Doctor Who: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Weeping Angels
3. ...And Blink Almost Didn't Happen At All
Like most seasons of Doctor Who, Series 3 features a Dalek story: in this case, the New York-set two-parter Daleks in Manhattan and Evolution of the Daleks.
Ultimately penned by Helen Raynor, these episodes were originally assigned to Moffat, but he had to drop out for unknown reasons. Obviously, losing a writer was a massive inconvenience for the production team, so to make up for the trouble, Moffat offered to write "the episode nobody likes": Series 3's Doctor-lite story.
Doctor-lite stories - like Series 2's Love & Monsters - are designed to feature as little of the Doctor as possible. This gives the lead actor more time to shoot other episodes, and thus, more episodes can be cranked out per series. It's an efficiency strategy.
So what if Moffat had stuck to the original plan, and had written the Dalek episodes? Well, obviously, he wouldn't have been able to write Blink in Series 3, and because he was planning to include the Angels in the library in Series 4, we came very close to never getting the Blink that we know today.