10 Unmade Doctor Who Stories We Wish We'd Seen
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,
00:04 says that she 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 1963
00:16 to 2022 is littered with half-finished scripts and rejected pictures. So, with that in mind,
00:23 then, I'm Ellie with WhoCulture, here with 10 unmade Doctor Who stories we wish we'd seen.
00:29 Number 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 worked
00:47 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 to
00:57 create his perfect companion. The idea was never developed much further than that, due to Abbott's
01:02 commitments with the increasingly popular Shameless. And it's not clear in the small
01:07 amount of information given by RTD how exactly the Doctor bred Rose for this purpose. Wibbly-wobbly,
01:14 timey-wimey engineered Pete and Jackie's courtship, perhaps? It is strange to think how different the
01:20 tone of the show would have 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 lighter,
01:31 more accessible tone of the 2005 reboot. Number 9, Killer Cats of Gallifrey. In a follow-up to
01:38 The Deadly Assassin, the Doctor Who production team wanted to return to Gallifrey for the
01:43 following season. Now, that story ended up being the invasion of time, but the original pitch for
01:48 the season 15 finale was quite different. Killers of the Dark would have revealed that the planet
01:54 of the Time Lords was also home to a race of cat people whose culture was similar to those of Asian
02:00 countries. Not much is known about the story, other than it was to feature a gladiator-style
02:05 battle in front of a stadium full of cat people. Perhaps this would have written out Leela the way
02:10 Louise Jameson had always wanted, sacrificing her life in battle for the Doctor. David Weir's script
02:16 got as far as the costume 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. Instead, they opted to
02:33 make Invasion of Time, which introduced us to the Outsiders instead, Gallifrey's cheaper-to-realise
02:39 humanoid population who had turned their backs on Time Lord society. Number 8, Jamie's happy ending.
02:46 The ending of The War Games was heartbreaking. Sent back to their appropriate time and place,
02:51 Jamie and Zoe are wiped of their memories of their many adventures with the Doctor. Not so
02:57 bad for Zoe, who returns to a fairly comfortable life on a space station, but Jamie faces a much
03:03 harder life. Returned back to his life following the Battle of Culloden, he faces slavery, murder,
03:09 or as detailed in one comic by the legendary Grant Morrison, madness. His ending, however,
03:16 was almost much more hopeful. In a story that would have formed the third part in a Yeti trilogy,
03:22 he and the TARDIS would arrive at a Scottish castle owned by an ageing Laird. The castle
03:27 is soon under siege from the Great Intelligence and the Yeti. The Doctor defeats them, and Jamie
03:32 decides 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 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 was much
04:07 lighter. The story was to feature the return of a renegade Time Lord Larsen in the 1960s,
04:12 The Monk. Originally played by comedy actor Peter Butterworth, Harness envisioned Matt
04:17 Berry in the role. The plot was to feature the Meddlesome Time Lord calling on the 12th Doctor
04:22 for help after he accidentally averts the Russian Revolution by playing Boney M to Rasputin.
04:29 They then try to put history back on course, with The Monk eventually taking on the identity of
04:34 Rasputin. It's a mad comic idea, but it might just have worked. And one can only imagine what a
04:40 brilliant comedy double-act Capaldi and Berry would have made. Moffat turned down the pitch,
04:45 and Harness' next story for the series was the underwhelming Pyramid at the End of the World.
04:51 Watching 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. Number 6. The Final Game. Introduced
05:02 to the series as Moriarty to the Third Doctor's Sherlock Holmes, The Master was intended to be
05:08 written out towards the end of the Pertwee era, with a storyline conceived where the former
05:14 friends would do battle one last time, and during that confrontation, it was to be revealed that
05:19 The Master was either the Doctor's brother or a personification of his dark side. The climactic
05:26 scenes were to see The Master sacrifice himself to save the Doctor, his former friend. Whilst it
05:32 was never produced, the story has been hugely influential over the years. The idea of The
05:37 Master's conscience catching up with them would be a key part of Steven Moffat's final series as
05:42 showrunner. Not only that, but the idea of The Master sacrificing their life to save the Doctor
05:47 was echoed in the climax to The End of Time 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 editor
06:06 Terence Dix and producer Barry Letts. Number 5. Return of the Autons. If Doctor Who hadn't
06:13 been put on hiatus after its 22nd season, there was a whole host of adventures planned. Many of
06:19 these, like The Nightmare Fair and Mission to Magnus, have since been both novelised and
06:24 dramatised in the intervening years. One unmade story that remains so due to the lack of a
06:30 finished script was Robert Holmes' Yellow Fever and How to Cure It. In a classic example of
06:36 producer John Nathan-Turner's grab-bag approach to story commissioning, it was to be set in
06:41 Singapore and feature the return of The Master, The Rani, and for the first time in over 20 years,
06:46 the Autons. Also appearing would be the Brigadier, who would be in Singapore on holiday before being
06:52 dragged into the adventure. All that's really known about the story is that The Master and
06:56 The Rani will be disguised as street theatre performers. Now, John Nathan-Turner did do a
07:01 location scout, 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,
07:12 but if anyone could make it work, it's Robert Holmes.
07:15 Number 4 - Nazis in the British Museum
07:18 Mark Gatiss has written for nearly every series of Doctor Who from 2005 to 2017,
07:24 with a few gaps here and there. One of those gaps is in series 4, when his script entitled
07:30 The Suicide Exhibition was dropped in favour of The Fires of Pompeii. It was held over for a
07:36 potential special in the following series, but it was ultimately not made. Set in the British Museum
07:42 at the height of the Blitz, it was an Indiana Jones-style adventure that pitted the Doctor
07:46 and Donna against a team of Nazis trying to release something. The museum is revealed to
07:51 be a giant puzzle box, and the Doctor and Donna have to deal with trapdoors, booby traps, and
07:56 various other nasties in order to stop the Nazis achieving their goal. While this particular story
08:02 went unmade, he was able to visit another London tourist attraction when he set victory of the
08:09 Daleks in Churchill's War Rooms. Number 3 - The Live Halloween Episode
08:15 Another fourth series story that was eventually abandoned by the production team was Century
08:20 House, written by Tom McRae. The writer had previously written the Cyberman two-parter
08:26 for the second series, and was 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 from home,
08:42 as the Doctor and a group of TV ghost hunters investigate the haunting of the Red Widow.
08:48 Davies liked the script, but he worried that following the Unicorn and the Wasp, there would
08:53 be too much comedy. He also felt that he'd given the writer a poor premise, and no longer had faith
08:59 in the concept. The story was eventually shelved and replaced by the RTD-penned Midnight, a far
09:06 scarier episode than Century House would have been. It was a fun concept, but it's unlikely we'll
09:11 ever get to see it, given that TV ghost hunting 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
09:23 second series? Not only had the return of the Cybermen, Sarah Jane Smith and K-9 been revealed,
09:30 but fans were also promised an episode written by Stephen Fry. The polymath author had got quite far
09:38 in the writing process - he's attended the first read-through, he went for dinner with his fellow
09:42 Doctor Who writers. His episode was set in the 1920s and would feature a sci-fi spin on Arthurian
09:49 legend. 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 of alien
10:02 origin. The finished draft was deemed too expensive to realise in its original form,
10:07 and rewrites were suggested. Sadly, a multi-talented figure like Stephen Fry is
10:12 constantly in demand, and so he couldn't commit to the rewrites. The story was sadly abandoned,
10:18 and despite suggestion that it might have been revisited in the following series,
10:22 it again never surfaced. What's even more upsetting is that the story that replaced it was
10:28 the critically derided Fear Her. Sentient crayon drawings are cheaper to realise than Arthurian
10:34 legends, but much less exciting. Number 1 - Tom Baker's Doctor Who movie.
10:40 One of the great "what if" moments in Doctor Who history is Tom Baker and Ian Martyr's proposed
10:47 movie in the mid-to-late 1970s. They had a director attached, but they could never raise
10:53 the funding required to make it a reality. Had it been made, it would have been an incredibly
10:59 memorable combination of folk horror and psychedelic sci-fi. Doctor Who meets Scratchman
11:04 was to pit the Doctor, Harry and Sarah against scarecrows in a Scottish village, and the Devil
11:10 himself, climaxing in a giant game of pinball featuring the Daleks. It's quintessentially Tom
11:17 Baker. Utterly mad, but very charming. Whilst the film never saw the light of day, BBC Books
11:23 did eventually commission Tom Baker to adapt his and Martyr's original treatment into a novel.
11:30 It's both a creepy, blackly comedic Doctor Who adventure, and a touching tribute to the Baker
11:37 era. And that concludes our list. If you can think of any that we missed, then do let us know in the
11:42 comments below. And while you're there, don't forget to like and subscribe and tap that
11:46 notification bell. Also, head over to Twitter and follow us there @whoculture, and I can be found
11:52 across various social medias just by searching Ellie Littlechild. I've been Ellie with Who
11:56 Culture, and in the words of River Song herself, goodbye, sweeties.