10 Dark Doctor Who Moments You Weren't Allowed To See

Doctor Who is renowned for sending people scurrying behind the sofa, but it always has to tread the line between frightening and nightmare-inducing. After all, it’s a family drama, not a horror film!

But that doesn’t stop the writers from testing boundaries, adding dark moments to their scripts to see what they can get away with.

In some cases though, these moments never make it to screen, because they’re either too scary or too violent. Sometimes there are other factors, such as whether there’s enough budget for a certain scene, or whether the story would be more streamlined without it.

Fortunately, many of these dark moments still exist in draft scripts, or have been talked about in interviews. Some made it to concept art, or were filmed but omitted from broadcast.

Whatever the case, there's a good reason you haven't seen them, and in a way, this only serves to make them more tantalising. After all, the suggestion of horror is often more effective than horror itself.

Doctor Who stories where nobody dies are few and far between, with Steven Moffat’s first story The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances being a rare example. “Just this once, everybody lives!”

But as fans have often joked, it wasn’t “just this once”. From Rory to River Song to Osgood, loads of other Moffat characters have visited the God of Death and been resurrected in the years since.

This inclination to save characters has changed several stories over the years – it was Moffat who persuaded Russell T Davies to let Jenny live at the end of The Doctor’s Daughter.

He also inadvertently prevented a much more downbeat ending to New Earth.

Originally, the Doctor created a very different type of ‘cure’ for the diseased patients – one which killed them all. “He had set them free and it was their only form of release”, RTD explains in the episode's online commentary.

For a story all about new beginnings, this would hardy have been the right note to end on. And so, once again, everybody lived! Which is just as well, because “everybody dies!” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.