At present there are 97 missing Doctor Who episodes. Now, if (big if) all 7 episodes Marco Polo has been found that brings us down to 90 missing episodes.
This sounds like an interesting reversal of the "90 missing episodes discovered!" nonsense that appeared online in June. I just wonder if this apparent Marco Polo discovery is the clue. The correct information was unfortunately leaked but along the way got twisted so that instead of 90 episodes are now missing it became the monster of 90 now found. It sounds more plausible to me than 90 eventually becoming 9.
Anyone else got any other interesting theories as to how the number 90 came about?
I don't know about the 90, but I spent a few minutes putting together my own crackpot theory. Try this for an example of how easy it is to wind yourself up:
Okay. Remember last season how there were repeated motifs throughout the episodes? For instance, the number 11 came up a lot as well, eggs were mentioned or visually referenced in every episode (Clara making souffles and the Doctor wondering where she got the milk and eggs, dinosaur eggs on the spaceship, etc.). Flickering lights and Christmas references were in almost all the episodes too. Perhaps there were other repeating concepts, but that's the four I can recall.
The number 11? Refers to the 2011 season. That's where it starts, with Impossible Astronaut/The Day of the Moon, a story that introduces the Silence -- a character that is there but that you can't remember once you look away. So they're there, you just don't know it. You have to hunt for them (see where I'm going with this?) I can even go one layer deeper: the BBC's footage of the Apollo 11 landing is missing, believed wiped, just like a whole lot of Dr. Who episodes.
The flickering lights? Well, one place you see flickering lights is from an old-fashioned film projector. The sort of thing that you'd run a 35 mm film on. Eggs? On a DVD, an Easter Egg is a bonus feature, almost always consisting of footage extras -- cutaways, bloopers, interviews, etc. You hunt, and you find the surprise. Christmas? That's when gifts are given.
Put it all together? I suspect that in 2011, they (you know, THEY--hey, if I'm gonna have a whackjob crackpot theory, I'm pulling out all the stops!) had the episodes in safe storage, and the production team was told. Why? Start priming the pump. So they let us all know by putting little clues in. They figured out that the 50th anniversary was coming--what better time for the official announcement--so they decided to spill it for Christmas 2013. First a test run with WoF and EotW, then the 50th anniversary episode, then something (I have a couple of guesses: the majority of Dalek Master Plan, including Feast of Steven, or the complete Tenth Planet) special for the Christmas season, followed by a regular run of recovered stories/episodes.
The clues are all through the episodes: I'll be specific on two missing stories. Canton Everett Delaware? That's an odd name first name for a kid, don't you think? But there's a Canton in China, where Marco Polo was set. Canton appears in the first story of 2011, and MP is the first missing story. I think MP has been recovered.
With clues from A Good Man Goes to War, the Girl Who Waited and Asylum of the Daleks, I can, under conspiracy-optimal conditions, conclude that the entirety of Dalek Master Plan has been recovered. Yes, even Feast of Steven. In The Girl Who Waited, the plague is called Chen-7, and Rory mentions that Amy says she always wanted help in making Christmas dinner. Mavic Chen is the main bad guy in DMP. Feast of Steven was set on Christmas and is the seventh episode of the story.
With just a little effort, I can spot clues to possibly as many as 10 additional missing stories. And going by a rationale that the clue would only be there for a complete recovery, that could mean as many as 49 episodes. And I didn't even look all that hard for the clues. Heck, if I start going frame-by-frame, maybe there's another 49 episodes in there being hinted at.
See how easy it is to spin a series of imagined "clues" into something huge?
Let's all breath in the love, blow out the jive, and simply wait. It's only another 45 days to Christmas.
