Welcome to The First Eight – The Roarbots’ classic Doctor Who watchthrough. We’re going through the 50+ year history of the Doctor Who franchise in chronological order. This is not a “rewatch”; I’m watching these shows for the first time.

This is not an effort to write an authoritative history or connect all the dots among the characters, planets, and eras of the franchise. I’m simply here to correct one of my most flagrant Geeky Blind Spots. And I hope you’ll join me on the journey. There’s only 26 seasons and 8 Doctors to catch up on. Easy peasy.

Want to watch along or catch up on classic Who on your own terms? Check out BritBox, which has nearly every existing episode available for instant streaming.

“The Crusade” (First Doctor, Second Season, Story 14) is composed of the following episodes:

• “The Lion” (March 27, 1965)
• “The Knight of Jaffa” (April 3, 1965)
• “The Wheel of Fortune” (April 10, 1965)
• “The Warlords” (April 17, 1965)

When I say that “The Crusade” is a difficult serial to watch, I mean it quite literally. Half of its episodes are missing, and the two that still exist aren’t back-to-back episodes. The second and fourth episodes are the missing pieces, which by itself makes this a tricky story to watch. But then add to that that the first and third episodes were only released on a mishmash DVD collection of lonely episodes and aren’t streaming on BritBox.

Also, if you’re an early Doctor Who fan (or have been following along with our journey here), you know that this isn’t the first serial with episodes that have been lost to time, although it is the only one in the second season. However, whereas “Marco Polo” has a really good (fan) reconstruction and the missing episodes of “The Reign of Terror” were animated (officially), “The Crusade” has seemingly gotten no such love.

In short, “The Crusade” is just darn difficult to watch.

And reader, I tried. I really tried. I bought the official BBC “audiobook” from Audible, which is actually the original audio from all four episodes (which survives) stitched together with new narration from William Russell (Ian). I watched the interstitial segments from the DVD release that featured William Russell – in character as Ian for the first time in 34 years – narrate the events of the missing episodes. I even watched the first and third episodes in dodgy quality on YouTube.

In fact, the only thing I didn’t do was read the novelization. Or watch some absolutely TERRIFYING fan animation on YouTube. But can you blame me?

And despite all that, I still have no idea what “The Crusade” is about. I’m forced to read (and reread) the Wikipedia recap of the story just to figure it out.

In brief, the TARDIS and her crew find themselves in 12th century Palestine during the Third Crusade. Barbara is promptly kidnapped (again, yawn), Ian launches a rescue attempt and is knighted (yes, really), Ian is caught, Barbara escapes (twice), Ian escapes, The Doctor is sentenced to death, and then everyone escapes to the TARDIS in the nick of time.

In fact, it’s probably for the best that “The Crusade” is so tough to watch. All the photos I’ve found show that it stars a whole bunch of Brits in black and brown face.

This is not a good serial. And we should just be moving on.

Which is a shame since it features Julian Glover (geek icon from The Empire Strikes Back and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) as Richard the Lionheart.

In the end, after the crew escapes, the cliffhanger ending finds everyone on board the TARDIS, frozen in time. Which leads us into…

Next time: “The Space Museum”