#5-b: The Macra Terror Missing Episode Notes

Jamie comes face to face with The Macra...

After a couple serials that benefited from existing episodes, The Macra Terror returns us to the "fully missing" story. Save for a few censor clips (including the particularly memorable Episode 2 cliffhanger) and some brief 8 mm clips, no substantial footage from this serial exists. 

After the success of the animated release of The Power of the Daleks, The Macra Terror was selected as a follow-up.  It was a good choice.  As my review observes, The Macra Terror is an excellent story that, to all appearances, suffered from lackluster production and a particularly poor monster.  This new format affords the animators to fix those problems - which they do.

The Macra themselves are the biggest beneficiaries here.  Censor clips reveal the original Macra to be ludicrously fake, even by standards of the time, and all but immobile.  The animated Macra look good.  They are creepy and genuinely alien, blending the script cues of being like both insects and germs.  They move, sometimes quite quickly, and to good effect in scenes that see the creatures menacing Polly and Jamie.  All told, this may be the one time a Doctor Who story is actively improved by virtue of being missing!

My readers may recall that I had significant issues with the initial animation of Power of the Daleks.  This is from the same animation team... but by the time they tackled The Macra Terror, they appear to have worked out the bugs (along with actually being given enough time to do the job properly).  While there is still the occasional moment whose realization doesn't quite work - such as the Doctor and Polly straining to close a door that security guards are trying to force open - these moments are few in number.  Movement is smoother, faces are more expressive, and the result is a product that is not merely "better than a still reconstruction," but that is actually engrossing in its own right.

My review mentions a couple of minor trims.  I genuinely regret these, particularly as the scene in which the Doctor is cleaned up, only to immediately rumple himself again, significantly parallels the story as a whole.  Still, the omissions are understandable; they were not plot-critical, and were difficult to animate.  If the price of quality is the loss of a brief aside here and there, it is one I can readily accept.  

It wasn't long ago that the prospect of fully-animated releases of missing stories was dismissed as a commercially unviable pipe dream.  To see that dream achieved as well as has been done here, and with such a good overall story at that, is pure pleasure.


Previous Releases:

For those who do not enjoy animation, the story's soundtrack was previously given a quite good BBC Audio release.  Unlike most stories, narrated by companion actors, this story was narrated by Colin Baker (originally recorded for an audio cassette release in the 1990s).  There are a few uninentional sniggers within the narration, some double-entendres slipping through. Still, the typical clarity of the BBC audio combines with the ability of the listener to summon up an atmospheric setting and a scary monster to make this a viable way to enjoy this story.

The story was also reconstructed by Loose Cannon.  Their original version was also their first-ever reconstruction, and the image quality was quite blurry. It was later redone with better audio and crystal-clear images... Though the very clarity of the images reinforced the weakness of the story's visual elements, making the story less effective than the audio release was.


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