10 More What Ifs About Doctor Who

4. What If The Dark Dimension Had Been Produced?

We wouldn't have had to endure Dimensions in Time, for one thing. That's bound to be a selling point, surely. The Dark Dimension was originally going to be the series' 30th anniversary story, written by Adrian Rigelsford and commissioned as a direct-to-video film project by BBC Enterprises. Unfortunately, that was the biggest problem: BBC Enterprises, then as now, primarily handles merchandising and licensing, not film production. Even if it had had the necessary facilities and resources to do the special, there were other problems - the main character in the special would have been a Fourth Doctor who had never died in Logopolis, thereby changing history, and meaning that Jon Pertwee, Colin Baker, and others would have been relegated to little more than cameos. Think of it as a Five Doctors in which Tom Baker showed up but none of the other Doctors did for long. But what if there had been the facilities and resources available to make this story? Would it have been any better than Dimensions in Time (since, frankly, it couldn't have been worse)? Interesting that we should ask, since we can get a glimpse of what it might have looked like (in a fairly well done animated form) on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rilhirixZxs (Gotta love the models borrowed from Archer, too.) But the main thing to remember is that, as much as Dimensions in Time is universally reviled, despite its laudatory goals, it did at least give each of the Doctors equal screen time. The Dark Dimension might have fulfilled Tom Baker's desire to play the role again (which is reportedly what started the whole thing rolling), it would have been a disservice to Pertwee, Davison, Colin Baker, and McCoy. As for the story... well, that's been covered often enough in other venues that we don't need to rehash it here, but it's... well, complicated. Yes, even more so than Dimensions in Time. Perhaps we were better off?