A Bargain of Necessity

"A Bargain of Necessity" is pretty much an exercise in backing out of the plot cul-de-sac of the last episode. It does a good job of that, with some highly entertaining bits from Hartnell and some interesting moral debate from Ian and Barbara (and once again, Susan present as a plot anchor preventing the other characters from ditching), but you can still hear a faint beeping noise as the story goes through its motions.

The first chunk of the episode is mostly given over to Ian's interrogation and rescue, along with an explanation of the reveal that Leon is the traitor. It's one of those things that probably worked when the story was first shown but suffers greatly from the huge volume of guides to the series that collectively spoil Stirling's real identity. That is to say, the story has been working very hard to try to get the audience to believe that Leon is really Stirling, but if you know going in that he's not, then he by definition has to be the traitor because otherwise his character has no real purpose to the story. (This is also how Roger Ebert used to figure out who the traitor was in every action movie--he just looked for the person who would otherwise be utterly surplus to the plot.)

Ian's interrogation is played well--it's a scene that actually uses the overall flaw of the story as its strength, because this time the TARDIS crew is almost totally disconnected from events and has only the barest connection to the Stirling plot or indeed anything else. But Leon, who has been living in the world of espionage and plot and counter-plot and treason and counter-treason for years now, simply can't accept that Ian's motivation is nothing more than, "A dying man asked me to find a total stranger and give him a message, and I figured why not?" Because it's ludicrous. For the previous four parts, that's been the problem, but right now it creates a great deal of tension until Jules shows up to save the day.

Afterwards, we get one of those scenes that occasionally pops up in this era of the program and always, always, always works: Barbara confronts Ian and Jules with the moral complexity of the French Revolution and points out that no, Leon didn't "deserve to die" because he betrayed them...from Leon's point of view, they betrayed him and everyone he cared about. It's a great scene, made no less great because Barbara later apologizes; her apology isn't an acknowledgment that Leon did deserve his fate, only that there were no other alternatives.

Meanwhile, the Doctor is off being awesome. That's really all you can say about the scene where he tricks the jailer into letting Barbara go on the pretense that they can then follow her back to her confederates, only to explain after she leaves that he thought the jailer was going to do the actual following. Sheer poetry. After that, the brief look-in on the ostensible plot (Lemaitre is on to him, Robespierre is both terrified of betrayal and inexplicably absent-minded about the official change to the French calendar that abolished "July") is almost anti-climactic. Again, this story is very much a thing of parts in the absence of any real story, but that doesn't mean there's not a lot of enjoyment to be had from the best of those parts.

The Tyrant of France

It's a shame we see so little of the actual Tyrant of France in "The Tyrant of France", because the scenes with Robespierre are the best part of this episode. Despite the general storybook atmosphere of the story, Spooner isn't interested in reducing Robespierre to a one-dimensional caricature; instead, he makes good use of the old truism that every villain thinks he's a hero. Spooner doesn't shy away from depicting Robespierre as a paranoid mass murderer, but he also shows the guilt lying not far beneath the surface of Robespierre's brutality. He knows that he's murdering people by the hundreds, he knows that history will remember the bloodshed, but he sees no alternatives at this point. Better to be remembered as a monster who founded the New France than a monster who failed, right?

Hartnell's Doctor is great in this scene, and he's also great in trying to avoid a reprise of it. His bluster is charming and hilarious, even as we catch wind of the fear that underlies it. The Doctor knows full well that he's stepped in it much deeper than he planned to when it was originally a hastily-improvised disguise to intimidate the jailer into releasing a few prisoners, and his attempts to bluff his way out are tense and funny at the same time. Even so...

Look, it's not that the episode is bad. It does an effective job of moving all of the pieces around in an interesting fashion, what with Susan getting sick (although again, this story does seem to mark the point where they stopped even trying to do anything with the character other than keep her around as a convenient warm body to be dragged from one peril to the next) and her and Barbara getting recaptured and Ian pursuing his spy plot and the Doctor trying to avoid getting exposed as an imposter...but it's pretty clear by now that moving the pieces around is all that's happening. There's no real story here; Stirling's plot is so slight that it's barely taken up a few minutes of each episode, and there's no real sense of urgency or momentum to it. Ian is looking for Stirling to give him a message because some guy he met asked him to. There's no emotional depth to it, and everything else in the story is just a run-around until the allotted number of episodes is up and everyone can escape to the TARDIS.

Again, this is primarily a function of Spooner having jettisoned the series' previous approach to the historical without yet knowing what to replace it with. 'The Romans' will make better use of the farce structure that is essentially being developed here, and 'The Time Meddler' will inaugurate what generations of fans will come to know as the established structure of the series, "aliens meddling in important historical events". But here, he's got six episodes to fill, and very little to fill it with. He's already getting better at learning how to hide the padding, but it's unfortunate that there's still so much padding to hide.

Assassin at Peking

Remember how I talked earlier about learning the history of the Hashishin from the novelization of this story? And remember how it took pride of place on my bookshelves, and I kept it long after the rest of my Target novelizations were let go to clear space on my bookshelves? Well, I have to say that it was a good thing that Lucarotti got to write that Target novelization, because as good as this is as a final episode, he didn't quite stick the landing here.

Don't get me wrong, this is a great episode. It gets off to a fast and exciting start, with Tegana getting a great villain speech (and again, it's awesome that his superstition isn't used to make him seem foolish, and in fact more of a threat) and framing Ian for the theft of the TARDIS. At this point, it must be said that Tegana has had a lot of unearned luck, here--he wasn't the one to kill Kuiju, and if either the guards had overheard him boasting about making Noghai the ruler of the world or if the guards hadn't been overzealous and Kuiju had fingered him, this would have been a very short episode seven. But you can say the same thing about any long story with a villain, really. ('Under the Dome'--the novel, not the TV show--has the same problem.) Still, it's a solid scene, made more so by Derren Nesbitt's silky smooth performance.

Then we get a wonderful highlight of the story--the Doctor and Kublai Khan's backgammon match. The sequence where the Doctor totals up his winnings is sheer poetry. "35 elephants with all of their trappings, 4000 white stallions, and 25 tigers--" "That's not so bad--" "Oh, and the Sacred Tooth of the Buddha--" "Oh, that was a gift from Marco!" "...and all the commerce from Burma for one year." It's a great scene, and it sets up what seems to be the resolution of the story as the Doctor wagers it all against the TARDIS.

But in an episode that's absolutely jam-packed, that's nowhere near the end. The Doctor loses, Tegana plays Marco Polo's eagerness to leave the Khan's service against him by suggesting that Marco's sympathies secretly lie with the TARDIS crew, and Ian is set to go on trial for the theft of the Khan's property. Again, this scene works well because Nesbitt plays it well...but it also works well because the script plays him as a man with an intimate understanding of people's weaknesses. Tegana knows what secrets Marco holds, and he knows that revealing them to Kublai Khan before Marco has the chance will leave him on the defensive. It's actually a very well-written as well as a very well-acted sequence.

Unfortunately, the resolution starts to feel a bit perfunctory here. The death of Ping-Cho's intended, while a sequence that is not without a certain twisted humor, wraps up her sub-plot with the rapidity of a Restoration comedy deus-ex-machina. The TARDIS crew's realization of Tegana's plan, and their escape to the throne room, is equally rushed. And in the end, all they really do is tell Marco what's going on and let him do all the heroic lifting. It works better than it should, because at this point Marco has been on the show long enough to feel like a protagonist in his own right, but it's still a little odd in a show called 'Doctor Who' that the final confrontation features two incidental characters slugging it out.

And then there's the final conclusion, which has none of the elegance of the novelized version. Instead of Kublai Khan graciously ceding the TARDIS to the Doctor as repayment for saving his life, Marco just sort of shoves the keys their way and they sprint for the hills. And Kublai Khan, who had been established pretty well as someone who was more than just a figure of comedy, who had the power of life and death over Marco and was shown to distrust him because Marco seemed to have a conflict in loyalties over the TARDIS and its crew, just shrugs the loss of the magical caravan off with a joke about backgammon. It's a weak ending to a good episode, and it makes you glad that Lucarotti had a second chance. Because with two opportunities, he made a story that's a genuine classic.

Mighty Kublai Khan

As previously mentioned, there has been a bit of padding in the previous five episodes. A five-episode long journey through Cathay with Marco Polo may, in fact, have had a wee bit of extra kidnapping and banditry and so forth; however, that slow simmer of sub-plots now means we've got two whole episodes that are almost totally payoff. "Mighty Kublai Khan" brings (unsurprisingly) the Khan himself, and he's exactly what you don't expect him to be--far from a terrifying warlord, he's a slightly doddery old man with gout who lives in fear of his domineering wife and indulges in a quiet bit of gambling when she's not around. The scenes between him and Hartnell are adorable, and they're only going to get better.

Meanwhile, Ian and Ping-Cho wind up paired off in their own sub-plot, tracking down Tegana's theft of the TARDIS. This is where the amount of character development we've gotten over the last five episodes really pays off; Ping-Cho is far more detailed and realized than any incidental character in the new series possibly could be. We care about the resolution to her story, which makes it feel more grounded and realistic that the regular cast does as well. When they stand up to Marco, not knowing that Tegana has been playing Iago once again to undermine them, it feels like an earned character beat and not merely a further plot twist. It gives Tegana another chance to go swanning off and be evil, but by this point that feels earned as well. Sure, it's obvious to us that Tegana is evil, but he does a great job of getting his licks in early and often.

Nonetheless, even the longest-simmering plotline has to come to a boil eventually, and Kuiju's admission that Tegana hired him finally makes his villainy overt. Which leaves us exactly one episode to resolve Ping-Cho's wedding, Tegana's betrayal, Marco's moral dilemma, and oh by the way to get the Doctor and company back to the TARDIS. Too much to handle? No, the pacing finally feels like it's moving at just the right clip.

Rider From Shang-Tu

It really is amazing just how epic this serial feels. We're five episodes in, and already we have traveled from the Himalayas to Cheng-Ting and taken in sandstorms, oases, treachery, hidden caverns, and sub-plots galore. We've had what feels like a massive cast and tons of incident, and Shang-Tu and Kublai Khan loom ahead with all the weight of 150 solid minutes of foreshadowing. This is the episode where all that momentum really starts to pull the story forward towards its conclusion.

Which isn't to say it's perfect--the bandit fight is a tense sequence, but the whole "let's scare the superstitious peasants by popping bamboo at them" strategy is a bit embarrassing in that way that treating everyone from The Past as superstitious peasants always is. Luckily, that's not the only thing going on here; Tegana shows he's not just a panto villain in a kiddie show by ruthlessly sacrificing his compatriots to preserve his ruse. He also shows himself as clever and adaptable--when his first ploy, canceling the raid to discredit Ian, fails due to Acomat's impatience, he's willing to change tactics and ingratiate himself further to Marco Polo.

The scene with Ian and Marco bears special mention as well, as it's a good example of the kind of characterization this story does well. The two men are clearly comrades, in an era of the series where Ian is treated credibly as a second protagonist (it's unfortunate that Barbara is mostly sidelined in this episode and to some extent in this entire story), and the speech between them shows a respect and admiration that clearly makes them wish their goals didn't conflict. Which leads also to the wonderful scene where Marco asks for their promise to cease trying to steal the TARDIS...and each of them respects him too much to lie to him. (And where he displays a common-sense, healthy distrust of Tegana by refusing his offer of bodyguarding duties. In one brief moment, we're made aware that Marco knows he has no true allies on either side.) The dynamics of this story really do make it a highlight of the "circumstances have separated us from the TARDIS for X episodes" era of the series.

And in an episode filled with so much plot and character development I almost can't fit it all in, I also want to bring special attention to Tegana's character once again. He's an interesting twist on the "superstitious peasant" trope that I disdained just a few paragraphs ago. Ian points out that he can't be after the TARDIS because he believes it to be magical and he's terrified of it, and he's both very right and very wrong. Tegana isn't faking his superstition about the TARDIS; he genuinely does believe it to be a magical artifact created by a wizard with evil magical powers. But it's exactly that quality that makes him want it so badly--Tegana believes that with the TARDIS' power, Noghai will gain a decisive advantage over Kublai Khan. His superstitious make him more dangerous, not less, because Lucarotti understands that superstition and stupidity don't necessarily go hand in hand.

And then there's Ping-Cho, who suddenly steps to the forefront and gains agency in a story where she has conspicuously been denied it at every turn. She still has no control over her own life, but circumstances put her into a position where she has both a moral dilemma and the power to bring hope back to her only friend. (Although it does put the idiot ball squarely into Marco's hands--why not just re-hide the keys?) Her inventive solution to the moral dilemma is obvious equivocation, but it's also an entirely understandable character beat that shows just how deep the characterization is for all the cast. This really is an ensemble series at this point, with the incidental characters just as important as the regulars.

Oh, and there's a great cliffhanger too, with Susan under threat for the entirely understandable decision to repay her friend's kindness with a small gratitude. Ping-Cho asked for only one thing in return for stealing from Marco and possibly earning herself a dreadful punishment, and Susan refuses to leave without giving it to her. It's a risky thing to do, but not a foolish one, and deeply rooted in everything we've seen about Susan so far in the series. Shame it's gone so badly for her.

The Wall of Lies

Now this is more like it. At this stage in the BBC's history, they really do view television as a sort of strange variant on the stage play, and so they're playing to their strengths when they treat 'Doctor Who' like a stage play as well. "The Wall of Lies" opens with the resolution of Barbara's rescue, but this is really just the mechanism to get to the far more important and effective conflict between the TARDIS crew and the locals. Barbara knows Tegana is up to no good, even if she didn't see him with the men who tried to kill her. Tegana knows that he's in a precarious position; there's no direct evidence implicating him, but Barbara can definitely finger him as being up to no good.

And what follows is a wonderful riff on "Shakespeare's Greatest Hits". Tegana outmaneuvers the TARDIS crew using the most effective political tactic of them all--come out swinging and immediately accuse the other party of the exact thing you're doing. He warns Polo that the Doctor and his friends are trying to set the two of them against one another by lying, in a scene reminiscent of Iago's performance in 'Othello'. When Barbara does tell Marco that she followed Tegana to the cave, she doesn't realize she's playing right into his hands.

We then follow up with a platonic twist on 'Romeo and Juliet', as Marco decides to limit Susan's influence on Ping-Cho without realizing that the Doctor distrusts Ping-Cho just as much as Marco distrusts Susan. The two friends are caught in the middle, with a wonderfully effective sequence displaying the difficult position Marco is in. Even if Tegana is lying, it's not like Marco can simply kick his butt to the curb; Tegana is an emissary of peace from a foreign power conducting delicate negotiations. This is the kind of person Marco can't antagonize, not without definitive proof of wrongdoing. His anger at Ping-Cho is almost like a father getting upset with his daughter for doing something dangerous without even realizing it.

And it all leads up to a wonderfully effective sequence as Marco discovers the grain of truth that makes Tegana's lies so effective. For all that the Doctor is right about Tegana, Tegana is also right about the Doctor in one key area. He doesn't trust Marco, he doesn't respect Marco's authority, and he is working behind Marco's back to defy his edict and steal what Marco has claimed as his property. The fact that Marco essentially stole said property, which the Doctor views as justification for his actions, only hardens Marco's heart against him; in order to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of stealing the TARDIS while still viewing himself as a moral man, Marco needs to see the Doctor as deserving of his fate. The Doctor's actions give Marco the excuse he needs to justify his harsh actions. The scene in front of the TARDIS, where Ian is forced to bluff things out until it all collapses (to Tegana's quiet delight) and the Doctor threatens to scuttle the TARDIS rather than let it fall into Marco's hands, is a brilliant and insightful sequence that changes the whole nature of the story.

And then, just when you think that the paradigm for the story's second act has settled, we get the excellent cliff-hanger. Ian prepares to subdue the guard and escape, only to find him already dead. The more this story focuses on its characters, the better it gets. This episode is a huge improvement off of last episode's stall, as Lucarotti figures out that the best thing about the series at this point is its characters.

Five Hundred Eyes

It's a little frustrating that this is an episode that doesn't know what the series' strengths are at this point. They have a great regular cast, all of whom are bringing their A-games week in and week out. They have a great guest cast who are really engaging with their material. They have some really good emotional material here to work with. And we just don't get enough of the real conflicts. Tegana is lying when he says that "bandits" prevented him from getting back to the caravan with life-saving water, and everybody knows it. But that scene is cut tragically short. Likewise, the conflict between Polo and the Doctor is really great stuff, with Polo as a sympathetic antagonist and a really fascinating ethical dilemma...but we get one snippy exchange in the whole episode.

Instead, we get a lengthy sequence where Ping-Cho tells the story of the Hashishin, which...look, on the one hand, I have pangs of nostalgia for this scene. Years ago, as a kid, I learned the history of the Hashishin from the Target novelization of this story. It's still got a place on my bookshelf, years after I let the rest of the Target books go in order to conserve shelf space. (The only other survivor was 'Remembrance of the Daleks', although I've built it back up a bit since then.) And it's performed beautifully by Zienia Merton. So with all that, I can't say that it's a bad scene, I really really can't.

What I can say, though, is that it doesn't really fit in with the tone of the episode that surrounds it and that it kills the momentum of the episode. And this is not an episode that can afford a five-minute stall, not with as little plot as it has. We've had a five-minute sequence involving the explanation of condensation, and now we're getting a history lesson. Even for a series that at this point has an educational mandate, this is draggy.

Luckily, Tegana is on hand to at least nudge the plot along by having Barbara kidnapped. It's really more of a set-up for next episode's action than anything else, but at least Jacqueline Hill gives it her all the way she always does. (Have I mentioned yet that the regular cast brings their A-game every week? Oh, yes. Right there, three paragraphs ago. Carry on.) This episode is definitely a bit of a longueur, but it's hard to get through a seven-parter without one. And as longueurs go, at least this one has the tale of the Hashishin.

The Singing Sands

And so, after an episode that's all about messing with people's heads and establishing the premise, 'The Singing Sands' settles in and does exactly what a story like this is supposed to do. Lucarotti is telling an exciting story of a journey through foreign lands, and that means the heroes have to overcome obstacles rooted in the cultural and geographical lore of the countries they're traveling through. Which means that the caravan has to go through the Gobi desert, which in turn means that the big drama is going to come from sandstorms and thirst. It's not rude to point out that these are old standards--a story that didn't hit these beats wouldn't feel like it was doing its job.

Likewise, Tegana is playing exactly the kind of character that needs to be in a classic adventure story; he's villainous enough that we can all lustily boo his schemes and machinations, but not so effective that he's actually disturbing. His plan to murder everyone in the caravan by cutting their water skins hits just the right sweet spot. It's potentially deadly, but not actually scary. (Which is actually one of the criticisms of the story--that Tegana is such an obvious mustache-twirling villain that the heroes seem like idiots for trusting him as much as they do. But at least at this point, it's clear that the TARDIS crew don't trust him at all, and Mark Eden does a good job of playing the part ambiguously enough that you can at least make a case that he doesn't so much trust Tegana as tolerate him.)

That said, it is an episode that does pretty much what it says on the tin, no more and no less. It's an adventure story for children, with none of the moral ambiguity or interpersonal drama of the previous fourteen episodes. Even worse, the Doctor is almost entirely missing from the story. As great as Ian, Barbara and Susan are (and at this point, I'm fully convinced that this is the best TARDIS crew ever), they need the Doctor to play off of. So does everybody else. The big emotional conflict is between Polo and the Doctor, even though Tegana is the ostensible villain; with one of them sidelined for the episode, we're left with the Boy's Own storyline for a full thirty minutes. And while that's not bad, it's not as good as it was or as it's going to be.

The Roof of the World

The thing that's striking about 'The Roof of the World' is the way that it delights in playing games with its audience's heads. It's a trick that perhaps slides past us modern viewers if we're not careful; in retrospect, this is the first "historical" story and a classic example of a common sub-genre of this era of Who. But that's in retrospect. At the time, the series had never done a proper "historical" story--we'd had a bizarre drama playing out among prehistoric humanity and a science-fiction epic, but many in the audience had no idea what to expect when the travelers next stepped out of the TARDIS. (The Radio Times had published an article on the upcoming story, but it was a far cry from the modern spoileriffic Internet.)

And Lucarotti's screenplay plays with that for most of 'The Roof of the World'. The first thing we see is a footprint larger than a human being could make...which is promptly dismissed as a half-melted bootprint. Barbara sees strange, furry monsters...which turn out to be normal people in furs. Tegana, warlord of the Mongol Noghai, tells of shapeshifting evil spirits...but Marco Polo dismisses it as superstition, and it's not brought up again. Marco, when confronted with a "flying caravan", speaks of it as part and parcel of the same magic that allows Buddhist monks to levitate cups of wine to the mouth of Kublai Khan...but this is presented as a mere unusual background detail to what is otherwise settling into an adventure with a well-known historical figure in a well-documented historical period. Everything seems to be settling in...

...until Marco announces that he wants the strange, miraculous flying caravan for Kublai Khan, and we realize we've been looking in the wrong place for aliens and strange science-fiction weirdness. It's not the situation that the Doctor and his companions have stepped into; it's them. They are the strange aliens that have stepped into Marco Polo's story, and far from being the first example of a classic historical, this is the exact opposite. This is a science-fiction story, and the TARDIS--that wonderful, impossible piece of futuristic technology--is the key to it all.

But it's also, fundamentally, a personal conflict in the way that the early Hartnell stories managed so effortlessly. With the tension more or less resolved among the TARDIS crew, Polo takes the place of Ian and Barbara as a sympathetic character who nonetheless has goals that conflict with the other protagonists. The Doctor has resolved himself to helping Ian and Barbara get back to England, but Marco is willing to do whatever it takes to reach his own home. And he's utterly incapable of understanding the bitter irony in his statement that Ian and Barbara can get back, but "it would take some time".

With all that, it's almost overkill to find out that Tegana's planning to kill everyone. That may be the cliffhanger, but the climax is the Doctor giggling maniacally at the thought of Buddhist monks piloting the TARDIS. His world is so alien to Polo's, literally and figuratively, that he's reduced to tears of helpless laughter at the thought of reconciling them. A brilliant end to a brilliant episode.

This Is What Happens When I Miss a Post

So apparently, in the five days since my last post, we went from "Missing episodes...well, we can dream, can't we?" to "An eccentric African engineer kept a whole bunch of tapes from his career in broadcasting and we're getting all the missing Hartnell and Troughton stories!" back to "Missing episodes...well, we can dream, can't we?" Which means I missed my chance to be either precognitive or foolish.

In practical terms, I was probably a bit of both. The story sounded patently unbelievable, and I didn't for a moment buy that there was an eccentric African engineer out there who had been hoarding episodes. I also didn't believe that he had everything. There's some stuff out there that just will never be recovered, like the missing Episode Seven of "The Dalek Masterplan", which we will not see through anything short of time travel. And frankly, there've been enough "ZOMOG a Seekrit Benefactor has found all Teh Missings and will give them to us and we will have ALL TEH WHOS!" rumors out there that I take all of them with at least a shaker of salt until the BBC makes an official announcement.

But that said, I wanted to believe. Who wouldn't? I wanted to imagine that some third-hand game of telephone had turned a plausible-but-exciting truth, like "Someone has found the missing episodes of 'Evil of the Daleks'!" into a wild, unbelievable exaggeration, and there was a grain of truth to it. And the person who reported it was stating that they had multiple sources, which seemed promising. So yeah, I was at least fooled enough to be hopeful, which is probably enough to encourage the type of person who makes this shit up to yank Who fans' chains.

But ultimately, I think that the BBC is doing the next best thing. The animated reconstructions are great, and they make those old episodes accessible to a new generation of fans. Will we ever see another missing episode? I wouldn't say "no", not after we found 'Airlock' and 'Underwater Menace Part Two', but I'll say I'm resigned to "probably not". Resigned enough to play the doubting Thomas to the next hoax, at least.

But not so resigned that I'll ever stop wanting to believe them.

Top Ten Missing Episodes

(Originally posted to my blog Fraggmented on December 11, 2011.)

For those of you who haven't heard the wonderful news, two more episodes of 1960s-era Doctor Who were recovered today ('Galaxy Four' Episode Three and 'The Underwater Menace' Episode Two), bringing the total of recovered episodes to 36 and reducing the number of missing episodes down to 106. As always, this is a day of rejoicing for Doctor Who fans; as I mentioned in my post over at Mightygodking.com, no other fandom can really understand what it's like to not be able to sit down and watch every episode of their favorite series.

Interestingly enough, one article on the TARDIS Erudotorum cited these episodes as "not on anyone's Top Ten list of episodes to be recovered." Which led me to the interesting question, what exactly would the Top Ten list be? So, I thought, why not give mine? Keeping in mind, of course, that we have to keep it to individual episodes (so no "All of 'Marco Polo'") and also that, suckily enough, we can wish as hard as we want but that won't make it happen. So here are my picks for the most desired recoveries, should a benevolent deity grant our wishes.

10-9. The Invasion, Episodes 1 and 4. This one is the most interesting, even though it's at the bottom of the list, because it's the most likely. Rumors have persisted for years, started by none other than the late Nicholas Courtney, that a private collector has copies of the two missing episodes of this classic late-Troughton story, but that they're holding the BBC over a barrel and demanding an exorbitant fee before they allow the Beeb to "recover" them officially. (Courtney claimed to have actually seen copies of the film, which had picture but no sound. The BBC, as with all missing episodes, has sound but no picture. Any A/V club geek could resolve that problem.) Of course, this one is already "restored", in the form of Doctor Who's only (canonical) animated episodes, but it'd be nice to be able to watch the story as interpreted by the actors and not the creators of "Danger Mouse".

8-6. Power of the Daleks, Episodes 1-3. This is actually one I'd love to have in its entirety, but I'm trying to stick to the "individual episodes only" rule, and I just don't have the space for the full serial. And from the sound of things, to be honest, all the good stuff really happens before the Daleks give up on being cunning manipulators and just start killing people; the first few episodes are filled with tense political intrigue and the Daleks actually being clever and subtle, which is such a twist for them that I'd love to see it. Couple that with Troughton's first three episodes in the role, and I would love to see it come back home.

5. The Tenth Planet, Episode 4. And speaking of "regeneration stories", this is probably a lot of people's Number One missing episode. It's certainly of tremendous symbolic significance; the final appearance of William Hartnell, the first actor to take the role, is a major cultural touchstone among fans of the series. But I suspect, having seen the first three episodes, that it's more interesting as a "religious relic" than as an actual story, which bumps it a bit below everything else on the list.

4. The Massacre, Episode 4. Yes, I know. It does seem a bit odd that I'm actually prioritizing the first appearance of Dodo over the final appearance of Hartnell, but I really want it for all the bits prior to that. This is, by all accounts, a remarkably intense episode, with a shocking and devastating climax to the events in France followed up by a genuinely emotional confrontation between Steven and the Doctor. It would be well worth the small price of Dodo's near-nonsensical introductory sequence to get the scenes preceding it.

3. Mission to the Unknown. This has always sounded like one of the truly fascinating, quirky episodes of the series; a one-part story in an era where six and seven-parters weren't at all unusual, a story that features absolutely nothing of the Doctor, not even a mention, and a story that ends with the nominal hero dying at the hands of the Daleks, the Doctor's arch-enemies, with his dying message lost. I don't think it'll ever have the impact that the original story had (especially when it was followed up on with a four-parter that had nothing to do with 'Mission'...for almost five weeks, fans watched the show with the lurking knowledge in the back of their heads that the Daleks were out there, getting ready to conquer the universe, and the Doctor didn't even know about it.) But I would dearly love to see it.

2. Evil of the Daleks, Episode 7. This is another "Dang, I want every one of the missing episodes of this one!" story. But if you can only have one on the list, then it's got to be Episode 7. Absolutely got to. The Doctor's final gambit against the Dalek Emperor, the revolt of the humanised Daleks, the civil war on Skaro...this was epic stuff, and we've been denied it.

1. The Daleks' Master Plan, Episode 12. And speaking of "epic", this was a freaking twelve-parter. That's almost a whole season, one of the grandest and most ambitious stories ever done in the history of 'Doctor Who'...and the climax, involving the death of a companion (well, possibly, depending on how you count these things) and the destruction of worlds and Daleks melting from existence and great big huge exciting stuff, is gone. Possibly forever. **sniff** Could we have it back, please?