Doctor Who: Something from nothing

Anybody who has spent significant amounts of time immersed in the universe of Doctor Who will have dreamt about the lost episodes. Precious dreamtime given over to sitting down and watching a TV show that literally does not exist any more.

Those missing episodes of the Hartnell and Troughton years, lost due to stupidity and deleted from the historical record, are a hole in the story that is never really going to be filled. Marco Polo and the Myth Makers and Power of the Daleks only exist in re-creation now, and as much as we yearn to see them, they are more than likely gone forever.

Many of them only exist in dreams anymore. I've seen episodes of the Macra Terror in my sleep and while I can barely remember any detail, the giant crabs aliens were much scarier in my head than they were when they showed up in 21st century Who.

I first became aware of the missing episodes in a small write-up in the seminal 20th anniversary magazine, and they all seemed lost then. There was a strange fascination with this - no matter how determined I was to see as much of the show as possible, there would always be this missing part, forever out of reach, forever mysterious, forever gone. You'd need a TARDIS for that.

I have seen the missing episodes as best I can, in fairly crude reconstructions that put telesnaps over the soundtrack, and it's easy enough to follow the story, but not enough to really get engaged. A significant amount of missing stories have also been recreated in animation form, and they do have their charms, but they do miss the crucial subtilties of Hartnell and Troughton, the strange ways they moved and gestured that were so important.

There are also some fools who have been trying to recreate the missing episodes with AI, and that's just as creatively and morally bankrupt as expected, and should be of no interest to anybody.

So the animation is probably your best bet if you want to see some version of it, and you live with this tiny sliver of void in the best story ever told. 

And then every few years, somebody dusts off some old film can, and suddenly you're watching the Doctor and Salamander fight on the floor of the TARDIS, and the dream comes true. There is nothing in all entertainment that compares with the news that they've found some of the Dalek Master Plan, and we'll actually get to see Katrina and Bret Vyon in full episodes. Nothing.

I might still dream about them, but they've also escaped out into the real world, and always bringing the hope of more.