The Underwater Menace seems to be the lynch pin in the entire omnirumour and that’s why information surrounding the animating of the missing episodes is such a big deal. Well, hold on to your hat because Planet 55, the studio thought to be animating episodes 1 and 4 has recently released a statement on their Facebook page.

There have been many queries about Planet 55 Studios’s work on ‘Doctor Who’ and whether we are doing any more. To date, Planet 55 Studios has completed work on three ‘Doctor Who’ animated reconstructions for BBC Worldwide’s DVD range: “The Reign of Terror”, “The Tenth Planet” and most recently “The Moonbase”. We really enjoyed creating those but they are the only ‘Doctor Who’ stories Planet 55 Studios have worked on and there are no plans to work on any more. At the moment the company is focused on animation projects completely unconnected to ‘Doctor Who’.

So there you go. But it does raise a few other questions. Were they never commissioned to do UWM in the first place? This would go against everything that we had been hearing for the past 7 or 8 months. Why then did they wait this long before making a statement regarding the UWM animation? Why not put us out of our misery months ago? There are still plenty of ways you could parse that statement, but to me I find it pretty unambiguous.  Throw in here that we have a fairly recent Doctor Who Magazine article stating that UWM would be out later this year. What then? Recons? That has been suggested over the past couple of weeks, but there is still no evidence of a UWM dvd with recons on the horizon.

So for now it seems like the Underwater Menace remains in limbo, with episode 2 being the only episode of Doctor Who still awaiting a dvd release. How much longer will the fans have to wait?