Missed opportunity to reconstruct Douglas Adams' long, lost classic.
I remember how excited I was back in 1992 when Shada was first released on home video featuring Tom Baker providing accompanying narration to the unfinished serial which was aborted from Season 17 due to a BBC strike. Previously, the only glimpse we had into this "lost" Douglas Adams story was the scene with the Doctor and Romana II punting down the river at Cambridge that was used in the 20th Anniversary special Doctor Who: The Five Doctors (Story 130).
I had surmised that the excruciatingly long delay to release Shada on DVD was because the Doctor Who Restoration Team had plans to do a complete reconstruction of the unfilmed serial using animation like Cosgrove Hall had fabulously done for Patrick Troughton's two missing episodes of Doctor Who: The Invasion (Story 46). Unfortunately what we have been given here is the same...
At Long Last - a Stitched Together Shada on DVD, With Tons of Extras!
Long ago, the Time Lords created Shada, a prison planet specifically to house the worst of the worst, that is, creatures who had tried to conquer the universe. One of those imprisoned was Salyavin, a Time Lord of enormous mental powers and mind control. But don't bother looking for Shada. Its location has been lost in the mists of time. Or not.
The episode starts on the Think Tank space station. Using a device with a strange sphere, great thinkers and scientists share their knowledge, to be accumulated in the sphere. But then one of them, Doctor Skagra, goes megalomaniac. He uses the sphere to drain his colleague's minds and sets out to, well, conquer the universe. But to insure his victory, he needs one last almost all-powerful mind to steal, that of the Time Lord Salyavin. There are rumors that there is one person alive who knows Shada's location, an elderly Time Lord who has retired to Cambridge, Earth, under the name Professor Chronotis. Skagra sets out for Earth...
Not really an episode
Kind of like a bed time story with Tom Baker telling the story. What footage they had, they had at the time of the strike and they used it, and what they didn't, he narrated. Some of the extras are a bit irritating. What do I care about women's lib throughout the Dr Who series? I had to have it because it is one of the Tom Baker episodes, but it's not really an episode, more like a bunch of out takes strung together. Chock this up as an episode ruined by the unions.
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