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What if Doctor Who took a drastically different path? This video delves into alternate realities of the Whoniverse, revealing 10 scrapped concepts that could have changed everything. Discover the show that could have been, and why we're glad it wasn't.
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00:00Doctor Who is full of so many great what-ifs.
00:02What if Sarah Jane had returned for Tom Baker's final season?
00:06What if Christopher Eccleston had met Matt Smith and David Tennant's Doctors?
00:09What if Rory had just got in the TARDIS instead of going back to check on that gravestone?
00:13I mean, come on, Rory, you're smarter than that!
00:15But for every awesome what-if idea, there's one that isn't so great.
00:18I'm Ellie for Who Culture, and here are 10 terrible Doctor Who ideas that nearly happened.
00:24Number 10, The Young Doctor Adventures.
00:26Keen to cash in on Doctor Who's overnight success in 2005,
00:30the BBC tapped Russell T. Davis for spin-off ideas.
00:33One concept that was pitched to Russell T. Davis was a CBBC show
00:37that would focus on the Doctor's childhood on Gallifrey.
00:40For obvious reasons, Davis declined to pursue the idea further
00:43and developed the Sarah Jane Adventures instead.
00:46It was the right call, as a series of The Young Doctor Adventures
00:49would have risked destroying any sense of mystery surrounding the character.
00:53For starters, how could you develop a whole show around the Doctor's childhood
00:56and not reveal their birth name?
00:58Sure, the Doctor's Theta Sigma nickname from the Armageddon factor
01:01would provide a decent workaround,
01:03but then what would their parents call them?
01:05What would those parents be like?
01:07And then what would the stories be like?
01:08Would we have young versions of the Doctor and the Master
01:10running rings around their tutors at the Academy
01:13and having food fights in the canteen?
01:14It sounds like what the BBC really wanted was Harry Potter with timey-wimey-ness
01:18and TARDIS's instead of spells on Quidditch.
01:20Thankfully, Russell nipped this one in the bud.
01:22Number 9. Tom Baker in the TV Movie
01:25One of the biggest stipulations for the 1996 TV movie
01:29was that the continuity was maintained with the previous 33 years.
01:34To that end, Sylvester McCoy was cast as the seventh Doctor
01:37for the regeneration into Paul McGann's eighth Doctor.
01:40Now, while that itself was arguably a bad idea for a relaunch of the show,
01:44it made far more sense than one change suggested by one of the executive producers.
01:48Joe Wright, who represented the BBC's interests on the project,
01:52was keen to move away from the apparently negative public perception
01:55of the Sylvester McCoy era.
01:57Wright believed that Tom Baker would be a bigger draw
01:59as a past Doctor to hand over the torch to McGann.
02:02That might have been true,
02:04not least because Baker was the best-known Doctor in the USA at the time,
02:07but it would have been utterly disastrous for Doctor Who continuity
02:10if an older Tom Baker had been gunned down in San Francisco.
02:13Would that negate the entire 1980s period of Doctor Who?
02:17What would that even mean?
02:18Sylvester McCoy was absolutely the right choice for the TV movie,
02:21and given Baker's reluctance to work on things like the Five Doctors,
02:24there's no telling whether he'd have agreed to return anyway.
02:27Number 8. The Toclophane being behind the Time War
02:30When the Terry Nation estate quibbled over the use of the Daleks in the 2005 revival,
02:36Russell T. Davis and Robert Shearman had to come up with new antagonists for Series 1,
02:41just in case.
02:42Contrary to popular belief, Shearman didn't just tip X over Dalek and write Cyberman.
02:47Russell T. Davis created another monster for use in that first Dalek episode,
02:51which briefly had the jokey working title of Absence of the Daleks.
02:55Called Spheres, these monsters were essentially an early version of the Toclophane from the Series 3 finale.
03:01This means that a race of evolved future humans inside metal balls
03:05would have been revealed as the terrifying enemy that laid waste to the Time Lords,
03:08the Nestein and the Gelf. Thankfully, the Nation estate buckled and we got the Daleks,
03:13as it should have been from the start.
03:15It is hard to imagine the Toclophane having anywhere near the iconic power of a Dalek,
03:19and as last of the Time Lords proved, they don't really work on their own.
03:23They need a character like the Master to use them as a private army.
03:26Still, colourful Skittleballs in Series 5 would have been quite something.
03:30Number 7. Nelvana's Animated Series
03:33Of the various independent production companies wanting to take on the Doctor Who license in the early 1990s,
03:39Nelvana got quite far in devising a concept.
03:42The Canada-based animation studio developed a Doctor Who cartoon
03:45that would have sat neatly alongside the likes of the real Ghostbusters or Captain Planet on Saturday mornings.
03:51Nelvana's Animated Doctor Who series was a complete reimagining of the show,
03:55which turned the Doctor into a sort of crusader for hire, working at the behest of the Time Lords.
04:00The series retained iconic characters like the Master, the Cybermen, the Daleks, and good old K-9.
04:05However, the dialogue in the scripts and treatments doesn't feel like Doctor Who at all.
04:09For example, at one point, the Doctor tells K-9 to cease that infernal barking.
04:13Meanwhile, the Master was to be half-man, half-cyborg,
04:16with a robot bird sidekick and looks modelled after Sean Connery.
04:19Alrighty then.
04:20The project was eventually shut down by the BBC, which was probably for the best.
04:25Although it is slightly sad that Doctor Who's Time Stick weapon wasn't the big Christmas toy in 1993.
04:31Number 6.
04:32The Return of Megloss
04:33Remember in The Lodger how there was a nefarious alien menace that was tied to an abandoned silence ship?
04:39Writer Gareth Roberts originally had another idea for the episode's villain.
04:43He wanted to bring back shape-shifting cactus monster Megloss,
04:47who would masquerade as the Doctor and Craig's neighbour, Mrs. Megloss.
04:50On one level, Megloss would work quite well as a villain in The Lodger.
04:54He could easily assume the forms of the people luring unsuspecting civilians into the Doctor and Craig's building.
04:59But while The Return of Megloss amused Stephen Moffat,
05:02he nixed the idea because, after the Vinvoci and Banacafalata,
05:06Doctor Who didn't need any more spiky-faced creatures.
05:09Not only that, but an alien posing as a kindly old lady was basically the plot of Amy's Choice,
05:13which would have aired just a few weeks prior.
05:15Instead, Moffat suggested that the threat should be a malfunctioning time machine,
05:19something he would return to again in his era.
05:21It was a much better idea, as the sad voices on the other end of the intercom
05:25were a far more chilling threat than a cactus would have been.
05:28Number 5. Rose Tyler, Earth Defense
05:31One of Russell T. Davis' worst ideas was to develop a Rose Tyler spin-off series
05:36that would have aired on BBC One after the end of Doctor Who's Series 2.
05:40In a 2006 interview with Doctor Who magazine, Davis said that the entire show,
05:44given the working title Rose Tyler, Earth Defense,
05:47had been commissioned by the BBC and had even been budgeted.
05:50The next stage would have been to secure Billy Piper's involvement.
05:53But it was then that Russell T. Davis began to have second thoughts.
05:56While he watched the filming of the final scene between the Doctor and Rose in Doomsday,
06:00he realised what a terrible idea it would be to go ahead with the spin-off show.
06:04Discussing his reasoning with Doctor Who magazine, Davis said,
06:07quote, it spoils Doctor Who if we can see Rose,
06:10if we see as a concrete fact that her life continues to be as exciting without the Doctor.
06:14Cancelling Earth Defense was definitely the right decision for Doctor Who,
06:17especially as Freema Adjaman had a hard enough time following Billy Piper
06:21without the former companion also having her own TV show.
06:24Number 4. Mark Gatiss' Doctor Who revival
06:27When Russell T. Davis brought back Doctor Who in 2005, it was zippy, vibrant and modern.
06:33The faster pace was a breath of fresh air that reinvigorated Doctor Who for a new generation,
06:37while staying true to the show's core ethos.
06:40However, things could have been much different.
06:42In the early 2000s, future new series writers Mark Gatiss and Gareth Roberts,
06:47along with future Doctor Who magazine editor Clayton Hickman,
06:50were devising their own Doctor Who reboot.
06:53Instead of introducing the young, energetic Doctor blowing up a central London department store,
06:57their pilot introduced a 60-something Doctor working in an antique shop in a sleepy village,
07:02and instead of 13 episodes at 45 minutes,
07:05Gatiss wanted to do seven three-part serials totalling 21 episodes.
07:09Gatiss, Roberts and Hickman acknowledged that they were too meek in their Doctor Who pitch,
07:14highlighting ways to save money rather than sell an exciting adventure series.
07:18It's likely that if this version of Doctor Who had got off the ground,
07:21then it would have been a fun little curio like the TV movie,
07:24but it feels highly unlikely that it would have spawned 19 years of telly.
07:28Number 3. Killing off the Brigadier
07:30Writer Ben Aronovich originally intended to kill off Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart in the 1989 serial
07:37Battlefield, before realising that he couldn't bring himself to do it.
07:41It's just as well, as it's hard to imagine a story that would have had the sufficient magnitude
07:45to kill off the Doctor's oldest friend.
07:47Battlefield is a lot better than people give it credit for,
07:50and it would make a degree of thematic sense to end the Brigadier story there.
07:53It's a story about old soldiers and the never-ending cycles of war and violence.
07:57However, it's also poorly directed, meaning that the darkness of the subject matter largely gets
08:01lost in the sunny scenery and slapstick battle sequences.
08:05Against that backdrop, the death of the Brigadier would have been an insult.
08:08Aronovich's inability to kill the Brig meant that we never had to endure the sharp,
08:12tonal gear shift from Arthurian knights trampolining over explosions to the Doctor losing his oldest
08:17friend. Instead, the Brig went out as he always should have. Peacefully.
08:21Who knows if his corpse would have still been turned into a Cyberman. But this is terrible
08:25ideas that nearly happened. Not definitely happened. So let's move on.
08:29Number 2. The Doctor's Rose Experiment
08:32Though Boomtown feels like it was always part of the Series 1 plan,
08:36it was actually a late replacement for an unusual story by shameless creator Paul Abbott.
08:42Abbott worked on his outline for a few weeks, which revolved around the idea that Rose had been
08:46created by the Doctor as an experiment to find the perfect companion.
08:50First of all, what on earth? Second of all, quite how this would have even worked in the
08:55context of the rest of the series is anyone's guess. That's a pretty huge shift in the Doctor
09:00Rose dynamic. And by that point, there were still two episodes left, not to mention Rose's return
09:04in Series 2. It was all for naught in the end though. Abbott had to abandon the project due to
09:09other commitments, and Russell T. Davis wrote Boomtown in its place. The Ninth Doctor had a lot of
09:13darkness in him coming off the Time War, but going so far as to reveal that he bred a companion
09:18in
09:18some twisted experiment feels like a step too far. Also, it's bloody weird.
09:23Number 1. Stephen Taylor Returns As A Cow
09:26If you're ever in Cardiff very late at night and your heart is in the right place,
09:31you can sometimes hear a giant Welshman hooting in Tetley's-fueled delight as he comes up with
09:36another insane Doctor Who concept. This is the noise that Russell T. Davis makes when he comes up
09:42with ideas like Captain Jack is the face of Bo and Sue Tech. Thankfully, not all of Russell T.
09:47Davis' late-night brainwaves have made it into the show. One particular plan to bring back Peter
09:52Purvis in The Giggle was so ridiculous that it rightly received a lot of flack from David Tennant
09:56and Phil Collinson. During the video commentary for The Giggle, Russell T. Davis outlined his
10:01abandoned plans for a character called The Ruminant, which was a giant cow. So far,
10:06so Russell T. Davis. But the giant cow would later whip off his mask like something out of Scooby-Doo
10:12to reveal that he was none other than First Doctor companion Stephen Taylor, returning to help the
10:17Doctor fight the Toymaker. Even in an episode as insane as The Giggle, The Ruminant is clearly a step
10:22too far. Thankfully, we got Stephen and Vicky's Tales of the TARDIS episode instead, which was much
10:26better. Not a giant cow in sight. So, James Corden fighting a cactus? No thank you. But not every idea
10:34is naff. So, while you're here, why not check out 10 awesome Doctor Who ideas that nearly happened?
10:39In the meantime, I've been Ellie for WhoCulture, and in the words of Riversong herself, goodbye, sweeties.
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