Doctor Who: 14 Cool Details In Steven Moffat & David Tennant's Silence In The Library Commentary

13. Tennant Disagreed With The Power Of The Sonic Screwdriver

Doctor Who Silence In The Library
BBC

Just after the title sequence, the Doctor and Donna have a nosy around the library, and the Doctor excitedly proclaims that they're in the biographies section.

Almost straight away though, the Doctor realises that something is wrong: they're standing in the biggest library in the universe... so why does it seem to be abandoned?

To find out what's going on, the Doctor heads to a nearby control station and zaps it with his sonic screwdriver, which reveals that there are over a million million life forms somewhere on the planet - which we later learn is due to a Vashta Nerada infestation.

Originally though, the Doctor didn't use a control station at all - he simply aimed his sonic into the air, and took a reading of the whole planet.

However, Tennant felt like this was a bit of a stretch - even by Doctor Who standards - and the scene was reworked into the version we know today.

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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!