When Doctor Who debuted in 1963, the notion of what constituted an “episode” of a BBC TV show didn’t resemble how we think about sci-fi television now. Starting with “An Unearthly Child” on Nov. 23, 1963, and all the way through “Survival” in 1989, Doctor Who was punctuated by two things: really low budget monsters and a ton of cliffhangers. In fact, because each installment in classic Who stories is always a 30-minute part of an overall serial, there’s a stop-and-go quality to these classic adventures that can seem a bit jarring for the modern viewer. That fact, combined with some of the less-than-stellar effects can, sometimes, occasionally, undercut the brilliance of the long-running show. Plus, with so many early William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton episodes incomplete or missing, getting the overall picture of the early Doctor is tricky for the contemporary fan.
