A Doctor Who DVD release that's so hard to classify that you can't even nail it down to a single Doctor, Lost In Time is essentially an assemblage of orphaned episodes. In the early 70s, before the home video market boomed and certainly before the arrival of the release-everything-in-the-vaults monster that DVD would become, the BBC's archives were short on space and, largely due to a failed fire inspection of all things, a massive purge of old shows whose commercial value was deemed negligible was scheduled. Many of the adventures of the first two Doctors vanished into this void, never to be heard from again. Thanks to avid film collectors, ardent fans, and the recovery of episodes sold to foreign countries, some single 25-minute episodes of these "lost" stories have been found once more, but the multi-part serials of which those episodes were a part may never be seen again. Hence, "orphaned episodes." Hence, Lost In Time.

Veteran Doctor Who VHS collectors, however, will have seen several of these episodes before. In the early 1990s, when the market for Doctor Who on videotape was at its all-time high, ex-producer John Nathan-Turner wrote, directed and assembled the "Years" series of releases - The Patrick Troughton Years or The Tom Baker Years or Cybermen: The Early Years, to name but a few - and the releases for the first two Doctors and their arch-enemies were an ideal showcase for many of the "orphaned" episodes at that time. Orphaned episodes from the Cybermen stories The Moonbase and The Wheel In Space, for example, featured on Cybermen: The Early Years. The two episodes of The Daleks' Masterplan known to exist in the early 90s were featured, along with Evil Of The Daleks episode 2, on Daleks: The Early Years. So many of the show's more dedicated fans will have seen much of this material before.

So why Lost In Time? Because it gathers everything in one place, and preserves it on a crisp digital medium. Many of the episodes seen in the Lost In Time collection have not gone through the kind of rigorous remastering that has been one of the hallmarks of Doctor Who on DVD, though, so don't look for the usual astonishing transformation from the Doctor Who Restoration Team's miracle workers this time around. To a certain degree, if you have seen any of the aforementioned VHS collections, then you've seen what you'll be seeing on this 3-DVD set.

What you won't be seeing, however, is a clear explanation of why these episodes are orphaned. Granted, I can understand the argument that most fans who'll be drooling over these compilations, and swooning over the opportunity to finally see the recently-recovered Daleks' Masterplan part two (which was unexpectedly unearthed earlier in 2004), are the fans who will already know why these episodes are incomplete. But what about the general public?

Generally speaking, I pick up as many region 2 Doctor Who DVDs as region 1 in a given year. If the North American release offers something extra like the Howard Da Silva introductory narrations from the Tom Baker syndication years, I'll get the region 1 version. When the UK gets something particularly enticing like Ghost Light that'll take another year to reach my shores, I pick up the British release. Lost In Time is a rare case of a simultaneous international release, so I picked up the region 1 version. One difference I've noticed between the North American and British versions of Doctor Who on DVD is that the Brits get a very nicely-researched and written booklet with each release, whose text briefly goes over that story's significance in the overall Doctor Who canon and places it in some cultural context of its time. Over here, we don't get these books - at most, the only thing sharing keep case space with the disc(s) is a mail-in marketing form for BBC America.

I'm sure the region 2 edition of Lost In Time had a great booklet, and this is a case where the region 1 edition desperately needs something. Without a booklet or a leaflet or something, the only clue as to why you've just bought three DVDs full of incomplete stories is provided by The Missing Years, a 40-minute documentary hosted by former series stars Frazer Hines and Deborah Watling, tucked away into the bonus features menu on the second disc of orphaned Troughton-era episodes. (One disc is devoted to William Hartnell's reign, and two to Troughton. In North America, the Hartnell disc is available separately, as is the pair of Troughton discs. The UK sensibly packages all three together - and heaven help anyone who got the Hartnell disc only and can't see The Missing Years.) The documentary explains some things about the show's incomplete history, and discusses some of the lucky finds that have brought missing episodes back to the fold, but it's not very in-depth - and again, it's something that's already been seen on a previous VHS compilation of Doctor Who orphans. It's also slightly outdated, though a text-screen epilogue adds the details of episodes and clips found since the documentary was produced.

Similarly, the bonus feature menus of every disc in the set are liberally sprinkled with individual scenes recovered from missing episodes - key scenes of The Tenth Planet or Evil Of The Daleks for example - but again, there's no context given to help you understand what you're seeing, or where it impacts the story. This is a case where at least some on-screen text intros, or an on-camera interview with either someone involved in the story or a capable fan historian, would've been great to have. No such luck.

Similarly, there are stories where missing episodes are represented by full-length audio playbacks that you can select from the episode menus. But not all of them are like that. Hartnell's The Crusade and Troughton's The Moonbase - the former being one of the series' finer early historical stories and the latter being the second appearance of the Cybermen - can at least be heard in their entirety, and each 4-episode story has at least two complete episodes that can be watched. With other stories, such as The Faceless Ones (of which two complete episodes out of four also are presented), you're on your own. There's not even so much as a notice pimping BBC Audio's extensive range of "Missing Episodes" audio CDs, which present the complete stories with narration to fill you in on the action. As obvious a marketing move as that is, it would at least give you a hint that there are other resources out there that can help you obtain the rest of the stories in question. With something like The Daleks' Masterplan, which would involve 9 25-minute audio segments to help explain the three existing 25-minute episodes, I can see omitting the audio. But in other cases it seems to be almost a case of random selection as to whether or not audio will be presented. BBC Video seems to have ruled out the possibility of commissioning or buying fan-made reconstructions of the missing segments. Long a staple of the Doctor Who fan underground, the reconstructions utilize the existing audio recordings and are carefully edited to show relevant existing still photos from the episodes in question at the right time, sometimes even with subtitles. BBC Video had previously done something very similar with the missing part four of Tenth Planet for that story's release on VHS, and it was actually quite effective - and the absence of the first three episodes of that story here makes me think that a DVD version of that tape is forthcoming.

The real gems of this set are the commentaries, frequently moderated by fan expert Gary Russell. In the cases where Russell is flying solo with one person who was involved in making the episode in question, it's like a running interview and turns up interesting snippets of things even I hadn't heard before. The Daleks' Masterplan episode which is accompanied by a commentary is very interesting - Peter Purves and Kevin Stoney are joined by Raymond Cusack, the BBC in-house designer who wound up creating the physical look of the Daleks when a fellow BBC designer, a young man named Ridley Scott, had to change assignments at the last minute. The commentaries are the true stars of the show in this collection.

And finally, extras aside, I love some of these shows, incomplete as they are - The Daleks' Masterplan is a grim, epic space opera whose political machinations and double-crosses offer a glimpse of projects that were still in Terry Nation's future. Something about the one existing segment of the six-part The Space Pirates is fairly compelling. And it's tragic that so many early Cybermen stories are incomplete, and that so many Patrick Troughton era stories are incomplete or just gone. And who wouldn't like to see the Twilight Zone-esque Celestial Toymaker restored to its former glory?

Overall, it's a very mixed bag of a presentation. Purely as a fan and a completist when it comes to this sort of thing, I'm grateful to have these episodes on DVD, as an official release, with extras. But a certain expectation has been built up with regards to Doctor Who on DVD, even the 60s episodes (actually, considering the awe-inspiring remastering and restoration jobs I've seen on the B&W material released thus far, make that especially the 60s episodes), so there are some quality issues that surprised me here. The scattershot approach to providing supplemental material was also surprising. And this set's unique nature also points up some limitations of the menu design that's been in place since Spearhead From Space and The Robots Of Death hit DVD - it's great for a single story release, but perhaps something unique was called for here to make it easier to navigate.

As it was released, Lost In Time is more of something I'd expect the faithful to be ordering with proofs of purchase from earlier DVDs - as a fan, I like having the stuff, but the side of me that has marketing experience balks at the thought that this is a consumer product that's been put on the shelves for the public, especially with so little explanation - at least in North America (and that's more Warner Home Video's fault than BBC Video's) - as to why the stories are incomplete, and as to why the supplemental material is such a hodgepodge. As a fan who wants to see more stories released on this medium, I'm worried that Lost In Time may put casual viewers off of the idea of buying further Doctor Who DVDs. But as a fan who already knows why the stories aren't presented in their entirety, I appreciate that they're available. I have a love-hate-and-deep-confusion relationship with Lost In Time, so I'm giving it a score on the lower end of three stars - a C+, if you will.

Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com webmaster / editor-in-chief