A Time Lord villain introduces Rasputin to disco music? Yes please!
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00:00 Exposed to the time vortex, Rose Tyler, now in the form of the Bad Wolf, says that she
00:05 can see everything. All that is, all that was, all that ever could be.
00:10 There's been a great many could-bes in Doctor Who's past five decades, and the road from
00:15 1963 to 2022 is littered with half-finished scripts and rejected pitches.
00:21 So, with that in mind, I'm Ellie with Who Culture, here with 10 unmade Doctor Who stories
00:28 we wish we'd seen.
00:29 10. Rose was actually created by The Doctor Russell T Davies' first series of Doctor Who
00:36 nearly featured a script written by another lauded British screenwriter. Davies approached
00:42 his friend Paul Abbott to write an episode for the series, and the pair had previously
00:46 worked together on Abbott's BBC series Linda Green, which also featured Christopher Eccleston.
00:53 Abbott's episode would have explored the idea that Rose was an experiment by The Doctor
00:57 to create his perfect companion. The idea was never developed much further than that
01:01 due to Abbott's commitments with the increasingly popular Shameless.
01:05 And it's not clear in the small amount of information given by RTD how exactly The Doctor
01:11 bred Rose for this purpose. Wibbly wobbly timey wimily engineered Pete and Jackie's
01:16 courtship perhaps? It is strange to think how different the tone of the show would have
01:21 been if The Doctor had been revealed to be a manipulative geneticist.
01:24 The Doctor has manipulated companions before, of course, but it does seem at odds with the
01:30 lighter, more accessible tone of the 2005 reboot.
01:34 9. Killer Cats of Gallifrey In a follow up to The Deadly Assassin, the
01:39 Doctor Who production team wanted to return to Gallifrey for the following season. Now
01:44 that story ended up being the invasion of time, but the original pitch for the season
01:49 15 finale was quite different. Killers of the Dark would have revealed that
01:54 the planet of the Time Lords was also home to a race of cat people whose culture was
01:58 similar to those of Asian countries. Not much is known about the story, other than
02:03 it was to feature a gladiator-style battle in front of a stadium full of cat people.
02:08 Perhaps this would have written out Leela the way Louise Jameson had always wanted,
02:12 sacrificing her life in battle for the Doctor. David Weir's script got as far as the costume
02:17 stage, with designer Dee Robson submitting some design sketches.
02:22 In the end, script editor Anthony Reid and director Gerald Blake decided it would be
02:27 far too difficult to achieve on Doctor Who's already tight budget.
02:31 Instead, they opted to make Invasion of Time, which introduced us to the Outsiders instead,
02:37 Gallifrey's cheaper-to-realise humanoid population who had turned their backs on Time
02:42 Lord society. 8. Jamie's Happy Ending
02:46 The ending of the War Games was heartbreaking. Sent back to their appropriate time and place,
02:52 Jamie and Zoe are wiped of their memories of their many adventures with the Doctor.
02:56 Not so bad for Zoe, who returns to a fairly comfortable life on a space station, but Jamie
03:02 faces a much harder life. Returned back to his life following the Battle
03:06 of Culloden, he faces slavery, murder, or as detailed in one comic by the legendary
03:12 Grant Morrison, madness. His ending, however, was almost much more hopeful.
03:18 In a story that would have formed the third part in a Yeti trilogy, he and the TARDIS
03:22 would arrive at a Scottish castle owned by an ageing Laird. The castle is soon under
03:27 siege from the Great Intelligence and the Yeti. The Doctor defeats them, and Jamie decides
03:32 to stay on at the castle, becoming its new Laird. He falls in love with a local girl,
03:36 Fiona, and is left to live happily ever after. The story was never filmed due to an ongoing
03:42 copyright dispute between the BBC and the writers Melvin Haysman and Henry Lincoln,
03:48 who eventually withdrew their script. And so, Jamie was left to his fate on the
03:53 fields of Culloden.
03:55 Number 7. Matt Berry as the Meddlesome Monk. Peter Harness, who co-wrote the dark urban
04:01 thriller The Zygon Inversion/Invasion with Stephen Moffat, pitched another story that
04:06 was much lighter. The story was to feature the return of a renegade
04:10 Time Lord Larsen in the 1960s, The Monk. Originally played by comedy actor Peter Butterworth,
04:16 Harness envisioned Matt Berry in the role. The plot was to feature the Meddlesome Time
04:21 Lord calling on the Twelfth Doctor for help after he accidentally averts the Russian Revolution
04:26 by playing Boney M to Rasputin. They then try to put history back on course,
04:31 with The Monk eventually taking on the identity of Rasputin. It's a mad comic idea, but it
04:37 might just have worked. And one can only imagine what a brilliant comedy double act Capaldi
04:42 and Berry would have made. Moffat turned down the pitch, and Harness's
04:46 next story for the series was the underwhelming Pyramid at the End of the World. Watching
04:51 a blind doctor trying to crack an entry code is nowhere near as much fun as him mucking
04:55 around with Rasputin, Matt Berry, and the music of Boney M.
04:59 Number 6. The Final Game. Introduced to the series as Moriarty to the
05:04 Third Doctor's Sherlock Holmes, The Master was intended to be written out towards the
05:09 end of the Pertwee era, with a storyline conceived where the former friends would do battle one
05:15 last time, and during that confrontation, it was to be revealed that The Master was
05:20 either the Doctor's brother or a personification of his dark side.
05:25 The climactic scenes were to see The Master sacrifice himself to save the Doctor, his
05:30 former friend. Whilst it was never produced, the story has been hugely influential over
05:35 the years. The idea of The Master's conscience catching up with them would be a key part
05:40 of Steven Moffat's final series as showrunner. Not only that, but the idea of The Master
05:45 sacrificing their life to save the Doctor was echoed in the climax to The End of Time
05:50 Part 2, when he forces the Time Lords back to Hell.
05:53 The story was never produced due to the tragic and untimely death of actor Roger Delgado,
06:00 and his loss heavily impacted Pertwee, who decided to leave the show, along with script
06:05 editor Terence Dix and producer Barry Letts.
06:09 Number 5. Return of the Autons. If Doctor Who hadn't been put on hiatus after
06:14 its 22nd season, there was a whole host of adventures planned. Many of these, like the
06:20 Nightmare Fair and Mission to Magnus, have since been both novelised and dramatised in
06:25 the intervening years. One unmade story that remains so, due to
06:29 the lack of a finished script, was Robert Holmes' Yellow Fever and How to Cure It.
06:34 In a classic example of producer John Nathan-Turner's grab-bag approach to story commissioning, it
06:40 was to be set in Singapore and feature the return of The Master, The Rani, and, for the
06:44 first time in over 20 years, the Autons. Also appearing would be the Brigadier, who
06:50 would be in Singapore on holiday before being dragged into the adventure.
06:54 All that's really known about the story is that The Master and The Rani will be disguised
06:57 as street theatre performers. Now, John Nathan-Turner did do a location scout,
07:03 or a holiday, as some might call it, but beyond this, not much more was planned.
07:07 It does sound like a little bit of an overstuffed combination of elements, but if anyone could
07:12 make it work, it's Robert Holmes.
07:15 Number 4 - Nazis in the British Museum Mark Gatiss has written for nearly every series
07:20 of Doctor Who, from 2005 to 2017, with a few gaps here and there.
07:26 One of those gaps is in series 4, when his script entitled The Suicide Exhibition was
07:32 dropped in favour of The Fires of Pompeii. It was held over for a potential special in
07:36 the following series, but it was ultimately not made.
07:40 Set in the British Museum at the height of the Blitz, it was an Indiana Jones-style adventure
07:45 that pitted the Doctor and Donna against a team of Nazis trying to release something.
07:50 The museum is revealed to be a giant puzzle box, and the Doctor and Donna have to deal
07:54 with trapdoors, booby traps and various other nasties in order to stop the Nazis achieving
07:59 their goal. While this particular story went unmade, he
08:03 was able to visit another London tourist attraction when he set victory of the Daleks in Churchill's
08:10 War Rooms.
08:12 Number 3 - The Live Halloween Episode Another fourth series story that was eventually
08:17 abandoned by the production team was Century House, written by Tom McRae.
08:23 The writer had previously written the Cyberman two-parter for the second series, and was
08:27 this time given a very different concept by Russell T Davies.
08:32 Designed to function as the companion light episode, it would focus mostly on the Doctor,
08:37 taking part in an episode of Most Haunted. Donna would be watching the live broadcast
08:42 from home as the Doctor and a group of TV ghost hunters investigate the haunting of
08:47 the Red Widow. Davies liked the script, but he worried that
08:51 following the Unicorn and the Wasp, there would be too much comedy.
08:55 He also felt that he'd given the writer a poor premise and no longer had faith in the
08:59 concept. The story was eventually shelled and replaced
09:02 by the RTD-penned Midnight, a far scarier episode than Century House would have been.
09:08 It was a fun concept, but it's unlikely we'll ever get to see it, given that TV ghost hunting
09:13 isn't as popular as it used to be.
09:16 Number 2 - Stephen Fry's King Arthur Story How exciting was the lead-up to Doctor Who's
09:22 second series? Not only had the return of the Cybermen, Sarah
09:27 Jane Smith and K9 been revealed, but fans were also promised an episode written by Stephen
09:34 Fry. The polymath author had got quite far in the writing process - he's attended the
09:39 first read-through, he went for dinner with his fellow Doctor Who writers.
09:44 His episode was set in the 1920s and would feature a sci-fi spin on Arthurian legend.
09:50 More specifically, the Green Knight, recently immortalised on film by Dev Patel.
09:56 Fry's episode was to reveal that Gawain had survived his beheading because he was actually
10:01 of alien origin. The finished draft was deemed too expensive
10:05 to realise in its original form, and rewrites were suggested.
10:08 Sadly, a multi-talented figure like Stephen Fry is constantly in demand, and so he couldn't
10:14 commit to the rewrites. The story was sadly abandoned, and despite
10:19 suggestion that it might have been revisited in the following series, it again never surfaced.
10:25 What's even more upsetting is that the story that replaced it was the critically derided
10:30 Fear Her. Sentient crayon drawings are cheaper to realise
10:33 than Arthurian legends, but much less exciting.
10:37 1. Tom Baker's Doctor Who movie. One of the great "what if" moments in Doctor
10:43 Who history is Tom Baker and Ian Martyr's proposed movie in the mid-to-late 1970s.
10:51 They had a director attached, but they could never raise the funding required to make it
10:55 a reality. Had it been made, it would have been an incredibly
10:58 memorable combination of folk horror and psychedelic sci-fi.
11:02 Doctor Who meets Scratch Man was to pit the Doctor, Harry and Sarah against scarecrows
11:08 in a Scottish village, and the Devil himself, climaxing in a giant game of pinball featuring
11:14 the Daleks. It's quintessentially Tom Baker.
11:17 Utterly mad, but very charming. Whilst the film never saw the light of day,
11:22 BBC Books did eventually commission Tom Baker to adapt his and Martyr's original treatment
11:28 into a novel. It's both a creepy, blackly comedic Doctor
11:33 Who adventure, and a touching tribute to the Baker era.
11:37 And that concludes our list. If you can think of any that we missed, then
11:41 do let us know in the comments below. And while you're there, don't forget to like
11:44 and subscribe and tap that notification bell. Also, head over to Twitter and follow us there
11:49 @whoculture, and I can be found across various social medias just by searching Ellie Littlechild.
11:54 I've been Ellie with Who Culture, and in the words of River Song herself, goodbye,
11:59 sweeties.