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A Time Lord villain introduces Rasputin to disco music? Yes please!
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00:00Exposed to the time vortex, Rose Tyler, now in the form of the Bad Wolf, says that she
00:05can see everything. All that is, all that was, all that ever could be. There's been
00:11a great many could-be's in Doctor Who's past five decades, and the road from 1963 to 2022
00:18is littered with half-finished scripts and rejected pictures.
00:22So, with that in mind then, I'm Ellie with Who Culture, here with
00:2510 Unmade Doctor Who Stories We Wish We'd Seen.
00:29Number 10. Rose Was Actually Created By The Doctor
00:33Russell T Davies' first series of Doctor Who nearly featured a script written by another
00:40lauded British screenwriter. Davies approached his friend Paul Abbott to write an episode for the
00:45series, and the pair had previously worked together on Abbott's BBC series Linda Green, which also
00:51featured Christopher Eccleston. Abbott's episode would have explored the idea that Rose
00:55was an experiment by the Doctor to create his perfect companion. The idea was never developed
01:01much further than that due to Abbott's commitments with the increasingly popular Shameless. And it's
01:06not clear in the small amount of information given by RTD how exactly the Doctor bread rose for this
01:12purpose. Wimbly-wobbly-timey-wimely-engineered Pete and Jackie's courtship, perhaps? It is strange
01:18to think how different the tone of the show would have been if the Doctor had been revealed to be
01:23a
01:23manipulative geneticist. And the Doctor has manipulated companions before, of course,
01:28but it does seem at odds with the lighter, more accessible tone of the 2005 reboot.
01:35Number 9. Killer Cats Of Gallifrey In a follow-up to The Deadly Assassin,
01:39the Doctor Who production team wanted to return to Gallifrey for the following season. Now,
01:45that story ended up being The Invasion Of Time, but the original pitch for the season 15 finale was
01:50quite different. Killers Of The Dark would have revealed that The Planet Of The Time Lords was
01:55also home to a race of cat people whose culture was similar to those of Asian countries. Not much is
02:01known about the story other than it was to feature a gladiator-style battle in front of a stadium full
02:07of cat people. Perhaps this would have written out Leela the way Louise Jameson had always wanted,
02:12sacrificing her life in battle for the Doctor. David Weir's script got as far as the costume stage,
02:18with designer Dee Robson submitting some design sketches. In the end, script editor Anthony Reid
02:24and director Gerald Blake decided it would be far too difficult to achieve on Doctor Who's already
02:30tight budget. Instead, they opted to make Invasion Of Time, which introduced us to The Outsiders
02:36instead, Gallifrey's cheaper-to-realise humanoid population who had turned their backs on Time Lord
02:42Society. 8. Jamie's Happy Ending
02:46The ending of the War Games was heartbreaking. Sent back to their appropriate time and place,
02:51Jamie and Zoe are wiped of their memories of their many adventures with the Doctor.
02:56Not so bad for Zoe, who returns to a fairly comfortable life on a space station,
03:01but Jamie faces a much harder life. Returned back to his life following the Battle of Culloden,
03:07he faces slavery, murder, or as detailed in one comic by the legendary Grant Morrison,
03:14Madness. His ending, however, was almost much more hopeful. In a story that would have formed the
03:20third part in a Yeti trilogy, he and the TARDIS would arrive at a Scottish castle owned by an aging
03:26laird. The castle is soon under siege from the Great Intelligence and the Yeti. The Doctor defeats them,
03:31and Jamie decides to stay on at the castle, becoming its new laird. He falls in love with a local
03:36girl Fiona and is left to live happily ever after. The story was never filmed due to an ongoing
03:42copyright dispute between the BBC and the writers Melvin Haysman and Henry Lincoln,
03:48who eventually withdrew their script. And so, Jamie was left to his fate on the fields of Culloden.
03:557. Matt Berry As The Meddlesome Monk
03:58Peter Harness, who co-wrote the dark urban thriller The Zygon Inversion-slash-Invasion with Stephen Moffat,
04:05pitched another story that was much lighter. The story was to feature the return of a renegade
04:10Time Lord last seen in the 1960s, The Monk. Originally played by comedy actor Peter Butterworth,
04:16Harness envisioned Matt Berry in the role. The plot was to feature the Meddlesome Time Lord
04:21calling on the 12th Doctor for help after he accidentally averts the Russian Revolution
04:26by playing Boney M to Rasputin. They then try to put history back on course,
04:31with the monk eventually taking on the identity of Rasputin. It's a mad comic idea, but it might
04:37just have worked. And one can only imagine what a brilliant comedy double act Capaldi and Berry
04:43would have made. Moffat turned down the pitch, and Harness's next story for the series was the
04:48underwhelming pyramid at the end of the world. Watching a blind doctor trying to crack an entry
04:53code is nowhere near as much fun as him mucking around with Rasputin, Matt Berry, and the music of Boney
04:58M.
04:596. The Final Game Introduced to the series as Moriarty
05:04to the third Doctor's Sherlock Holmes, the Master was intended to be written out towards the end of
05:10the Pertwee era, with a storyline conceived where the former friends would do battle one last time,
05:16and during that confrontation, it was to be revealed that the Master was either the Doctor's brother,
05:22or a personification of his dark side. The climactic scenes were to see the Master sacrifice
05:28himself to save the Doctor, his former friend. Whilst it was never produced, the story has been
05:34hugely influential over the years. The idea of the Master's conscience catching up with them would be
05:39a key part of Steven Moffat's final series as showrunner. Not only that, but the idea of the
05:45Master sacrificing their life to save the Doctor was echoed in the climax to The End of Time Part 2,
05:50when he forces the Time Lords back to hell. The story was never produced due to the tragic and
05:57untimely death of actor Roger Delgado, and his loss heavily impacted Pertwee, who decided to leave the
06:04show, along with script editor Terence Dix and producer Barry Letts.
06:095. Return of the Autons
06:11If Doctor Who hadn't been put on hiatus after its 22nd season, there was a whole host of adventures
06:18planned. Many of these, like The Nightmare Fair and Mission to Magnus, have since been both novelised
06:24and dramatised in the intervening years. One unmade story that remains so, due to the lack of a finished
06:30script, was Robert Holmes' Yellow Fever and How to Cure It. In a classic example of producer John
06:37Nathan Turner's grab-bag approach to story commissioning, it was to be set in Singapore
06:41and feature the return of the Master, the Rani, and for the first time in over 20 years, the Autons.
06:48Also appearing would be the Brigadier, who would be in Singapore on holiday before being dragged into
06:53the adventure. All that's really known about the story is that the Master and the Rani would be
06:57disguised as street theatre performers. Now, John Nathan Turner did do a location scout,
07:02or a holiday, as some might call it, but beyond this, not much more was planned.
07:07It does sound like a little bit of an overstuffed combination of elements,
07:12but if anyone could make it work, it's Robert Holmes.
07:15Number 4. Nazis in the British Museum
07:17Mark Gatiss has written for nearly every series of Doctor Who from 2005 to 2017, with a few gaps here
07:25and there. And one of those gaps is in series 4, when his script entitled The Suicide Exhibition
07:32was dropped in favour of the Fires of Pompeii. It was held over for a potential special in the
07:37following series, but it was ultimately not made. Set in the British Museum at the height of the Blitz,
07:43it was an Indiana Jones-style adventure that pitted the Doctor and Donna against a team of Nazis trying
07:49to release something. The museum is revealed to be a giant puzzle box, and the Doctor and Donna have to
07:54deal with trapdoors, booby traps, and various other nasties in order to stop the Nazis achieving their goal.
08:00While this particular story went unmade, he was able to visit another London tourist attraction
08:07when he set Victory of the Daleks in Churchill's War Rooms.
08:12Number 3. The live Halloween episode
08:14Another fourth series story that was eventually abandoned by the production team was Century House,
08:21written by Tom McRae. The writer had previously written the Cyberman two-parter for the second series,
08:27and was this time given a very different concept by Russell T Davies. Designed to function as the
08:33companion light episode, it would focus mostly on the Doctor, taking part in an episode of Most
08:39Haunted. Donna would be watching the live broadcast from home as the Doctor and a group of TV ghost
08:44hunters investigate the haunting of the Red Widow. Davies liked the script, but he worried that following
08:51the Unicorn and the Wasp there would be too much comedy. He also felt that he'd given the writer a
08:57poor premise and no longer had faith in the concept. The story was eventually shelled and replaced by the
09:03RTD-penned Midnight, a far scarier episode than Century House would have been. It was a fun concept,
09:10but it's unlikely we'll ever get to see it given that TV ghost hunting isn't as popular as it used
09:15to be.
09:15Number two, Stephen Fry's King Arthur story. How exciting was the lead-up to Doctor Who's second series?
09:24Not only had the return of the Cybermen, Sarah Jane Smith and K-9 been revealed, but fans were also
09:31promised an episode written by Stephen Fry. Now, the polymath author had got quite far in the writing
09:38process. He's attended the first read-through, he went for dinner with his fellow Doctor Who writers.
09:43His episode was set in the 1920s and would feature a sci-fi spin on Arthurian legend. More specifically,
09:51The Green Knight, recently immortalised on film by Dev Patel. Fry's episode was to reveal that Gawain
09:58had survived his beheading because he was actually of alien origin. The finished draft was deemed too
10:04expensive to realise in its original form and rewrites were suggested. Sadly, a multi-talented figure like
10:11Stephen Fry is constantly in demand, and so he couldn't commit to the rewrites. The story was
10:17sadly abandoned, and despite suggestion that it might have been revisited in the following series,
10:23it again never surfaced. What's even more upsetting is that the story that replaced it was the critically
10:29derided Fear Her. Sentient crayon drawings are cheaper to realise than Arthurian legends, but
10:35much less exciting. Number one, Tom Baker's Doctor Who movie. One of the great what-if moments in Doctor
10:43Who history is Tom Baker and Ian Martyr's proposed movie in the mid-to-late 1970s. Now, they had a
10:51director attached, but they could never raise the funding required to make it a reality. Had it been
10:57made, it would have been an incredibly memorable combination of folk horror and psychedelic sci-fi.
11:03Doctor Who meets Scratchman was to pit the Doctor Harry and Sarah against scarecrows in a Scottish
11:08village and the devil himself, climaxing in a giant game of pinball featuring the Daleks.
11:15It's quintessentially Tom Baker. Utterly mad, but very charming. Whilst the film never saw the light
11:21of day, BBC Books did eventually commission Tom Baker to adapt his and Martyr's original treatment
11:29into a novel. It's both a creepy, blackly comedic Doctor Who adventure and a touching tribute to
11:36the Baker era. And that concludes our list. If you can think of any that we missed, then do let
11:42us know
11:42in the comments below. And while you're there, don't forget to like and subscribe and tap that
11:46notification bell. Also, head over to Twitter and follow us there at WhoCulture, and I can be found
11:52across various social medias just by searching Ellie Littlechild. I've been Ellie with WhoCulture, and in the
11:57words of Riversong herself, goodbye, sweeties.
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