10 Doctor Who Episodes More Important Than You Realised

In The War Machines, the First Doctor finally returns to 1960s London, only to find strange things going on at the Post Office Tower. It's the blueprint for the UNIT era and RTD's own take on Doctor Who, but that's not the most important thing about The War Machines.

As with a lot of 1960s Doctor Who, The War Machines was sent out to Commonwealth nations including New Zealand, Australia, and Nigeria.

Many of these prints became the only existing copies when the BBC began junking their film cans. Over the years, many Doctor Who stories have been recovered from old broadcast stations in Commonwealth nations, by people like Phillip Morris.

Before all of that, however, an Australian collector had acquired a print of The War Machines Episode Two at some point in the late 1960s/early 1970s. This was years before the complete serial was discovered in Nigeria in 1984.

That Australian print was returned to the BBC archives in the late 1970s, making The War Machines Episode Two the first of Doctor Who's many missing episodes to be returned from overseas.