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 River Song David Tennant Alex Kingston
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.

In this post: 
Doctor Who
 
Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.