Next up is The Crusade, another semi-historical story about King Richard the Lionheart. This one has four episodes and the first and third episodes are the only ones contained in the BBC archives. They were released on the Lost in Time DVD set (along with the audio for the missing episodes). For the missing episodes, again we turn to the Loose Cannon reconstruction.
As I mentioned before, the BBC is good at period costume drama and this story is exactly that at its best. Julian Glover makes a very convincing King Richard and this is certainly one that I would love to see in its entirety. It seems to be about the perfect length for the story it conveys. It's definitely a shame that this one is missing, but the two existing episodes give us a good flavor of the story. Hartnell seems to have hit his stride by this point and he is definitely growing on me the more I watch of him. This is also the first of several appearances by Jean Marsh in Doctor Who.
I don't have the special features included on the Loose Cannon reconstruction, but I'm hoping to get them. I did, however, listen to the commentary with Julian Glover included on the Lost in Time DVD set which was quite nice.
Incidentally, the novelization of this story is one of the six classic Target novelizations that BBC Books has reprinted (one each from the first three Doctors... the novelization of The Daleks being the other Hartnell one). I'm working my way through those in addition to watching the episodes, so perhaps I'll post some comments on them as well.
This brings the total missing episodes to 11: 9 in Season 1 plus the 2 in this serial. The remaining serials in Season 2 exist and have been released on DVD, so this concludes the gaps in Season 2 and now we move onto Season 3...
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