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

Andrew Cartmel famously told Marc Platt that Lungbarrow was too literary to realise effectively on a BBC budget in the late 1980s. It was replaced by the equally opaque and literary Ghost Light, and controversial as this may sound, it's for the best. During Flux, the concepts of Lungbarrow came back to the surface, with the Doctor presented with a strange, crooked house as a metaphor for her hidden memories.

Lungbarrow was Marc Platt's attempt to shed some light on the Doctor, and his family history. Lungbarrow is the Doctor's family home, which has disappeared into the earth out of shame. It's a grand, poetic idea for sure, but for an era that was attempting to return some mystery to the character, exploring the Doctor's family tree and home world in extensive detail feels like a misstep.

It revealed that the Doctor was the reincarnation of one of the founding members of Timelord society. It even suggests that the Doctor's mother might even be Leela, who married a Gallifreyan guard! It's unclear exactly how much of this would have ended up in the TV version, but it's interesting to note that Chris Chibnall has effectively brought some of these ideas to life, by establishing that the Doctor's DNA forms the building blocks of the Gallifreyan's regenerative abilities!