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

11. There Was Almost A Longer Scene Set Inside The TARDIS

Doctor Who Silence In The Library River Song David Tennant Alex Kingston
BBC

One other idea that Moffat had for extending the episode was to include a lengthy scene set inside the TARDIS, but in the end, this never came to pass.

The TARDIS isn't really in this two-parter very much, which is presumably why Moffat felt like there was room for more TARDIS-oriented material.

So what would this extra TARDIS scene have been? Well, Moffat states that he wrote "two pages of absolute waffle" in which the Doctor and Donna talk about a beach while stood around the console. In the final cut of the episode, Donna says that she and the Doctor were planning to "hit the beach" prior to arriving in the library, so this extra scene would've expanded on that a bit more.

Amusingly, Moffat actually used this "adding a TARDIS scene to flesh out an episode" trick when he became showrunner. As we already mentioned, The Time Of Angels came in too short, so Moffat scripted in that early TARDIS scene involving the Doctor, Amy and River, to make the episode a suitable length.

Doctor Who The Time Of Angels River Song Amy Pond Eleventh Doctor TARDIS
BBC

Shooting in the TARDIS doesn't require as much money as a location shoot, so it's a quick and easy way to add more scenes to an episode when necessary.

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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.