10 Insane Doctor Who Plot Twists That Nearly Happened

"Humany-wumany." Too far Moffat. Too far.

For the fifth series of modern Who, writer and future showrunner Chris Chibnall brought back a classic monster that hadn't been seen since 1984.

The Silurians are a race of lizard-like creatures that are also native to planet Earth. In the two-parter The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, a mining operation awakens a hibernating colony, which they are not best pleased with at all.

The revamped, human-like look of these Silurians was achieved with intricate prosthetics, which looked great, but were an absolute bugger to apply. It was too much work to give these prosthetics to every Silurian in the story, which is why some of them wear those grey masks with large black eyes.

These masks led Chibnall to consider an almighty retcon for the Silurians - that they'd always worn masks, and that they'd always had the same humanoid faces underneath that these revamped versions do.

Those classic Silurians, with their much more alien-looking faces? Yep, Chibnall wanted to reveal that those were actually masks. Crazy.

In the end, Chibnall was overruled by Steven Moffat, who decided that these new Silurians should be a different sub-species instead.