Doctor Who: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Weeping Angels

3. ...And Blink Almost Didn't Happen At All

Doctor Who Blink
BBC Studios

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.

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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!