The Reign of Terror is the eighth serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast on BBC1 in six weekly parts from 8 August to 12 September 1964.

It later received several print adaptations and home media releases, with animated versions of the missing episodes constructed using off-air recordings.

They are discovered by two counter-revolutionaries, D'Argenson (Neville Smith) and Rouvray (Laidlaw Dalling), who knock the Doctor unconscious and hold the others at gunpoint.

The soldiers set fire to the farmhouse, and the Doctor is saved by a young boy (Peter Walker), who tells him that his friends have been taken to the Conciergerie Prison in Paris.

Ian's cellmate is an Englishman named Webster (Jeffry Wickham), who tells him that there is an English spy, James Stirling, highly placed in the French Government, who is now being recalled to England.

Webster dies, and a government official named Lemaitre (James Cairncross) arrives and probes any conversation between Ian and the dead man.

En route to the guillotine, Barbara and Susan's transport is hijacked by two men, Jules (Donald Morley) and Jean (Roy Herrick), who take them to a safe house.

With Susan too weak to be moved, he engineers Barbara's release on the pretext that she can be trailed to lead the security forces to the core of the escape chain.

In response, Ian relays Webster's message and Stirling realises that the secret assignation at an inn on the Calais Road is where the conspiracy will take place.

Jules, Ian and Barbara head to the inn and overhear Barras conspire with a young general, Napoleon Bonaparte (Tony Wall), in the indictment and overthrow of Robespierre.

Although Spooner was originally interested in writing a science fiction story, Whitaker was seeking a historical serial after John Lucarotti's Marco Polo and The Aztecs.

Spooner was given four possible subjects, eventually deciding to focus on the French Revolution,[7] a setting first suggested by actor William Russell.

[3] Actor and lyricist James Cairncross portrayed Citizen Lemaitre, having been recommended to Hirsch by production assistant Timothy Combe, recalling his stage performances.

[9] Ronald Pickup, who played the physician, heard about the role from his friend Frank Cox, director of previous serial The Sensorites.

Led by cameraman Peter Hamilton, a crew shot inserts of the Doctor, played by Brian Proudfoot in William Hartnell's absence, walking to Paris; Denham, Buckinghamshire was selected as the location by Combe due to the "French-looking" lanes, particularly the avenues lined with tall trees.

[20] ^† Episode is missing The Reign of Terror received smaller audiences than previous serials due to the warmer weekends, but still maintained a position within the top 40 shows for the week.

The fourth and fifth episodes remain missing, existing only as off-air audio recordings from 1964;[22] the CyBC's copies were stored in a vault that was destroyed in a bomb attack during the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus.

In The Discontinuity Guide (1995), Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping enjoyed the serial's dialogue and the "uncompromising nature of the story", citing the vicious soldiers, dirty cells, and off-screen murders.

[26] In A Critical History of Doctor Who (1999), John Kenneth Muir identified that later historical stories would borrow elements established in The Reign of Terror, though felt that they should have done so with The Aztecs instead.

[1] In 2013, SFX's Ian Berriman felt that the serial is "really rather dull" after the first episode, noting that it assumes the audience is aware of the history of the French Revolution.

This was later included in The Lost TV Episodes: Collection 1 box set in August 2010, alongside an additional CD with interviews and original camera scripts.