Doctor Who archive expert shares positive update on missing episode
27 comments
·October 19, 2025giancarlostoro
afavour
Who is such an interesting show, in the sense that it’s cultural footprint has always stood in contrast to a relatively tiny production budget.
pndy
The 2005 return/reboot had a small budget and that could be seen in the props which mostly were ordinary items repurposed as out of this world technology. But that worked on the overall charm of this period - I dare to say that show felt realistic in that cheapness.
The regained interest surely allowed to assign more money to the series. DW was at the peak during 11th and 12th Doctors tenure with BBC America involvement in production - the low-quality is mostly gone and more CGI was utilized, and so the stories were good. Not mention the good chemistry between all main actors.
ocdtrekkie
This is a pretty common scifi thing. The Borg antennas being built on the Enterprise's deflector in First Contact were bird feeders. Odo was once contained on DS9 in a bread maker.
goalieca
Disney blew the budget up and the quality went down.
pndy
I'd say that happened already with 13th Doctor. Bad Wolf-Disney DW comes with this "plastic oversaturated filter" effect that plagues media productions for 10 years if not longer.
tredre3
Uh I didn't realize that Disney was involved in production, I thought they were merely distributors.
But yeah, since 2023 Disney has been co-producing. It certainly explains some of the choices, but I don't know if they can be entirely blamed for the decline of the franchise.
FridayoLeary
The old episodes are very quaint. They are quite clearly produced on shoestring budgets, some of the plots are quite weak and i found it hilarious how bad the actors were at faking violence. But none of that mattered, because the team were clearly passionate and enjoyed what they were doing and did a good job so the end product is charming. Production standards have obviously moved on massively since the 1980's and we are better off. The modern episodes are much more highly polished and coherent but not necessarily more popular. Like someone else pointed out the massive influx of disney money did nothing and only exacerbated the train wreck which was the recent doctor who seasons.
Another film that had a huge impact was monty python and the holy grail which was produced with a budget of 75p and ends abruptly because the money ran out. But they just turned that into a running joke throughout the whole movie.
scubbo
> ends abruptly because the money ran out
It is a literal cop-out.
alternatetwo
That’s not true. With Planet of the Dead it was filmed in HD. And no NuWho was ever shot on film.
MathMonkeyMan
I remember seeing Doctor Who for the first time circa 2011 when it was on Amazon Prime. First few seasons were very much early 2000s TV, and then suddenly it got all big budget Netflix style in season five.
The older look doesn't bother me, though. The same thing happened with The Expanse.
dylan604
Season 5 makes it sound like it was a this century show the way you've stated it. Dr. Who is older than I am, and we don't need to get into how old that is. "Who" has been restarted so many times that it seems strange to refer to season five without any more info. In fact, not being a Who follower, how do they differentiate just by the actor playing the doctor? Season 5 of actorName?
tredre3
I also got caught on how GP said Season 5 which would have been from the 60s, not the 2000s. But apparently it is correct (unless you want to be pedantic about the choice of word Series/Season).
The listing of seasons on Wikipedia goes:
Season 1-26 (1963-1989)
Series 1-15 (2005-2025)
hinkley
The Eccleston episodes are a bit on the rough side.
MathMonkeyMan
When I saw the first episode of the first season of the reboot, I was hooked. I couldn't believe that there was really a show that went all in with that zany, campy, sci-fi vibe. There's something about the britishness that makes it work.
A time traveling alien with a Northern accent investigates killer mall mannequins, one of which possesses a trash bin that then eats the costar's boyfriend and transforms him into a plastic golem. They get to the heart of the infestation, and the Doctor readies his weapon -- "anti-plastic," of course -- but desires not to use it as he struggles to talk intergalactic law with the malignant plastic blob. Then he runs off with the girl for adventures in future episodes.
Many of the flavor-of-the-week sci-fi concepts were quite good, and some were not. But anthropomorphic cat nuns! A giant head! Evil buckets with eye stalks! Killer statues that can only move when you're not looking!
Maybe it was some inner child aging out of me, but I feel like the show's writing took a nose dive about halfway through Peter Capaldi's Doctor.
cm2012
But, some of the better storytelling.
JKCalhoun
Related? There are also missing Beatles performances that were also recorded over by the BBC — one of which (do I have this right?) made an appearance in an early Doctor Who episode? I think that Doctor Who episode is still in tact.
SoftTalker
Also NASA's Landsat program was facing a severe data tape shortage in the 1980s and it is likely that Apollo 11 data tapes containing the raw video feeds from the moon were erased and reused at this time. (per Wikipedia, and sometimes claimed as "evidence" that the entire mission was faked).
mikehall314
Correct. The Beatles appearance on Top of the Pops survives only because a clip from that show was used in episode 1 of The Chase.
Ironically, The Chase often has rights clearance issues when it comes to home release because of this. Beatles music costs a fortune to clear, making releases untenable.
Double ironically. This is because the Beatles chose to mime to their studio record for Top of the Pops. If they had played live, it would have been less of a problem.
qingcharles
I seem to remember looking into this once. Aren't large swathes of TOTP itself missing? Like, entire early decades?
maxfurman
FYI pretty much nobody played live on Top of the Pops
ant6n
The irony is that the animated versions of lost episodes are probably much more watchable for most people today than the actual episodes, should they ever be found.
My biggest annoyance is that it wasn't until Matt Smith that they started recording the new Doctor Who episodes correctly with film, everything including David Tenant was all camcorder.