OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 239
STORY NUMBER: 049
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 15 March 1969
WRITER: Robert Holmes
DIRECTOR: Michael Hart
SCRIPT EDITOR: Derrick Sherwin
PRODUCER: Peter Bryant
RATINGS: 6.8 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - Lost In Time
"Not only do I think that Milo Clancey is in league with the argonite pirates, I think he is the mastermind behind the whole organisation, which is precisely why I let him go!"
The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe are trapped in their section of the space station running out of air. The V-Ship encounters Milo Clancy in his ship the Liz-79. General Hermack dispatches Major Warne in a minnow ship to follow him but proceeds himself to Ta, where he speaks to Madeleine Issigri, the head of the Issigri Mining Corporation formed by her father and Clancy. Clancy finds the space station segment and enters it, shooting Jamie.
I know what we'll do: after having the Tardis crew absent for most of the first episode, lets lock them in a room for the second separate from the rest of the story and what little action there is!
The space ship crew are as wooden as my dining room table. Yes that is a domestic television set behind Hermack & Warne there! And as for the "eccentric" Milo Clancy he's nothing but an annoying imitation of a wild west prospector!
The model work of Warne's Minnow launching I liked, but that leads to him spending the rest of the episode sitting by himself and, like the pirates in episode 1, wearing a stupid helmet!
While I liked the Minnow launch the X-ship itself doesn't do anything for me. It's just too flat and lacking in detail.
I'm sorry it's just a boring, awful, episode. I'll be honest: Given the opportunity to have a missing episode of any other story back in return for this I'd happily sling this into the incinerator. It's a shame it exists and none of Power of the Daleks or Fury from the Deep does.
Me and Space Pirates 2 have history. It was on the Troughton Years VHS and I hated it then. Why was this on the tape and not Web of Fear 1? It has been speculated that it owes it's early release on video to being the only surviving episode of the first Doctor Who story that John Nathan-Turner worked on as a floor assistant. Eleven years later JNT would become Doctor Who's producer and in 1991 he was helping BBC Video with their Doctor Who range and was responsible for producing the Years tapes of orphaned episodes from missing stories.
And speaking of orphaned episode, this is the last one. So we bid farewell to the mighty Doctor Who - Lost In Time DVD which contains the most recent release of Space Pirates 2 as well as 17 other orphaned episode, those from the stories of which 50% or less existed at the time of it's release. The episodes on lost in time are:
The Crusade: 1 & 3At the time four stories with missing existed with more than 50% of their episodes
The Daleks’ Master Plan: 2, 5 & 10
The Celestial Toymaker: 4
The Underwater Menace: 3
The Moonbase: 2 & 4
The Faceless Ones: 1 & 3
The Evil of the Daleks: 2
The Abominable Snowmen: 2
The Enemy of the World 3
The Web of Fear: 1
The Wheel in Space: 3 & 6
The Space Pirates: 2
The Reign of Terror: 1, 2, 3 & 6These stories were released on DVD with animated reconstruction as was The Moonbase.
The Tenth Planet: 1, 2 & 3
The Underwater Menace: 2 & 3
The Ice Warriors: 1, 4, 5 & 6
The Invasion: 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 & 8
Since then Enemy of the World has been returned complete and at the same time Web of Fear 1 has been reunited with four of it's missing episodes. Web of Fear's DVD budget and limited pre release time meant that it got a Telesnap reconstruction. When the returned Underwater Menace 2, paired with the existing episode 3, got an eventual DVD release they too were accompanied by reconstructions rather than animation. The returned Galaxy Four episode 3 meanwhile was released on a DVD with a special edition of the Aztecs.
I love my existing Lost In Time set and dig it out regularly but as several of the episodes on it are now on story DVD releases and there's one orphan episode elsewhere perhaps it's time for a new edition of Lost in Time consisting of the following episodes:
The Crusade: 1 & 3New commentaries for these episodes would give an incentive to Doctor Who fans to buy this set.
Galaxy Four: 3
The Daleks’ Master Plan: 2, 5 & 10
The Celestial Toymaker: 4
The Faceless Ones: 1 & 3
The Evil of the Daleks: 2
The Abominable Snowmen: 2
The Wheel in Space: 3 & 6
The Space Pirates: 2
Isn't it odd The Crusade hasn't got a DVD release with animation/reconstruction when the other two 2 episode existing out of 4 stories have? The Crusade was certainly sold abroad wider than the two Troughton tales so the chances of it's recovery are somewhat better, maybe that's influenced the decision?
With that little milestone out the way we'll be counting down the remaining missing episodes: Four, and they're all in this story. From the start of the next story every Doctor Who episode exists. But there's another count running too: there's only fourteen Troughton episodes left for us to enjoy.
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