Doctor Who: 10 Things You Never Knew About Series 4 Of NuWho

2. Elton Pope Was Meant To Return in Journey's End

Let's talk about Love & Monsters. Wait, where are you going? No! Come back! Love & Monsters is a second series episode notorious for being one of the very worst episodes. It consistently lands in the top 10 worst episode polls and is only barely saved by the fact it's immediately followed by Fear Her. There are plenty of reasons that Love & Monsters deserves the carping it gets, but since this post is about Series 4, you won't find any of them here. Suffice to say, the sight of a loincloth clad, phlegm-coloured Peter Kay still haunts the nightmare of every child, including the one who designed his costume. Being a double-banked episode, both the Doctor and Rose are hardly in the story. Instead, viewers follow the mishaps of Elton Pope (played by Marc Warren), a man who encountered the Doctor as a child and is obsessed with finding him again. He meets up with a gang of like-minded Doctor enthusiasts in a loving tease about the fandom (kinder than the outright disdain Moffat would later write into Who and Sherlock) and eventually runs into the Time Lord during a hasty cameo. Elton was hardly a fan-favourite, though he wasn't the worst thing about Love & Monsters but he certainly wasn't the best, either. But Russell T Davies seemed to think otherwise, as the character was originally set to return in the Series 4 finale as one of the Children of Time. Whilst the breakdown lists Elton above even Rose and Mickey in the list of returning allies, the idea seems to have been discarded later on with no explanation. Most likely reason is that, compared to the gang of alien hunters and dimension-hoppers teaming up to help the Doctor, a fanboy who routinely molests a paving slab would have been a bit outclassed. Moving on...