The Massacre

"The Massacre" is lost. Doctor Who itself was even lost as this doom-laden, despairing story hit the screens to rapidly falling viewing figures (under two million less than the "Daleks Masterplan" average). If there is a point of turnaround in the Hartnell era, where Doctor Who's wave of massive popularity crashed to shore, it falls squarely on the shoulders of this brooding story. Almost everything before it, regardless of quality, commanded adoration and popularity. Beyond it lies Dodo, a ridiculed western and ultimately the ousting of the show's star. And "The Massacre" itself? A lost story.

Very rarely has Doctor Who inadvertently mirrored the start of an off-screen hangover as visibly as here. Even the Doctor is lost, disappearing in Episode 1 to apparently show up later murdered in a gutter, leaving Steven to wander, lost and alone in Paris, with only the doomed French servant girl Anne Chaplet for company. The previous historical stories seemed almost celebratory in approach, with "The Myth Makers" and "The Romans" casting the travellers in the roles of jaunty time tourists, stopping off for a gander at history and the odd cheeky burning down of Rome on the way. In "The Massacre", not since "The Aztecs" has history seemed so relentless, so bloody and so unstoppable. I seem to remember the Doctor once uttering a line about not being able to "stop the tide". Here, all concerned are practically washed away by the sea of ongoing events, almost becoming a gruesome part of them at the end.

In Episode 4 Steven storms out of the TARDIS, an unprecedented foot-down on behalf of one of the Doctor's companions, leaving the Doctor to fittingly ruminate on his recent past. The equivalent of headachy morning-after regret, its only coda is the arrival of Dodo, rushing into a TARDIS contemporarily disguised for the first time since Totters Lane. The re-boot is timely but ill judged. You can't put on the same clothes and expect to have the same fun twice, and things would never be quite the same again.

How appropriate that "The Massacre" is the most missing story of all. The only tale with no moving visual record, the Doctor meeting Preslin or the calculating Catherine De Medici are impossible to even imagine. I feel sure that this was a rewarding tale, a grim but magical postscript to the drunken hubris of "Masterplan", but not even that shaky-handed Australian cameraman thought to point his cini at the TV screen when this story aired. It's as if it never even existed.

We have a murky soundtrack of course. But as Steven angrily turns his back on the Doctor, pre-empting so many loyal viewers in the coming months, and Hartnell begins his forlorn soliloquy to camera, even that begins to crackle and break up. A story, like no other, that is always just beyond our reach.