Save the Day essays #2: Recovery

I went to a Doctor Who convention in 1986. John Nathan-Turner, then producer of the show, was asked about efforts to recover the old missing stories. He said something like, “They may have dried up, and there may be no more to find.”

He was wrong.

We got back most of “The Ice Warriors” in 1988. We got back all of the epic “Tomb of the Cybermen” in 1991. We got back an episode of “Galaxy 4” in 2011, to name a few. But there is always this fear that the next recovered episode from the 1960s could be the last to be recovered.

If, not too long ago, you had told me that during the fiftieth anniversary year of Doctor Who, that there would be nine episodes recovered (completing one story and almost completing another)...

And that one set of those (“The Web of Fear”) would be a story featuring the Great Intelligence, a villain that had been brought back to the current show just months before (“The Snowmen” Christmas special from 2012, “The Bells of St. John,” “The Name of the Doctor”)...

And that I’d be be able to download them online and watch them mere days after their discovery had been announced...

I would have brushed that off as the most wishful of wishful thinking. It sounds too improbable, too good to be true, to have so many coincidences align.

The moral of the story is that sometimes, the improbable happens. And it can be wonderful.