Friday, September 16, 2005

Missing II - Season 4

Things really fragment for a while after this. The last stretch of the Hartnell era is symbolic of what is to come: 'The Gunfighters' intact, then 'The Savages' missing; 'The War Machines' intact, then 'The Smugglers' missing. Following 'The Tenth Planet', the start of the Patrick Troughton era is devastated by the archive purges, with both his first two stories completely missing - 'The Power of the Daleks' in which the Second Doctor has his first run-in with his greatest enemies, and 'The Highlanders' where he gains another travelling companion in the shape of Battle of Culloden survivor Jamie McCrimmon. Only a few 8mm clips exist from the former on the 'Lost In Time' DVD, and then it's on to episode 3 of 'The Underwater Menace', 2 and 4 of 'The Moonbase', before the entirely absent 'The Macra Terror', 1 & 3 of 'The Faceless Ones' and just episode 2 of the seven-part season closer 'The Evil of the Daleks'. All in all, just six episodes survive from the Second Doctor's 35 in season 4.

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