The Crusade

When "The Lion" came back and, incidentally, I doubt few had even heard much about the episode before it did, it was a remarkable find for many reasons. Firstly, it must seriously have been among the Top 10 missing episodes LEAST likely to have turned up. It was the oldest absent episode at that time and a historical to boot, fan lore telling us that it would therefore have been sold to less foreign TV stations. The October 1994 publication "Image to Image" placed the episode in its Group C category, meaning "practically no hope of discovery". And then it was discovered.

The other reason the return was extraordinary was because The Lion was among the least WANTED of lost episodes as well. Most of the excitement surrounding the discovery of a missing episode is in seeing much talked about lost sequences, like the Hartnell/Troughton "mirror" scene, or of getting a first glimpse of a Macra or a Rill, otherwise gone forever. We already had one bit of "The Crusade" and it really felt strange that it should be JUST another part of it to come back. We'd assumed that when the next recovery was made it would be "Fury from the Deep" or "Evil of the Daleks". No mechanism officially existed for catering for it being an episode we didn't particularly want.

But why not? "The Lion" had as much right to be found as any of the "big" episodes. We should have felt lucky that (i) the story the episode hailed from was a good one (a secondary concern that would have tripped us up if the entire "Savages" or "Macra Terror" had come back) and (ii) it was a first episode and therefore didn't rely on another missing episode to be enjoyed in full. If Part 2 of "The Underwater Menace" had been the one sitting on that market stall in New Zealand, we all really would have been speechless, knowing that we should have felt happy we were finally getting what we'd for so long desired, but also feeling guilty in the knowledge that we "knew" it was a not-very-exciting one. We'd have felt tricked, no less.

The whole business should have been a reassurance like no other that we should never give up hope. If "The Lion", the oldest and most obscure of missing episodes can turn up, then anything must be possible. Instead, the recovery effectively killed off active enthusiasm for finding lost Doctor Who episodes, because it showed us that the romantic coincidence that saw all four episodes of a "holy grail" story returned in 1991 was just that - an extraordinary coincidence. We could search for another ten years and only get Part 5 of "The Space Pirates" or another "Reign of Terror" episode as our only reward. At the end of the day, was it worth all the hope? How many times have YOU watched "The Lion" since it turned up?

Still some keep searching. But the fever for stumbling across a lost classic has never been quite the same since "The Lion" was found, proving that there are an awful lot of 'non classic' episodes out there waiting to be found as well.