10 Dropped Doctor Who Plot Threads We'll Never Get Answers To

3. The Mystery Of The Valeyard

Doctor Who Trial of a Time Lord Valeyard
BBC Studios

The Trial of a Time Lord - Colin Baker's final series - introduced the mysterious Valeyard, a Time Lord prosecutor who, according to the Master, is a sinister future incarnation of the Doctor, a physical manifestation of his darkest impulses.

Considering how important this reveal was in relation to Doctor Who canon, the Valeyard seemed primed to become a recurring character in the Whoniverse (perhaps like the Master) allowing the show to fill in some of the blanks that his brief stint left wide open: how was he created? Where, specifically, does he stem from in the Doctor's timeline? Heck, when we last saw him onscreen at the end of Trial of a Time Lord, he was laughing right into the camera, hinting at more villainous antics to come.

But nope. We haven't seen him since.

The Valeyard is one of those characters who's brought up every single time a new Doctor Who series is about to be broadcast, with people saying that he should be the new overarching villain, and many theories being posited about how he could return.

But at this point - over 30 years after his last appearance - it just feels like the creators don't care about the Valeyard as much as the fans do.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!