The missing tapes, in the name of the Doctor

Oh, well that changes things quite a bit, doesn’t it?

When the Daily Mirror broke the news over the weekend that “106 episodes of Doctor Who” had been located, it was easy to dismiss as another festering pile of Dalek droppings. The number alone was pure wish-fulfillment: since the 2011 discoveries of episodes of Galaxy Four and The Underwater Menace, only 106 episodes remained to be found, including episodes that had never been sold outside of the UK for a variety of reasons; the by-now-legendary major find in northern Africa, or Sierra Leone, or Nigeria, or Ethiopia, or whatever it was, couldn’t possibly complete the entire series. The fanciful discussion of the mythical find has even received its own name – “the omnirumor” – with True Believers and skeptical detractors lining up for or against its chances of actually being true.

Today, BBC News broke its silence, confirming that something has indeed been found, somewhere. An announcement will be made in a couple of days. Fandom is waiting to exhale.

Christmas isn’t all about stocking stuffers and presents and dangerously delicious dinners that undo any attempts you’ve made since the previous new year to drop weight. It’s also about Crazy Aunt Ethel sending ungodly experimental fruitcakes that could probably survive a nuclear winter. So in contemplating what’s lost and what might have been found, I decided to come up with an even-handed wish list: one consisting of both Christmas dinner and indestructible (also, inedible) fruitcakes. The good and the bad.

It’s way too easy to just say “I’ll have 106, please,” almost like you’re contemplating a side order of fries with that. As I write this, the BBC has only just confirmed a missing episode find, its hand having been forced somewhat by the Daily Mirror articles and the Radio Times – and, one suspects, by a fandom that, while known for being demanding from time to time, had probably reached a fever pitch after rumors circulated relentlessly for much of 2013.

So let’s assume that the haul of returned episodes falls short of that magic number, 106. Which ones would you want returned?

I decided to list three “finds” per Doctor as my “wish list”, for wildly different reasons. Two beautifully wrapped gifts that you’re almost afraid to open… and one fruitcake… per Doctor.

The Two First Doctor Episodes I’d Most Like To See Returned

Marco Polo – the missing gem of the first season, this is by all accounts a lavish costume extravaganza. But more to the point, it’s where – having been put through the wringer on Skaro and then trapped in the TARDIS – the Doctor, Ian, Susan and Barbara gel as a team and realize that, whether the strangeness they encounter is on another world or on Earth, they need each other to survive. The following historical Earth adventure, The Aztecs, would test that new dependency and loyalty to its limits, a test that doesn’t have quite the same meaning with all seven episodes of Marco Polo missing. After a fashion, with the release of The Reign Of Terror on DVD with its two animated missing episodes, the rest of Doctor Who’s first season on the air exists, marred only by the absence of this, the first story to go missing in its entirety.

The Savages – I almost couldn’t decide between this story and the remaining missing episodes of Galaxy Four. Both are solid attempts to do “hard” science fiction in Doctor Who, and both are solid attempts to slip a moral into the story as well. But The Savages has something that Galaxy Four doesn’t (the departure of the first Doctor’s loyal companion, Steven Taylor), and Galaxy Four, as of two years ago, has something that The Savages doesn’t (one episode safe and sound in the BBC archives at last). We can now see that lone episode of Galaxy Four; of The Savages, we have seen nothing.

The First Doctor Story In Which I’m Least Interested

The Smugglers – Ben and Polly’s first trip in the TARDIS takes them to an adventure on the Cornish coast! With pirates! In audio form, this story barely maintains my interest, but is that because it’s a bad story, or is that because all that swashbuckling just can’t be conveyed by the medium of sound? As uninterested in the story as I am, I would be up for sitting through it again for a reassessment. The Smugglers is also the last time that Doctor Who was a show that could only be fronted by William Hartnell; at the end of the following story, The Tenth Planet, the entire structure of the series changed forever.

The Two Second Doctor Stories I’d Most Like To See Returned

Power Of The Daleks – the entirety of the history of this show that I love hinges heavily on this story, which is completely lost to the ages. If this hadn’t been an effective story – and from its audio recordings and the slideshow reconstruction, it certainly seems like it had to be effective – we would not now be on the eve of Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary; we might instead be musing on this little show, Doctor Who, that dared to recast its main character in its fourth year on the air and suffered an ignominious loss of audience and swift cancellation as a result. But that didn’t happen. Patrick Troughton picked up the ball and ran for his life. And when he said run, the audience ran too. This was the biggest risk that Doctor Who ever took, with the Daleks riding shotgun as a surefire ratings draw for an insurance policy. I want to see it, not just hear it.

The Web Of Fear – practically a new pilot for the direction Doctor Who would take in the 1970s, this story saw the Doctor throwing in his lot with the British Army, besieged by an unearthly force invading London itself – and, in the second episode, the Army threw its lot in with the Doctor too, in the person of the inquisitive, skeptical, but never-less-than-dedicated Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart. Everything that Doctor Who needed to become to save itself from cancellation during the BBC’s transition from black & white to color is neatly laid out in this story. And it has Yeti in it! What’s not to love?

The Second Doctor Story In Which I’m Least Interested

The Space Pirates – in my book, VWORP!1, I nominated the six-part yawner The Space Pirates as possibly the worst second Doctor serial, if not the worst storyline in the series’ history. Even slideshow reconstructions and audio recordings fail to make it thrilling – but again, it was a tour de force for the BBC’s in-house space model shop, whose time was usually taken up by painstakingly recreating American space missions in miniature for BBC News. Is there, in fact, some thrilling element we’re missing by not seeing the entire thing in motion as originally filmed? I’d be willing to sit through it again in its entirety to find out. Considering how much I love later BBC space operas, like Blake’s 7 and Moonbase 3, I should be all over this one. Maybe seeing it in its original glory (well, maybe that’s the wrong word) would change my opinion.

In mere days, we’ll know what has returned to us after all these years. The BBC is willing only to say that it’s “a number” of episodes – and that number could be anywhere between 0 and 106. Even if it’s below ten, this find is a gift, timed almost impossibly right. If the number is above 20, it’s a treasure on a scale for which we could never have dared to hope. If the number is closer to 100, you would almost think that perhaps a mad man in a blue box left these somewhere for us as a thank you for keeping an eye out for him for the past half-century.

The credit, of course, properly belongs with fans who have never been satisfied with the notion that so many episodes are gone from the show’s history. If you think I’ve devoted a ridiculous chunk of my life to a show from another country by writing a book or two about it, imagine devoting years of your life and very real resources, often including visits to parts of the world that have much weightier issues demanding their attention, to looking for something that may simply no longer exist. Some folks take risky trips like that in the name of God; the people who have found these missing episodes did it (whether peace and sanity were involved or not) in the name of the Doctor. I thank them.