It wasn’t Daleks who wiped out the Doctor, but cost-cutting executives at the British Broadcasting Company.

Back when Doctor Who debuted on the BBC, and for many years afterwards, saving the master copies of television programs wasn’t cost-efficient. Tape was expensive, and could be reused, thus countless episodes of programs such as Doctor Who were erased, the tapes subsequently used for some other show.

For a show like Doctor Who, with a devoted worldwide following, the fact that so many episodes of the show are deemed missing or lost, it’s a devastating gap in the narrative of the long-running series. That’s why it’s so noteworthy that two episodes, originally broadcast in 1965 and then thought lost forever, were just found in a collector’s hoard of films.

Featuring the original Doctor, William Hartnell, the first episode, titled “The Nightmare Begins”, was part of the third season of the show, airing in November of 1965. The second newly-found episode, “Devil’s Planet”, was broadcast two weeks later. This was only the fourth time the series’ history that the Doctor’s longtime foe the Daleks were featured.

The two were the first and third parts of a story arc called “The Daleks’ Master Plan.” The second part, called “Day of Armageddon,” was located back in 2004 by a BBC engineer. A couple more episodes of that arc have been recovered, but unfortunately, the other 7 episodes of the 12 in “The Daleks’ Master Plan” remain missing, including “The Feast of Steven”, which was the first Christmas episode in the series’ history and is now a yearly tradition.

They were found among a donation of films given to the Leicester charitable trust Film is Fabulous! (FIF), who called the donor’s library of films “ramshackle and eclectic.” It’s not known how the donor acquired the show tapes.

Many of the once-lost episodes were recovered in the archives of television stations in other countries, like Nigeria, which was where the last trove of missing episodes was found. But the “Master Plan” story arc was deemed far too violent by foreign markets like Canada and New Zealand, and so remained a British domestic product. The recovered episodes must have been dubbed from the original for some reason, perhaps a quality control measure, according to the BBC.

Peter Purves, who played the Doctor’s companion Steven Taylor during that time, was invited to a surprise screening of the episodes at the Phoenix theater in Leicester. He was later quoted as saying “my flabber has never been so gasted” by the surprise revelation.

Purves, 87, told the BBC, “Twenty-seven of mine [episodes] still are missing, but I’m delighted that two have been found. It’s rather sad, but it’s great when some turn up.”

95 episodes of the show are still considered missing from the long-running series, which debuted in 1963.

Film is Fabulous! will hold a screening of the episodes on April 4th, where Purves will again be a guest, and the general public will be able to view them the same day on the BBC’s iPlayer app. It’s not known when they will be available worldwide.