Missing Episodes Opinion: Keep Calm, Don’t Blink

There was a previous opinion piece posted on this website regarding the missing episode rumours entitled “Keep Calm and Carry On.” That is very sound advice, the sort that your father gives you when you are a teenager. You know, the kind of advice that gets summarily ignored and eventually you have to eat a little humble pie and admit that’s what you should have done all along.

Keep calm and carry on. That’s what fans of Classic Doctor Who should do.

I’m wearing a Doctor Who t-shirt right now, one with a well-established catch phrase on it. “Keep Calm And Don’t Blink.” And that, my friends, is exactly what we are doing instead of carrying on. For months now I have been obsessively checking various rumour and news sites multiple times a day, trolling twitter endlessly hoping and praying for an update, new gossip, the resurgence of an old rumour or just wild and impossible speculation, no matter how sketchy or unreliable.

Reading some of the more outlandish rumours makes my head spin with excitement. The possibility of an omni-set containing every episode of the classic show (even if some of them would be animated)? That there’s another 81 lost episodes out there just waiting to be announced? Imagine just for a moment that those rumours are true! Or Marco Polo being released sometime, who knows if that’s now or in another year, but still, IT EXISTS! Have you watched the remaining clips from Power Of The Daleks? My heart breaks as I view the scant few moments that remain, but now the rumour mill says that the whole story has been recovered from a collector.

Rumours like these keep me from ‘carrying on’, bringing me back time and time again when what I really need to do is blink and take a breather from the craziness of fan speculation.

But it’s impossible for anyone who really loves Doctor Who, especially the Hartnell and Troughton years, to just sit back and ignore the speculation right? Perhaps, but instead of looking at the rumours let’s just take a look at one single fact.

That fact is that we have been incredibly spoiled by Phil Morris’s find thus far. No Doctor Who fan wants to believe that there are no more missing episodes returned/recovered, but let’s pretend that’s the case. Wouldn’t you agree that the world is a better place now that we can watch Patrick Troughton’s brilliant performance as Salamader in Enemy of the World, or Nicholas Courtney’s debut as Lethbridge-Stewart in Web of Fear?

The finding of those lost Doctor Who episodes in Nigeria was like the opening of Pandora’s box. As with the myth, some ‘evil’ has escaped into the world. ‘Evil’ like creating schisms in the fandom, online trolling reaching an all-time high, paranoid conspiracies accepted at face value as fact and the growing attitude that the BBC and Phillip Morris be given a cavity search so that all their secrets can be known immediately.

But, just like the myth, the one thing that remains is hope. That is truly the greatest gift that Phil Morris has given us. Hope when we believed that all was lost. Three years ago it was an almost universally accepted fact that there would always be 108 missing Doctor Who episodes. Then two were returned, found in the trunk of a car. Amazing! I still remember the day of that announcement, pumping my fist in the air, so incredibly excited. Now just a few years later we have two whole (well, almost) stories returned, a fact that I still find almost unbelievable.

So, even though I said it’s time for me to blink, that’s one New Year’s resolution that would be impossible to keep. Maybe I can check those websites just once a day now, knowing that whatever is going to happen will happen, and we will find out all the truths (whether there are more lost episodes discovered or not) in time. Until then I will keep calm and carry on. Carry on in my love of new and classic Doctor Who. It’s been 45 years since Enemy of the World and Web of Fear were broadcast, let’s make sure that we don’t take those treasures for granted while searching for a bigger haul that may or may not exist!