10 Unmade Doctor Who Stories We Wish We'd Seen
A Time Lord villain introduces Rasputin to disco music? Yes please!
Exposed to the time vortex, Rose Tyler, now in the form of the Bad Wolf says that she can "see everything. All that is, all that was, all that ever could be." There's been a great many "could be"s in Doctor Who's past five decades and the road from 1963 to 2022 is littered with half-finished scripts and rejected pitches. The number of unfinished Doctor Who stories is so large that Big Finish have made whole range of audio dramas out of them!
There are numerous reasons that Doctor Who stories don't get made. The infamous story of the Doctor's family home, Lungbarrow, was deemed too literary to work on TV, eventually being adapted into a novel. The equally infamous Shada, Douglas Adam's unfinished Doctor Who swansong, was unfinished due to a management lock-out at the BBC. It's now been finished more times and in more mediums than any other Doctor Who story.
Most unmade Doctor Who stories don't even make it as far as one adaptation, let alone six, and instead disappear into the ether, becoming the stuff of legend. This list collects just some of these lost legends.
10. Rose Was Actually Created by the Doctor
Russell T Davies' first series of Doctor Who almost featured a script by another lauded British screenwriter. Davies had approached his friend, Paul Abbott, to write an episode for the series. The pair had previously worked together on Abbott's BBC series Linda Green, which also featured Christopher Eccleston.
Abbott's episode would have explored the idea that Rose was an experiment by the Doctor to create his perfect companion. The idea was never developed much further than that, due to Abbott's commitments with the increasingly popular Shameless. It's not clear in the small amount of information given by RTD how exactly the Doctor "bred" Rose for this purpose.
Wibbly wobbly timey wime-ily engineered Jackie and Pete's courtship, perhaps? It's crazy to imagine how different the tone would have been if it revealed the Doctor to be a manipulative geneticist. We've seen the Doctor manipulate companions before of course, but it seems at odds with the lighter, more accessible tone of the 2005 reboot.
Unless Abbott's story would have built to some sort of fake-out ending. Perhaps some sort of alternate reality or test of the Doctor and Rose's faith in each other? We'll never know!