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

8. This Shot Of The Byzantium Wasn't In The Plan

Doctor Who The Time Of Angels Byzantium spaceship
BBC

After the opening title sequence, the very first shot shows the TARDIS chasing after the doomed Byzantium spaceship.

Normally, cool-looking effects shots like these are pre-planned and factored into each episode's tight budget, but in this case, that wasn't what happened.

According to Moffat, this particular shot "wasn't in the script" and it "wasn't in the plan". Rather, it was offered up by The Mill - the visual effects company that worked on the episode - and of course, the Doctor Who team accepted it gladly.

From Moffat's words, it's not clear whether they got this shot for free, or whether they still had to pay for it. He simply says that The Mill "gave us a shot".

If we had to guess, we'd probably say that it wasn't free - purely taking into consideration the amount of man-hours required to produce something like this - but either way, it was a nice gesture, and a damn fine shot.

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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!