Two Doctor Who episodes unseen since 1965 have been found and released worldwide, bringing back the first and third parts of William Hartnell’s The Daleks’ Master Plan after 60 years out of sight.
The recovered episodes, now viewable again, were uploaded by the for US audiences on YouTube and made available on iPlayer in the UK. The discovery matters because nearly 100 Doctor Who episodes were lost from the ’s pre-1970s archives, and every return from that era narrows one of television’s longest-running absences.
The missing material was found by the preservation group Film is Fabulous! in a trove held by a collector who had recently died. Paul Vanezis described the prints as “cutting copies,” meaning they were used for technical review before duplicates were made for overseas distribution. That detail explains both why the episodes survived and why they could be handled so carefully once identified.
The Daleks’ Master Plan was never sold for international broadcast, which made these two recoveries especially unlikely. Of the 12 total episodes, seven remain missing. That leaves the story unfinished, but it also shows that the search is not limited to the places where lost Doctor Who material has turned up before, since internationally distributed film reels have often been the source of past recoveries.
Film is Fabulous! said it is not hunting Doctor Who episodes at all. The group said it is not episode hunters and has no special interest in the series, and that its remit is to preserve British film culture. The unearthing of missing episodes, it said, is a happy byproduct of its work with the film collector community. For fans, that is the real surprise here: two episodes presumed gone for decades have resurfaced not through a targeted chase, but through preservation work aimed at something larger than one show. The next question is how many more lost recordings are still sitting in private collections, waiting to be identified before they disappear for good.
