Doctor Who, Least Likely...
Everything is relative even if you have to break matters down to get to that relativity. When you start discussing missing episodes of 'Doctor Who' you could argue that the likelihood of any further episodes being returned is slim to none or you might argue that plenty of episodes are out there waiting to be found. The missing episodes tend to be discussed as a whole. Really some episodes have a somewhat higher chance of surviving than others. Sales figure reports that still exist provide an indication of how many prints for each episode was generated and some stories sold better than others. For instance, a recent DWM article on 'The Tenth Planet' indicated that it was a poor selling story, only making it out to four countries. It seems less and less likely that the fourth episode will ever be found considering that information, doesn't it?
One story is highly unlikely to ever be uncovered as those sales figures indicate that the odds are against it. That story is commonly referred to as 'The Dalek Masterplan'. To the best of my knowledge, it is the only Doctor Who serial to not be sold abroad. Evidently the length and overall grimness of the story worked against it. One print was made of the eleven episodes (the 'Christmas' episode, 'The Feast of Steven', was apparently never telerecorded and therefore is highly unlikely to ever be found in any form apart from the audio that is already known to exist) and sent to Australia for the censors to examine.
Australia was evidentially a stricter country at the time and all television was viewed and often edited. Many episodes of 'Doctor Who' were edited and, according to the law, the clips were physically removed from the film prints and saved to prove that the censors wishes had been met. Even more odd was the fact that, according to law, those clips had to be saved for thirty years. Some episodes of 'Doctor Who' have film clips existing now because of this strange law, but that's another story. I'm drifting.
So, the eleven episodes were sent to Australia. The censors watched them and rejected them, not due to any specific scene or scenes that could be removed, but the overall storyline was too much. They rejected the story outright as it was uneditable.
What happened to the eleven film prints? Were they returned to the BBC? Destroyed? Currently, no one knows.
With all this against the story, it seems impossible that any episode would ever exist. To make this story even more twisted, two of those episodes 'Counter Plot' (episode five) and 'Escape Switch' (episode ten) exist. The easiest way to explain their existence is to argue that these two episodes are from the prints sent to Australia and that they were returned to England. If this is so, what happened to the other nine episodes?
Of course, it could be that another set of film prints were made at some point, and these two episodes come from this other set. If this is so, another set of prints isn't noted in any documentation.
It's a strange story, with all sorts of twists and questions yet to be answered.
-Stephen M. Wolterstorff 11/23/00