Doctor Who: Lost in Time Collection

Never broadcast in the US, these episodes offer an enticing glimpse into 'lost' stories that have achieved legendary status. Fans can relish rare appearances of the Daleks, Cybermen and Yeti, as well as guest star turns by Julian Glover (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), Michael Gough (Batman) and Jean Marsh (Upstairs, Downstairs). New to video is Episode 2 of  The Daleks' Master Plan, the story that marked the series debut of Nicholas Courtney, who later returned time and again as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.

Includes episodes from: The Crusade, The Daleks' Master Plan, The Celestial Toymaker, The Underwater Menace, The Moonbase, The Faceless Ones, The Evil of the Daleks, The Abominable Snowman, The Enemy of the World, The Web of Fear, The Wheel in Space and The Space Pirates

The Crusade
Includes The Lion (27/03/1965) and The Wheel of Fortune (27/03/1965)
The TARDIS arrives in 12th Century Palestine where a holy war is in progress between the forces of King Richard the Lionheart and the Saracen ruler Saladin. Barbara is abducted in a Saracen ambush and the Doctor, Ian and Vicki make their way to King Richard's palace in the city of Jaffa. Ian is granted permission to ride in search of Barbara - the King knighting him Sir Ian of Jaffa to fit him for the role - while the Doctor and Vicki stay behind and try to avoid getting involved in court politics.

King Richard secretly plans to marry his sister Joanna to Saladin's brother Saphadin in order to bring the war to an end, but Joanna finds out about this and refuses. The Doctor and his young ward are forced to flee after making an enemy of the King's adviser, the Earl of Leicester.

Ian has meanwhile rescued Barbara from the clutches of the vicious Saracen emir El Akir. All four meet up in the wood where the TARDIS materialised and narrowly manage to escape the Earl of Leicester's men.

The Daleks' Master Plan
Includes Day of Armageddon (20/11/1965), Counter Plot (1/12/1965) and Escape Switch (15/01/1966)
The TARDIS materialises on Kembel. There the Doctor and his friends meet Space Security Service agent Bret Vyon, who has been sent in search of Marc Cory. Learning of the Daleks' scheme, which hinges on the use of a weapon called the time destructor, they determine to warn the authorities on Earth. This proves problematic as the human leader Mavic Chen, Guardian of the Solar System, is a traitor in league with the Daleks.

Fortunately the Doctor has managed to make off with the taranium core of the time destructor, disrupting the Daleks' plans. In one of a number of attempts to regain the taranium, Chen dispatches Space Security Service agent Sara Kingdom to track down the Doctor's party.

Sara, unaware of Chen's treachery, kills Bret - her own brother - before the time travellers can convince her of the truth. She then joins forces with them and, after an encounter with their old adversary the Monk, they all arrive back on Kembel. There, the Doctor contrives to steal the time destructor and turn it against the Daleks, annihilating them. Sara has ignored his instruction to return to the TARDIS, however, and she too is killed.

The Celestial Toymaker
Includes The Final Test (23/04/1966)
The travellers arrive in a strange domain presided over by the Celestial Toymaker - an enigmatic, immortal entity who forces them to play a series of games, failure at which will render them his playthings. The Doctor has to solve the complex Trilogic game while Steven and Dodo are faced with defeating a succession of apparently child-like but potentially lethal animated toys in contests such as 'blind man's buff', musical chairs and 'hunt the key'.

The Doctor finally overcomes the Toymaker by imitating his voice in order to complete the Trilogic game from within the TARDIS, which then dematerialises as his foe's universe is destroyed.

The Underwater Menace
Includes Episode 3 (28/01/1967)
The TARDIS arrives on a extinct volcanic island. Before long, the travellers are captured and taken into the depths of the Earth, where they find a hidden civilisation - the lost city of Atlantis.

The Atlanteans worship a goddess named Amdo and use Fish People - men and women operated upon so that they can breathe under the sea - to farm the plankton-based food on which they survive. A deranged scientist, Professor Zaroff, has convinced them that he can raise their city from the sea, but actually he plans to drain the ocean into the Earth's molten core, so that the resultant superheated steam will cause the planet to explode.

The travellers meet up with two shipwreck survivors, Sean and Jacko, who manage to persuade the Fish People to rebel and stop work. The Doctor eventually manages to foil Zaroff's plan, but only by breaking down the sea walls and flooding the city. Zaroff drowns, but everyone else escapes.

The Moonbase
Includes Episode 2 (18/02/1967) and Episode 4 (04/03/1967)
The TARDIS arrives in 2070 AD on the Moon, where a weather control station under the command of a man named Hobson is in the grip of a plague epidemic - in reality the result of an alien poison planted by the Cybermen.

Polly realises that as the Cybermen's chest units are made of plastic they must be vulnerable to attack by solvents. She and her friends manage to destroy all the Cybermen on the base with a 'cocktail' of such chemicals shot at them through fire extinguishers.

A second wave of Cybermen advances across the lunar surface but, prompted by the Doctor, Hobson uses the base's gravity-generating weather control device, the Gravitron, to send them flying off into space.

The Faceless Ones
Includes Episode 1 (08/04/1967) and Episode 3 (22/04/1967)
The TARDIS arrives on Earth in 1966 - on a runway at Gatwick airport. Polly witnesses a murder in a nearby hangar and is then kidnapped by the perpetrator, Spencer of Chameleon Tours. Subsequently Ben also vanishes. The Doctor and Jamie are left to try to convince the sceptical airport Commandant that there has been foul play.

It transpires that a great many other young people have also vanished, all of them while on Chameleon Tours holidays. With the help of Samantha Briggs, the sister of one of the missing youths, the Doctor and Jamie uncover a plot by the alien Chameleons to kidnap human youngsters in order to take their identities - for the Chameleons have lost their own in an accident on their home planet.

The Doctor offers to help the Chameleons find another solution to their problem and the kidnapped humans are released.

The Evil of the Daleks
Includes Episode 2 (27/05/1967)
The TARDIS has been stolen by antiques dealer Edward Waterfield, who lures the Doctor and Jamie into a trap. They are transported back to Waterfield's own time, 1867, where his daughter Victoria is being held hostage by the Daleks to ensure his cooperation.

The Daleks force the Doctor to monitor Jamie's performance of a test - the rescue of Victoria - with the supposed intention of identifying the human factor: the special quality possessed by humans that enables them always to defeat the Daleks. The Doctor, having succeeded in this task, implants the human factor into three test Daleks - with the result that they become friendly and playful!

Everyone is transported back to Skaro where the Doctor discovers that the Daleks' true aim has been to isolate the Dalek factor - the impulse to destroy - and implant it into humans. The Emperor Dalek informs him that his TARDIS will be used to spread the Dalek factor throughout all time.

By a ruse, however, the Doctor is able to infuse many more Daleks with the human factor. A civil war breaks out between the two Dalek factions and they are apparently all destroyed. As Waterfield has been killed during the course of the action, the Doctor offers Victoria a place aboard the TARDIS.

The Abominable Snowmen
Includes Episode 2 (07/10/1967)
The TARDIS arrives in Tibet in 1935 and the Doctor visits the remote Detsen monastery in order to return a sacred bell, the ghanta, given to him for safe keeping on a previous visit. There he meets an Englishman, Travers, on an expedition to track down the legendary Abominable Snowmen or Yeti.

It transpires that the Yeti roaming the area are actually disguised robots, which scare away or kill anyone who approaches. The High Lama Padmasambhava, whom the Doctor met hundreds of years earlier on his previous visit, has been taken over by a nebulous alien being, the Great Intelligence, which has artificially prolonged his life and is now using him to control the Yeti by way of models on a chessboard-like map.

The Intelligence's aim is to create a material form for itself and take over the Earth. The Doctor banishes it back to the astral plane, allowing Padmasambhava finally to die in peace.

The Enemy of the World
Includes Episode 3 ( 06/01/1968)
The time travellers arrive in Australia in the near future and learn from a man named Giles Kent that the Doctor is the physical double of Salamander, a scientist and politician who has discovered a means of storing and distributing solar energy and thus ending starvation in a world ravaged by earthquakes, floods and the like.

Most people see Salamander as a hero, but Kent and others believe him to be establishing himself as a dictator. The Doctor uncovers the truth by impersonating Salamander and gaining access to his research station. Salamander and Kent were originally working together. Almost five years ago, they convinced a group of people undergoing an endurance test in a bunker beneath the station that a war had broken out on the surface.

It is these people, led by a man named Swann, who - deceived into thinking that they are striking back against an evil enemy - have been engineering the so-called natural disasters. Kent, now exposed as a traitor, blows up the station. Salamander meanwhile tries to escape in the TARDIS by impersonating the Doctor. He neglects to close the doors before dematerialisation, however, and is sucked out into the vortex.

Web of Fear
Includes Episode 1 ( 03/02/1968)
The TARDIS narrowly avoids becoming engulfed in a web-like substance in space. It then arrives in the London Underground railway system, the tunnels of which are being overrun by the web and by the Great Intelligence's robot Yeti.

The time travellers learn that this crisis was precipitated when Professor Travers, whom they first met in the Himalayas some forty years earlier, accidentally caused one of the Yeti to be reactivated, opening the way for the Intelligence to make another invasion attempt.

The travellers work alongside army forces - led initially by Captain Knight and then by Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart - as they battle against the alien menace, hampered by the fact that one of their number has fallen under the Intelligence's influence and is a traitor in their midst.

The Intelligence's ultimate aim is to drain the Doctor's mind. The Doctor manages to sabotage the device with which it intends to achieve this, so that he can drain the Intelligence's mind instead, but he is 'rescued' by his friends before he can bring his plan to fruition.

The Intelligence is repelled into space, and the Doctor and his friends leave the army to clear up the mess.

The Wheel in Space
Includes Episode 3 (11/05/1968) and Episode 6 (01/06/1968)
The TARDIS materialises on board a spaceship, the Silver Carrier, where the Doctor and Jamie are attacked by a Servo Robot. Jamie manages to contact a nearby space station known as the Wheel and they are rescued. Meanwhile, the Silver Carrier discharges some Cybermats, which also travel to and enter the station. These pave the way for the penetration of the station by Cybermen, who intend to use its direct radio link with Earth as a beacon for their invasion fleet.

The Doctor sends Jamie and a young woman named Zoe Heriot over to the Silver Carrier to fetch the TARDIS's vector generator rod. Meanwhile he manages to free the Wheel's crew from the Cybermen's hypnotic control and to destroy all the Cybermen on the station.

When Jamie and Zoe return, he installs the rod in the station's X-ray laser, making it powerful enough to destroy the Cyber-fleet. An approaching force of space-walking Cybermen is also vanquished.

The Space Pirates
Includes Episode 2 (15/03/1969)
The TARDIS materialises in Earth's future on a space beacon just before it is attacked by pirates. The travellers find themselves trapped in a sealed section of the beacon as it is blown apart and flown to where the pirates will plunder it of the precious mineral argonite. They then witness a conflict between the pirates and the Interstella Space Corps, led by General Hermack and Major Warne.

The ISC are convinced that the pirates' mastermind is an innocent yet eccentric space mining pioneer named Milo Clancey, while their true leader is a man named Caven. Caven has a secret base on the planet Ta and is assisted by Madeleine Issigri, daughter of his ex-partner Dom, who - unknown to her - is now his captive.

When Madeleine discovers Caven's full treachery she helps to bring him to justice. The time travellers are given a lift back to the TARDIS by Clancey in his rickety old ship, the LIZ 79.