Doctor Who: 018 Galaxy Four

Season 3... Ah... Here's where we start to run into trouble... Of the ten serials in this season, only three are complete and many are missing entirely. :( Galaxy Four, the first story of the season, fell into that latter category until late last year when episode three and a missing Troughton episode were discovered in the hands of a film collector. The episode will require some restoration work and BBC and 2|entertain have promised to release it to DVD as soon as possible. Hopefully that will be later this year...

Until then, again we turn to the Loose Cannon reconstruction. Very little exists from these episodes, although oddly enough, there are three clips from episode one which together comprise almost six minutes of nearly continuous footage, missing only a single line of dialog. This six minutes is more than a quarter of the episode! Loose Cannon did a fantastic job in reconstructing this given the limited material they had to work with.

This wasn't the best story I've seen, but it certainly wasn't the worst either. It was quite enjoyable and it will be exciting to see the real episode when it eventually comes out. At the end of this serial, I was kind of surprised that the Doctor didn't make one last desperate attempt to rescue the Drahvin before leaving in the TARDIS.

Interestingly enough, Galaxy Four and the following story Mission to the Unknown were actually filmed as part of the same filming block (and apparently shared a production code) and were intended to be part of Season Two, but were ultimately held over to start off Season Three.

This starts of Season 3 with 3 missing episodes... :(