8 Deleted Scenes That Explain Confusing Doctor Who Moments

7. Rickston's Phone (Voyage Of The Damned)

Doctor Who Voyage of the Damned Rickston Slade phone
BBC

The Mystery

With space Titanic plummeting towards the Earth and threatening to wipe out humanity, the Doctor has to move incredibly fast in order to save the passengers on the ship, as well as the people on the planet below.

He ultimately succeeds of course, but at no point in the episode does the Doctor consider using slimy businessman Rickston Slade's phone to send an SOS or to call for outside help, which could've made the whole "saving the day" thing a lot easier.

So... why wasn't Rickston's phone used to send out a distress signal?

The Deleted Scene

After the Titanic is wrecked by a meteor strike, the Doctor gathers a few survivors and then makes contact with a crew member, Alonso, to discuss their dire situation.

A scene was cut here in which Rickston complains that his phone isn't working, only for the Doctor to brush this seemingly trivial complaint away. However, in a followup scene (that was also cut) the Doctor asks to examine Rickston's phone, claiming that it should work "anywhere" because it's a "solar plus" phone. This leads the Doctor to the realisation that he can't simply call for outside help, and that he's on his own.

According to then-showrunner Russell T Davies, these two scenes were cut because they slowed the pacing of the episode, but even he acknowledges that perhaps they should've been left in - and he's the guy who wrote this story.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!