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

6. The Clockwork Droids Originally Had Hair Covering Their Faces

Doctor Who The Girl in the Fireplace clockwork droid
BBC/Twitter: @russelldavies63

The clockwork droids are one of the most memorable monsters in the show, largely thanks to their mechanical sound effects, unsettling masks (that thin smile and those dead eyes... nightmare fuel) and their penchant for blades.

It's hard to imagine them looking, sounding or acting any differently, but at one point in time, Moffat wanted them to be a little bit... hairier.

In a Twitter exchange, Davies and Moffat discussed how, early on, the clockwork droids had hair covering their faces (like Samara from the Ring movies), which might have actually been creepy, depending on the lighting of the scenes and the colour of the hair. We'll just never know.

In addition, Moffat hinted that the final masked design of the droids was producer Phil Collinson's idea.

In this post: 
Doctor Who
 
Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

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!