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

2. The Curious Absence Of The Reapers

Doctor Who Reapers
BBC Studios

In the Series 1 episode Father's Day, Rose alters a fixed point in time when she stops her father, Pete, from dying in a car accident.

In response to her meddling, a group of winged creatures - Reapers - appear in the sky and start attacking people at random. The Doctor describes these creatures as bacteria being drawn to a wound, indicating that the Reapers are attracted to fixed points in time that have been messed with or changed in some way.

So isn't it pretty odd that we haven't seen the Reapers since this episode? The Doctor and his companions have tampered with fixed points in time on countless occasions since Father's Day, and yet, the Reapers haven't shown up to play.

There are plenty of theories as to why this might be - some speculate that the incident in Father's Day was unique, while others think that the Reapers themselves are rare beings who can't attend to every single crack in the universe's timeline.

But if we're being honest, the real reason why we've only seen them in one episode - and the reason why we'll probably never see them in another - is because it just isn't feasible (from a production or scriptwriting standpoint) to have to bring back the same monster over and over again whenever a story involves some time-meddling.

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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!