10 Doctor Who Deleted Scenes That Should Have Been Left In
They cut THAT footage from Twice Upon A Time? Criminal!
In a show like Doctor Who, there are plenty of ideas that never make it to the screen.
There are the stories that never were, such as Tom MacRae’s Century House, Mark Gatiss’ Sleep No More sequel, and the abandoned Season 23.
Then there are the stories that were produced, albeit in a very different form to how they were first envisaged. For instance, did you know that Kate Stewart and UNIT featured in early drafts of Flatline, or that the Master wasn’t always part of Spyfall?
Even if an idea survives to the shooting script, there’s no guarantee it will appear in the finished production. Indeed, over the years, loads of Doctor Who has ended up on the cutting room floor – from snippets of dialogue, to entire plot threads.
Not every deleted scene has made it into the public domain either (we’re still waiting to see It Takes You Away’s mysterious Spindleman in action). But the ones that do exist have given fans lots of food for thought.
And though it’s usually easy to see why they were cut, we can’t help but wish that some of them had been left in...
10. “You Get One Detour!” (Daleks In Manhattan)
Martha Jones doesn’t become a fully-fledged companion until well into Series 3. For the first six episodes, she’s just a temporary TARDIS traveller.
It's easy to forget this, and that might be because a crucial scene was cut.
At the end of Smith and Jones the Doctor offers Martha a single trip. At the start of Gridlock, he stretches that definition to include a trip to the past and a trip to the future, before returning her home in The Lazarus Experiment.
But first, Martha gets another trip back in time, to 1920s New York. How come?
Originally, an explanation was given onscreen, in the form of a TARDIS interior scene cut from the start of Daleks in Manhattan. This lasts for almost two minutes, and sees Martha coaxing the Doctor into taking a cheeky detour.
The scene was cut for two reasons: for time, and because it was felt that the episode had two openings – the TARDIS scene, and the scene outside the Statue of Liberty. With the TARDIS scene being less integral to the narrative, it was the one that had to go.
Structurally, the episode probably works better for it. But it’s a scene that really should exist in some form, given how important it is to Martha’s journey. It would be a neat addition to the story, should it ever get novelised!