Doctor Who: 13 Cool Details Steven Moffat Just Revealed About The Girl In The Fireplace
9. Mickey Was Originally Absent From The Story
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.