10 Unmade Doctor Who Stories We're Glad We Never Saw

Sleep No More was a laudable experiment with making a found-footage Doctor Who episode, but it didn't quite work. Mark Gatiss' capitalist satire, meta-commentary on the structure of the average Who base-under-siege and sci-fi take on found-footage tropes was undermined by the Doctor and Clara being menaced by a race of sentient eye-bogies.

Gatiss had planned to revisit the concept for a follow-up that would have taken place in a city that had also tried to remove the need for sleep, with similarly disastrous results. It would be both a sequel and a prequel, with the events in the story taking place thousands of years prior to the events of Sleep No More. The end results would be exactly the same, so it doesn't feel like it was a story worth telling.

Gatiss abandoned the idea when Moffat announced his departure, and instead wrote the far superior Empress of Mars. Gatiss had always wanted to write an Ice Warrior story set on Mars, and decided to fulfil that ambition. It's emblematic of Mark Gatiss' best work, and of his love of Doctor Who, so it's a much better story for one of the series' most prolific writers to bow out with.