8 Doctor Who Episodes With Alternate Endings
6. The Parting Of The Ways
The Televised Ending
After Rose Tyler becomes the Bad Wolf and vanquishes the Dalek threat, the Ninth Doctor takes this enormous power away from her in order to save her life.
But his life? It's over.
Absorbing all that energy has killed him, and it's time for him to regenerate into his tenth incarnation, which he does. Bye-bye Eccleston, hello Tennant.
The Alternate Ending
Unlike most of the entries on this list, we don't actually have any footage of this one, only a few small details found in places like the BBC's fact file for the episode. This alternate ending was never intended to be shown to the public, but it's very much real.
The whole point here was to try and hide the fact that the Doctor was going to regenerate at the end of the episode. So, an alternate ending - which was written and filmed - showed the TARDIS scanning Rose, with the message "LIFEFORM DYING" being displayed on the console monitor. Based on that description, this would've been slotted in around the same time that Rose becomes the Bad Wolf.
This way, nobody would suspect that the Doctor is about to die, because there's no way that the writers would kill off the companion, and the main attraction... right?
This is the ending that the press would've seen in early screenings, but when Eccleston's departure was outed earlier than planned, this whole idea was scrapped.