10 Doctor Who Episodes That Were Almost Completely Different

10. The Girl Who Died

As it stands, Series 9's The Girl Who Died is a relatively small episode. The pre-title sequence features a couple of effects shots where Clara is floating in space, but other than that, the whole thing takes place in a tiny human village with a couple of huts.

That's not to say it's a bad episode. In fact, it's a rather solid one, as is to be expected from talented writers like Jamie Mathieson and Steven Moffat. It's just a very small-scale episode from a production standpoint, but originally, Mathieson had much grander plans for the story that would've taken the episode way over budget.

In his earliest drafts of the script, Mathieson included a bunch of Valkyries on flying horses, a sequence in which a flying longboat gets attacked by a huge sea serpent, and then, a scene where the Doctor crashes said longboat into Valhalla. It sounds much more action-heavy and fantastical when compared to the final version, but again, the budget meant that none of this stuff was possible to do.

From the sounds of it, those early drafts were completely wacky and over-the-top, a huge departure from the more grounded episode that was eventually broadcast.