master Plan”, a time-hopping adventure that sees the first Doctor and his companions Steven and Katarina, as well as the Space Agents Bret Vyon and Sara Kingdom (the former played by Nicholas Courtney, who would return to Doctor Who in the more prominent role of Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart), race to stop the Daleks’ attempts to create the ultimate weapon and dominate the galaxy.
The episodes—”The Nightmare Begins” and “Devil’s Planet”—were recovered from a posthumous collection of hundreds of film reels donated to the Leicester-based Film is Fabulous! charity, the first to be returned to the BBC’s archives since several episodes were found in Nigeria in October 2013. It brings to an end the longest gap between recovered missing episodes in Doctor Who history.
7 episodes of the 12 in “The Daleks’ Master Plan” remain missing, including “The Feast of Steven”, the first episode in the series’ history to broadcast on Christmas Day. The serial is thought to be especially difficult to recover episodes from, as not only was it ordered wiped from the BBC’s archives (the corporation would not codify formal rules around archiving classic TV material as part of its charter until 1981), but it was also not sold to international broadcast markets, which have been primary sources for recovering what was initially 152 missing episodes.
The reason? “The Daleks’ Master Plan” is an infamously violent story, featuring several prominent character deaths. By the end of the series, Bret, Katarina, and Sara had all been graphically killed off—the latter particularly shocking, as Sara had initially been planned to be a potential long-term replacement for Katarina as a companion. Overseas censors in New Zealand and Australia blocked its broadcast at the time, leading to it being shut out of several other international markets for sale.
Before being restored and released to the general public next month, the episodes were broadcast in secret to one of the serial’s few surviving stars, actor Peter Purves, who played Steven Taylor from 1965 through 1966, before briefly returning to Doctor Who to play the character once again in 2023 for the spinoff anthology series Tales of the TARDIS.
“It was the fourth appearance of the Daleks and it’ll be exciting to fans for a lot of reasons,” Purves told the BBC of the recovery. “The fans of Doctor Who are legion, and they seriously love the classic times. I’m astonished these two wonderful episodes have finally turned up—so many of my episodes are missing—it’s heartbreaking to me.”
The two episodes will be released on the BBC iPlayer, joining the three other surviving episodes of “The Daleks’ Master Plan” available on the streaming platform, on April 4.
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