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

15. Moffat Had The Start Of The Episode Mapped Out Before He Agreed To Be Showrunner

Doctor Who The Eleventh Hour Amy Pond Steven Moffat
BBC/Twitter: @StevenWMoffat

Moffat was first announced as the new Doctor Who showrunner in May 2008, with The Eleventh Hour - his first episode as head honcho - airing on 3 April 2010.

Of course, the man had already written a bunch of Who episodes prior to his appointment, from Series 1's The Empty Child to Series 4's Forest of the Dead, and he's also been a fan of the show for the vast majority of his life.

Considering his strong connection to Doctor Who then, it's not really surprising to learn that Moffat had a vividly-realised plan about how he was going to kick off his first series in charge, even before he was given the job of showrunner.

The writer tweeted that he "loved" writing the opening chunk of The Eleventh Hour, and that the entire sequence of events that begins with the TARDIS crashing in Amelia's garden - and ends with the young redhead sat waiting for the Raggedy Doctor to return - had been in his head for a while before he wrote it.

On the downside, he also said that he didn't have any idea how to progress the story after this point. Worked out pretty well in the end though.

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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!