Doctor Who: 13 Cool Details Steven Moffat Just Revealed About The Girl In The Fireplace

9. Mickey Was Originally Absent From The Story

Doctor Who The Girl in the Fireplace Mickey Rose
BBC/Twitter: @StevenWMoffat

On top of the episode order being jumbled around, another side effect of Doctor Who's hectic schedule is that scripts may need to be altered to include or remove certain characters.

For example, The Stolen Earth's Shadow Proclamation was originally going to be enormous, but it was stripped down to a few characters due to budget constraints.

Another character-centric alteration occurred while The Girl in the Fireplace was being written. When Moffat was first drafting the script, he mapped the whole thing out without Mickey. However, later on, he was told to include him.

While Davies and Moffat didn't go into further detail about this issue during the watch-along, we imagine that Mickey was originally absent from the episode because The Girl in the Fireplace was, at one point, envisioned as the series opener - and the series opener that we did get, New Earth, does not feature Mickey in the main adventure.

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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!