20 Cancelled Doctor Who Episodes You Need To Know About
Judi Dench as a companion and Peter Capaldi as a vampire? We were robbed!
As of Wish World/The Reality War, there have been over 300 Doctor Who stories (or almost 900 individual episodes). But there are many others that never got made.
The reasons for this are endless. Sometimes a script is too similar to others in development. Sometimes the writer has to drop out due to other developments. In many cases, the budget simply doesn’t stretch far enough. And quite often, in spite of everything, things just don’t work out.
The writers in question range from seasoned Who scribes who were denied the chance for more episodes, to “celebrity” names who looked to make their mark on the show.
Although lots of these unmade stories were simply just abandoned, some morphed into other, almost unrecognisable adventures. Some have since been adapted into other mediums, such as audio dramas and novels. And some could even still reach the screen one day!
From sequels and prequels to an anniversary special, a crossover, a surprising character study and radical reimaginings, here are the craziest Doctor Who stories we never saw...
20. Death To The Doctor
Having worked on three Tenth Doctor stories and multiple instalments of The Sarah Jane Adventures, Gareth Roberts was one of the first writers Steven Moffat approached when he took over as showrunner in 2010.
Roberts would end up writing Series 5’s eleventh episode, The Lodger – a loose adaptation of a 2006 Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, which saw the Tenth Doctor briefly move in with Mickey. And carnage ensued, as you would imagine.
But at one stage he was set to contribute an entirely different episode.
Titled Death to the Doctor, this would've been set on a Vegas-style planet obsessed with law enforcement, with the Doctor arrested for a minor offence and forced to fight a massive Cyclops (hence the title). Another key element was a disgraced Sontaran called Skorm.
It’s a story that was just too costly too produce (unsurprisingly, The Lodger was much more wallet-friendly), though its impact would be felt elsewhere.
Most notably, Skorm would inspire the character of Strax, debuting in the following year’s A Good Man Goes to War. In the interim, the title would be used, in modified form, for Matt Smith’s Sarah Jane Adventures story, Death of the Doctor.
See, it all worked out in the end!