12 Abandoned Doctor Who Subplots

Russell T Davies' Time War concept, which integrated the show's 16-year hiatus, or the "Wilderness Years", was simple yet ingenious. It gave the Doctor a renewed mysterious side to their character not seen since before we discovered the Doctor's own race in The War Games.

There were brief, albeit brutal, mentions of this infinite war throughout the Davies and Steven Moffat eras:

THE DOCTOR: They're never going to come! Your race is dead! You all burnt, all of you. Ten million ships on fire. The entire Dalek race wiped out in one second.

DALEK: You lie!

THE DOCTOR: I watched it happen! I made it happen!

We then got to hear how the "War turned into Hell" in The End of Time, and as mentioned in the previous entry, this was the reason the Doctor had to stop the Time Lords. So given the rather crappy hand he was dealt with at the time, his actions were, arguably, justified. Even Moffat said he was "still haunted by the guilt" at reversing the Doctor's fateful decision in The Day of the Doctor.

But the fact he was able to is amazing in itself, considering the entire Time War is meant to be time-locked, which segues us nicely into...