Finding out Doctor Who has over 90 lost episodes is one of the heartbreaking realities of becoming a Doctor Who fans in the 21st century – but Doctor Who having a chunk of missing history is also one of the many reasons it’s special. In the 1960s and 1970s, words like DVD and Blu-Ray had yet to exist, and television was considered ephemeral. Subsequently, many William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton Doctor Who episodes broadcast via the BBC no longer exist, with archivists seeing little point in keeping them past their initial broadcast.

Though junking of Doctor Who stopped in the late 70s, and fans such as Ian Levine intervened to save several stories, over 150 episodes were already missing by that point. Over the years, private copies and telerecordings of episodes for overseas sales have trickled in, both from the UK and in places as far-reaching as Hong Kong. The last finds - the complete "Enemy of the World" and five episodes of "The Web of Fear" in 2013 - have brought the total of missing episodes down to 97.

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Despite the sadness of such classic Doctor Who stories like the sweeping “Marco Polo,” the epic “Daleks’ Master Plan,” or the tragic “Massacre” being partially missing or wiped entirely, it does give the Doctor Who franchise one truly unique element: a hidden past. Discovering 1960s Doctor Who also invites the fun of digging up pictures of otherwise lost episodes, seeing the tantalizing little clips that have survived, and using book adaptations of scripts to imagine how these lost stories might have looked on screen. Unlike any other franchise, Doctor Who has buried treasure and a secret history much like its main character.

How Doctor Who's Lost Episodes Have Helped The Series

The Doctor looks slyly in Doctor Who

Miraculously, audio recordings of every Doctor Who episode do survive, meaning that fans are inspired to ingenious feats of creativity to reconstruct missing classics. This goes back to the 1990s when enthusiasts would create telesnap reconstructions, piecing together pictures of the episodes from off-air recordings and set photos. This has now evolved into official reconstruction Doctor Who animations, funded by the BBC, including “Power of the Daleks,” “The Macra Terror,” and “The Faceless Ones” – though sadly, it appears this animation series is coming to an end soon. There are even full cast remakes of episodes, such as the University of Central Lancashire’s 2019 version of the first-ever ‘Doctor-lite episode, “Mission to the Unknown.” Similarly, these audio recordings give creative inspiration to fan creators online, resulting in work like Josh Snares's brilliant “Doctor Who: The Missing Episodes” YouTube documentary. Across animation, filmmaking, fiction, and non-fiction, the Doctor Who fanbase rallies together in increasingly inventive ways to bring these classics to life and tell the story behind them. Even outside the main show, relics like the script for the Peter Cushing 1967 radio pilot have been studied and documented extensively.

Most notably, this enthusiasm has also led to remarkable efforts to rediscover copies of the lost Doctor Who episodes themselves, the most recent find being missing TV hunter Philip Morris’ discoveries on a shelf at a television station in Jos, Nigeria. This collective quest in fandom to find the episodes and the success so far is a testament to the love for Doctor Who and, in itself, a wholly unique and exciting chapter in its history.

Though it would be a joy for all the remaining episodes to turn up one day in a miraculous haul, there is no denying that their absence has, and is still, inspiring invention and craft unprecedented in nearly any other fandom. On top of that, there is the possibility that somewhere out there in the world, there are First and Second Doctor episodes that are, in effect, brand new to a whole generation of fans. Finding out there are missing episodes as a Doctor Who fan is upsetting – but there’s adventure and mystery befitting the Doctors themselves in the many ways to rediscover them.

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