Weeks after the BBC confirmed that, for the first time in over a decade, two previously missing episodes of Doctor Who thought lost to time had been restored and recovered; they’re now officially available to watch for the first time in 60 years. But it’s not just for UK fans who need a hit of technically-new-Who waiting for news about this year’s Christmas episode—”The Daleks’ Master Plan” is going worldwide!
This morning the BBC announced that, alongside the previously detailed release of the two missing episodes (“The Nightmare” and “Devil’s Planet”) joining the corporation’s extensive library of classic Doctor Who episodes on the iPlayer streaming service for UK-based audiences, the two episodes will be viewable by international audiences starting today via the Doctor Who Classic YouTube channel.
Broadcast for the first—and last—time in late 1965 as part of Doctor Who‘s third season, “The Nightmare” and “Devil’s Planet” are the first and third episodes of the 12-part serial known as “The Daleks’ Master Plan”. Even with their recovery, 7 episodes of the story remain missing and presumed lost, part of a total of now 95 episodes from the series’ black-and-white broadcast era that have yet to be recovered.
“The Daleks’ Master Plan” was thought to be one of the largely missing serials that it would be most difficult to ever recover episodes from. Now infamous for its violence—the serial not only features the first-ever onscreen death of a companion, the then-recently-joined Katarina, played by Adrienne Hill, but also the killing off of her would-be replacement, the space agent Sara Kingdom—the body count and fear factor lead to international censors declining to pick up the story for broadcast. With those reels sold for international broadcast having become a key source in hunting for missing episodes, it was presumed for years that stories like “The Daleks’ Master Plan”, which were kept only in the UK, were likely to have been wiped forever thanks to the BBC’s old policy of archival junking.
That’s what makes the recovery of these two episodes such a surprise, even beyond the fact that their recovery by the charitable UK foundation Film Is Fabulous brought an end to the longest gap between episode recoveries so far. Now as we finally get to enjoy them in earnest for the first time in six decades, we can only hope there’s more out there to uncover.
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