Doctor Who: 17 Cool Details Steven Moffat Just Revealed About The Eleventh Hour

4. The Doctor's Big Hero Moment Almost Didn't Happen

Doctor Who The Eleventh Hour Matt Smith Amy Pond Rory
BBC/Twitter: @StevenWMoffat

At the end of the episode, the Doctor does something unusual: he successfully deals with the Atraxi threat, and then... calls the aliens back to Earth for a scolding?

Normally, once the bad guys are defeated, a Doctor Who episode comes to a close, and a more traditional ending like this is actually what Moffat had in mind originally.

However, BBC executive Jane Tranter observed that Smith's new Doctor needed a "big swaggering hero moment", causing Moffat to add the sequence where the Doctor gives his epic "basically... run" speech on the rooftop.

Ten years on, this is still singled out as one of the Eleventh Doctor's greatest moments, so it was clearly the right call to add it.

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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!