10 Insane Doctor Who Episodes That Almost Happened
David Tennant nearly clashed with the wizarding world. Again.
Whether it comes from the showrunning staff or an individual writer, every single episode of Doctor Who starts with a simple, exciting idea.
Story concepts are tossed around at pitch meetings, monsters are discussed in frantic late-night emails, and slowly but surely, what was once a basic outline becomes a fully-realised slice of television that's beamed out across the world.
But not every idea makes it that far. For a variety of reasons - budget concerns, similarities to other stories - every series of Doctor Who is surrounded by the corpses of abandoned episodes, some of which actually reached the scripting stage, and others that were banished even before ink touched paper. And because the show is all about the infinite possibilities of the universe, a lot of these ideas sound rather nutty.
Maybe they would've made fantastic episodes in the end - we just don't know. But what we do know is that Doctor Who writers are free to dial their concepts up to eleven in the bonkers department, as proven by these weird and wonderful premises that were scrapped en route to the screen.
10. The Tenth Doctor Goes Full Indiana Jones
Mark Gatiss has scripted many Doctor Who episodes since 2005. In fact, from the Ninth Doctor to the Twelfth Doctor, he wrote an episode for every single series except the third and the fourth, although he did come close to filling in one of those gaps.
Back in the late 2000s, Gatiss was working on a story called The Suicide Exhibition, which was intended to air during Series 4, but was eventually replaced by The Fires of Pompeii. This huge blockbuster episode was set to involve Nazis, the British Museum and the Second World War, and according to the writer himself, it would've been an adventurous romp in the vein of a classic Indiana Jones flick:
"After the first draft, Russell [T Davies, former showrunner] said 'Let's make it the Nazis and do the full Indiana Jones on it.' The whole museum was a puzzle box of sliding doors and traps and stuff."
Imagine the Doctor investigating a booby-trapped museum in the 1940s, all the while dodging Nazis and dealing with Donna's sass. For David Tennant's "action hero" Tenth Doctor in particular, this sounds like a perfect episode. Somebody make it happen!