Doctor Who - Lost in Time is a BBC three-disc boxset DVD released in 2004. It is a collection of restored Doctor Who episodes and clips from stories that are incomplete or missing from the Corporation's archives. There were, at the time of release, 108 missing episodes, all from the black-and-white 1960s era. Although the search goes on (and eleven complete episodes, plus some clips, have been recovered since the release) many or all of these episodes may be lost forever - hence this collection's title.
Contents
The Region 2 and Region 4 releases are a single three disc set. In Region 1, it is available as two separate releases (a single disc William Hartnell DVD and a two disc Patrick Troughton set) or as a single three disc set.
Content
Footage found in the set varies from complete episodes to extremely short surviving clips that were cut either for time or for censorship reasons. Several episodes in the set include commentary tracks moderated by Gary Russell and featuring actors and crew from the original productions.
For budget reasons, Lost in Time does not feature text commentary or a photo gallery (unlike most other Doctor Who DVD releases).
Hartnell Era
Troughton Era
The Missing Years
The 1998 documentary The Missing Years is included on disc 3. It details the loss and recovery of 1960s episodes and is presented by Frazer Hines and Deborah Watling. It features the longest extant clip from an otherwise-missing Doctor Who episode – over six minutes of Episode 1 of Galaxy 4; a version of "The Final End" recreating the climax of The Evil of the Daleks; fan Ian Levine stating that he believes there will never be fewer than 110 missing episodes, then begging to be proven wrong (which he later was: as of October 2013 there are 97 episodes missing); and a lengthy recreation of the first regeneration sequence put together from all that exists of the end of The Tenth Planet and the start of The Power of the Daleks. The feature was previously released on VHS.
In its original form, this documentary was presented in an earlier VHS boxset (The Ice Warriors in the UK, and with The Edge of Destruction and Dr. Who: The Pilot Episode in North America); both regions shared the tape with the one surviving episode of The Underwater Menace (with Hines' intro as mentioned above), which pre-dates the rediscovery of some of the Lost in Time content.
The DVD presentation includes some new footage documenting the return of two previously missing episodes – "The Lion" (Episode 1 of The Crusade) was discovered in New Zealand in 1999, while "Day of Armageddon" (Episode 2 of The Daleks' Master Plan) was returned in 2004 by a former BBC employee. This addendum ends the documentary.
Material found since the release
In 2005, a year after the set was released, three clips from The Power of the Daleks were found on a 1966 edition of Tomorrow's World (aired as part of the clip-filled nostalgia series Sunday Past Times) and returned to the BBC. The clips were released as parts of extras on the Genesis of the Daleks DVD ("The Dalek Tapes" documentary) and The Trial of a Time Lord DVD ("Now Get Out of That" documentary, disc three).
In 2011, two complete previously missing episodes were returned to the BBC. The first was episode 3 of Galaxy 4, which was released (as part of a reconstruction of the whole story) on the special edition DVD of The Aztecs. The second was episode 2 of The Underwater Menace, which was included in a DVD release of that story in October 2015.
In 2013, nine more episodes were recovered: the remaining previously missing episodes of The Enemy of the World; and episodes 2, 4,5 and 6 of The Web of Fear (leaving only episode 3 missing). Both stories were released on iTunes on the day their recovery was announced. The Enemy of the World was released on DVD in November 2013 and The Web of Fear in February 2014.