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

Christopher Bidmead’s third and final Doctor Who script revolves around a planet that supposedly buries its own dead.

In reality, the mavity-manipulating Tractators are to blame, using their powers to pull the colonists into the earth for use in their nefarious schemes.

Quite what this entails isn’t clear. We learn that their excavation machine requires a living mind to operate (in this case, the unfortunate Captain Revere) and there’s a throwaway line about the Tractators needing bodies as well as minds. But we’re left to imagine how these bodies are actually utilised.

This is a hangover from the draft scripts, which took the concept to a whole other level: Bidmead’s original intention was for all Tractator technology to be constructed from human remains.

The idea was deemed too grisly for Saturday teatime, but it was reinstated in the story’s Target novelisation, which describes the excavation machine as follows:

“It was a repellent sight – a huge and hideous assembly of parts of human bodies, shaped something in the form of a giant Tractator. It was a machine built from the dead.”

A machine made from corpses sounds more John Carpenter than Doctor Who, though it would've been interesting to see how this was portrayed with '80s budget and effects!