Doctor Who: 13 Cool Details Revealed In Steven Moffat's Time Of Angels Commentary

11. The Random Origins Of The Headless Monks

Doctor Who The Time Of Angels the Doctor Amy Pond
BBC

The Doctor's first appearance in the episode finds him poking around an old museum called the Delirium Archive, a place that he describes as "the final resting place of the Headless Monks".

This quick line wasn't in the script; it actually stemmed from a text conversation between Moffat and Piers Wenger, one of Doctor Who's executive producers during the Smith era.

Since the real-life location used for this museum was actually a church, Wenger texted Moffat and asked for some dialogue that would justify why the museum looked so much like a place of religion. Moffat replied with "the final resting place of the Headless Monks", and this made it into the episode.

The Headless Monks then made a physical appearance in A Good Man Goes To War, an episode from the following series.

Doctor Who The Headless Monks A Good Man Goes To War
BBC

During the commentary, Moffat doesn't mention this at all, so it seems like this quick line about the Monks was intended to be just that - a quick line - and it wasn't until later on that he decided to turn them into actual characters.

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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!