Doctor Who/Recap/S3/E01 Galaxy 4

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
< Doctor Who‎ | Recap‎ | S3
"It is easy to help others when they are so willing to help you. Though we are beings of separate planets, you from the solar system and we from another space, our ways of thought, at times, do not seem all that different. It has been an honour to know you and serve you."
—The Rills say goodbye.

The TARDIS lands on a desert planet and the travellers find two crashed spaceships and their occupants; the hideous Rills (and their cute robots, nicknamed "Chumblies" by Vicki) and the beautiful female Drahvins. The two have had a space battle above the planet and crash-landed, but the planet is disintegrating.

The Rills turn out to be the good guys — innocent explorers who were attacked without reason by the warlike Drahvins, mindless clones led by a tyrannical matriarch.

With escape imperative and their own ship a complete write-off, the Drahvins try to force the Doctor, Vicki and Steven to help them capture the Rills' ship, but the Doctor instead powers up the Rills' ship from the TARDIS, allowing them to escape and then departs himself, leaving the Drahvins to their deaths.

In a classic example of Trailers Always Spoil, the big twist (that the beautiful Drahvins were the villains of the piece) was given away in a BBC press release published by the Daily Mail.

This story is thought to be one of the last to be wiped before the episode junkings were stopped in 1978, though there's some dispute about that. All four episodes were lost until 2011, when Episode 3 (Air Lock) was returned to the BBC. Reconstructions [1] can be watched here.

Tropes

  1. ↑ (fan-made attempts to "recreate" missing episodes using surviving footage, telesnaps, and other sources)
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