Doctor Who: 15 Cool Details Peter Harness Just Revealed About The Zygon Invasion
1. The Doctor's Speech Was Originally Shorter
On the subject of that speech, here's another really interesting fact about it.
The entire sequence is around ten or eleven minutes long, and again, it's set inside a single room, with barely any music, no action to speak of, and no cutaways. It's just three people talking, but it works beautifully.
Still, it's unusual to find a dialogue scene of this length in a TV show, especially one like Doctor Who, which is known for its fast pace, crazy sci-fi concepts, and murderous aliens. If anything, you'd expect a scene like this to be cut down as much as possible, but in this case, the exact opposite happened: it was made longer.
According to Harness, the scene was five pages long in the first draft of the script, but had grown to ten or eleven pages when the time came to shoot it.
The writer also noted that you rarely see scenes like this that go on for five pages - let alone double that number - so we should be thankful that the whole thing actually made it into the episode!
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Thoughts on The Zygon Invasion and The Zygon Inversion? Where would you rank them within Series 9? Let us know in the comments section!