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 Amy Pond Matt Smith Karen Gillan
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 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.