Doctor Who: 13 Cool Details Russell T Davies Just Revealed About The Stolen Earth & Journey's End

6. Davies Forgot That He Needed To Destroy The TARDIS

Doctor Who Journey's End TARDIS
BBC/Twitter: @russelldavies63

Near the start of Journey's End, the Daleks locate and seize the TARDIS, taking it aboard their ship and sending it plummeting down into a massive ball of fiery energy.

The TARDIS - with Donna still inside - begins to burn up and explode, but it's saved from destruction when a clone of the Doctor springs into life and flies it away.

This entire sequence of events is extremely important, for several reasons: it establishes the creation of the duplicate Doctor, it makes the real Doctor think that Donna is dead and his TARDIS is gone, and also... it just looks cool. Unbelievably though, Davies completely forgot that the TARDIS needed to be destroyed when he was mapping out the episode's visual effects budget.

How did that happen? We're not sure. But Davies mentioned that he only had a limited number of shots as a result. Fortunately, the whole thing works very well in the finished episode, with no indication that there were any kind of behind-the-scenes problems.

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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!