Doctor Who: 12 Cool Details Russell T Davies Just Revealed About New Earth & Gridlock

5. The Episode Was Inspired By An Edgar Allan Poe Story About A Deadly Disease

Doctor Who Gridlock New Earth undercity motorway
BBC/Twitter: @russelldavies63

The idea for Gridlock partly came from Davies' desire to revisit New New York, but another big inspiration for him was The Masque of the Red Death, a short story by famed writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe.

In this story, a group of upper-class citizens seal themselves in an abbey in order to escape a disease called the Red Death. These wealthy nobles don't really care about the rest of the common people outside the walls of the abbey: they just want to wait out the Red Death in a luxurious and comfortable environment.

Davies then took elements of this plot - the rich and the poor separated, a deadly disease - and came up with Gridlock. In his version though, he decided to kill off all the rich people, telling his story from the point of view of the commoners.

He also threw in some giant crabs, for good measure.

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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!