News Doctor Who Two Long-Lost Doctor Who Episodes Have Been Found; Co-Star’s Flabber Has Never Been More Gasted Many, many Who episodes remain missing. Check those closets! By Molly Templeton | Published on March 13, 2026 Screenshot: BBC Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: BBC Studios Two Doctor Who episodes that no one has seen since the 1960s have, astonishingly, turned up. Among the objects in the estate of an anonymous collector, whose films were donated to the charitable trust Film is Fabulous! after his death, were copies of two episodes that aired in the show’s third season. “The Nightmare Begins” and “Devil’s Planet” both originally aired in November 1965. In the 13-episode The Daleks’ Master Plan arc—written by Dalek creator Terry Nation—the first Doctor (William Hartnell) faced the Daleks as they planned to take over the galaxy. This storyline, according to the BBC, was “dark and gritty,” and was “ordered to be wiped.” (There were kind of a lot of deaths.) Apparently, neither Australia nor New Zealand would take the episodes, finding them too violent, and “without their buy-in, selling to other markets was not profitable.” So these episodes have never been seen outside the UK. (A third episode in the arc was found in 2004.) The two newly found episodes were apparently the gems in a collection that mostly included film of canals and trains. Possibly the funniest part of this story, though, is the fact that actor Peter Purvess, who played the Doctor’s companion Steven Taylor, was lured to a screening of the episodes “under false pretenses.” For unclear reasons, he was told he was going to do “interviews with the media about television in the 1960s.” Purvess, bless him, said, “My flabber has never been so gasted.” He also immediately had his eye on the future: “I’m absolutely thrilled and maybe I’ll [get] quite a few invites to conventions and various things.” Purvess was invited to the screening by Doctor Who historian Toby Hadoke, who said, “I’m a grown man and I’ve been wishing I could see ‘The Nightmare Begins’ since I saw the name on a list of missing episodes of Doctor Who 30 years ago. Forget Glastonbury, I think if you put on a screening of these tomorrow it would sell out in seconds.” A special screening is in fact taking place in London on April 4, which is the same day the episodes will arrive on BBC iPlayer. Seven episodes in this story arc are still missing; they’re among the 95 remaining lost Doctor Who episodes. Perhaps yet more will be found in the unlikeliest of places.[end-mark] The post Two Long-Lost <i>Doctor Who</i> Episodes Have Been Found; Co-Star’s Flabber Has Never Been More Gasted appeared first on Reactor.