10 Deleted Doctor Who Characters You've Never Heard Of

While the version of Hide that made it to screen is relatively low-key, the original plan for the episode had a much wider scope.

Not only did writer Neil Cross want it to be a crossover featuring Bernard Quatermass – the hero of three BBC serials from the 1950s, that heavily inspired Doctor Who – but he also planned for the villain to be a figure from Time Lord mythology.

In the first drafts of Hide, the mysterious creature trapped in the pocket universe wasn’t the lonely Crooked Man, but The Lost Lord, an ancient Time Lord who had been trapped so long he was remembered on Gallifrey only as a myth. The Time Lords' bogeyman, essentially.

And while the Crooked Man was trying to break into our universe in a surprisingly heart-warming attempt to reunite with its long-lost lover, The Lost Lord’s ambitions were a little more nefarious than that: he wanted to absorb all of time itself.

Though Hide is generally a well-regarded episode, if it had stuck to the original plan, it would've been one of the biggest episodes of Series 7. Gallifrey and Time Lord history is still somewhat nebulous, and so getting insight into a Gallifreyan ghost story would've been an interesting way to flesh things out, without compromising any of the mystery or intrigue surrounding the Doctor themselves.