N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!

After the wild and uneven fantasy on Vortis, Doctor Who gets back to doing one of the things it does best: pretending to be Shakespeare.

Whilst that sounds somewhat reductive, it’s not meant to be: actually, it’s great to see two acting heavyweights such as Julian Glover and Jean Marsh duking it out in The Wheel of Fortune.

“There’s something new in you, yet something older than the sky itself.”

Joanna, The Wheel of Fortune

Indeed, the high quality of the script is apparent from the off, even if the print of The Lion we have is in a pretty shoddy state (despite the best efforts of the Restoration Team). We can only hope a copy in better nick turns up one day!

Remarkably, The Crusade is the only serial in season two to have episodes absent from the archive, and as its two missing episodes have not yet received the animation treatment, my ‘viewing’ of it was a combination of the extant first and third episodes with the narrated off-air soundtracks and telesnaps for the other two.

I think this disjointed experience contributed to my not enjoying it quite as much as other historicals such as The Aztecs or The Romans, where all of the episodes exist, nor indeed as much as Marco Polo, for which none does. In the latter, the complete absence of episodes in fact allows for a more consistently enjoyable experience – it’s just that it’s all left to your imagination, rather than some of it!

Despite The Crusade‘s many merits, this disjointedness, I fear, is a state of affairs that will become the norm rather than the exception once I’m on with season three, where sadly so much remains missing. But, for now, there’s a space museum to visit!