Doctor Who: Every Post-Regeneration Episode Ranked Worst To Best

One of the Holy Grails of missing Doctor Who episodes. It's astonishing to think that the entire serial of Patrick Troughton's debut was culled from the BBC archives. Sacrilege! Thankfully, this story survives in the form of reconstructing the tele-snaps with the original audio, and due to the wonders of modern technology, via animated versions from 2016 and 2020.

We're now used to the post-regeneration playbook, so viewers back in 1966 had a completely unique experience seeing a new Doctor after William Hartnell. Troughton's charming mixture of amiable buffoonery, single-minded curiosity, quicksilver adaptation and subtle air of absolute authority made him the standard-bearer of all future Doctors. As David Tennant put it:

"Patrick Troughton created the Doctor as he is now. We've all sort of done our version kind of what Patrick Troughton did. If he hadn't done what he did so confidently and with such charm, and so brilliantly, I wouldn't be sitting here today."

Encountering the Daleks in your first adventure means there's no time for napping here, although perhaps a quick tune on the recorder to settle the nerves and provide some vital thinking time. Like all the best Dalek episodes, this shows how dispiritingly evil they truly are, which is brutally encapsulated when one casually glides by a line of dead bodies. Of course the human colonists typically fiddle while Rome burns.

We're given a treat seeing the slimy Dalek innards for the first time during the terrifyingly efficient production line scene. Even when they're dormant, there's a manipulative spectre that pervades them. Poor old Lesterson, no wonder he was driven mad.

The black and white animation complements the bleakness of Vulcan together with the atmospheric background music.