10 Terrible Doctor Who Ideas That Nearly Happened

Doctor Who is full of so many great what-ifs

What if Sarah Jane had returned for Tom Baker's final season? What if Christopher Eccleston had met Matt Smith and David Tennant's Doctors

What if Rory had just got in the TARDIS instead of going back to check on that gravestone

I mean, come on Rory, you're smarter than that! But for every awesome what-if idea, there's one that isn't so great

I'm Ellie for Who Culture, and here are 10 terrible Doctor Who ideas that nearly happened

Number 10. The Young Doctor Adventures Keen to cash in on Doctor Who's overnight success in 2005

the BBC tapped Russell T. Davis for spin-off ideas. One concept that was pitched to Russell T. Davis was a CBBC show

that would focus on the Doctor's childhood on Gallifrey. For obvious reasons, Davis declined to pursue the idea further

and developed the Sarah Jane adventures instead. It was the right call, as a series of the young Doctor adventures

would have risked destroying any sense of mystery surrounding the character. For starters, how could you develop a whole show around the Doctor's childhood

and not reveal their birth name. Sure, the Doctor's Theta Sigma nickname from the Armageddon factor

would provide a decent workaround, but then what would their parents call them

What would those parents be like? And then what would the stories be like? Would we have young versions of the Doctor and the Master

running rings around their tutors at the academy and having food fights in the canteen

It sounds like what the BBC really wanted was Harry Potter with timey-wimey-ness and TARDIS's instead of spells on Quidditch

Thankfully, Russell nipped this one in the bud. Number 9. Tom Baker in the TV movie

One of the biggest stipulations for the 1996 TV movie was that the continuity was maintained

with the previous 33 years. To that end, Sylvester McCoy was cast as the seventh Doctor

for the regeneration into Paul McGann's eighth Doctor. Now, while that itself was arguably a bad

idea for a relaunch of the show, it made far more sense than one change suggested by one of

the executive producers. Joe Wright, who represented the BBC's interests on the project

was keen to move away from the apparently negative public perception of the Sylvester McCoy era

Wright believed that Tom Baker would be a bigger draw as a past Doctor to hand over the torch to McGann

That might have been true, not least because Baker was the best-known Doctor in the USA at the time

but it would have been utterly disastrous for Doctor Who continuity if an older Tom Baker had been gunned down in San Francisco

Would that negate the entire 1980s period of Doctor Who? What would that even mean

Sylvester McCoy was absolutely the right choice for the TV movie, And given Baker's reluctance to work on things like The Five Doctors, there's no telling

whether he'd have agreed to return anyway. 8. The Toclophane Being Behind the Time War

When the Terry Nation estate quibbled over the use of the Daleks in the 2005 revival

Russell T Davis and Robert Shearman had to come up with new antagonists for Series 1 just in case Contrary to popular belief Shearman didn just tip over Dalek and write Cyberman

Russell T. Davis created another monster for use in that first Dalek episode

which briefly had the jokey working title of Absence of the Daleks

Called Spheres, these monsters were essentially an early version of the Toclophane from the Series 3 finale. This means that a race of evolved future

humans inside metal balls would have been revealed as the terrifying enemy that laid waste to the

Time Lords, the Nestean, and the Gelf. Thankfully, the nation estate buckled and we got the Daleks

as it should have been from the start. It is hard to imagine the Toclophane having anywhere near the

iconic power of a Dalek, and as last of the Time Lords proved, they don't really work on their own

They need a character like the Master to use them as a private army. Still, colourful skittleballs

in Series 5 would have been quite something. Number 7. Nelvana's Animated Series

Of the various independent production companies wanting to take on the Doctor Who license in the

early 1990s, Nelvana got quite far in devising a concept. The Canada-based animation studio

developed a Doctor Who cartoon that would have sat neatly alongside the likes of the real

Ghostbusters or Captain Planet on Saturday mornings. Nelvana's animated Doctor Who series

was a complete reimagining of the show, which turned the Doctor into a sort of crusader for

hire, working at the behest of the Time Lords. The series retained iconic characters like the

Master, the Cybermen, the Daleks, and good old K-9. However, the dialogue in the scripts and

treatments doesn't feel like Doctor Who at all. For example, at one point, the Doctor tells K-9 to

cease that infernal barking. Meanwhile, the Master was to be half-man, half-cyborg

with a robot bird sidekick and looks modelled after Sean Connery. Alrighty then! The project

was eventually shut down by the BBC, which was probably for the best. Although it is slightly

sad that Doctor Who's time stick weapon wasn't the big Christmas toy in 1993

Number 6. The Return of Meglos Remember in The Lodger how there was a nefarious alien menace that was tied to an abandoned

silence ship? Writer Gareth Roberts originally had another idea for the episode's villain. He

wanted to bring back shape-shifting cactus monster Meglos, who would masquerade as the

Doctor and Craig's neighbour, Mrs. Meglos. On one level, Meglos would work quite well as a

villain in The Lodger. He could easily assume the forms of the people luring unsuspecting

civilians into the Doctor and Craig's building. But while the return of Meglos amused Stephen

Moffat, he nixed the idea because, after the Vinvoce and Banacafalata, Doctor Who didn't need

any more spiky-faced creatures. Not only that, but an alien posing as a kindly old lady was

basically the plot of Amy's Choice, which would have aired just a few weeks prior. Instead

Moffat suggested that the threat should be a malfunctioning time machine something he would return to again in his era It was a much better idea as the sad voices on the other end of the intercom were a far more chilling threat than a cactus would have been 5 Rose Tyler Earth Defense

One of Russell T. Davis' worst ideas was to develop a Rose Tyler spin-off series that would

have aired on BBC One after the end of Doctor Who Series 2. In a 2006 interview with Doctor Who

Magazine, Davis said that the entire show, given the working title Rose Tyler, Earth Defense

had been commissioned by the BBC and had even been budgeted. The next stage would have been to secure Billy Piper's involvement

but it was then that Russell T. Davis began to have second thoughts. While he watched the filming of the final scene between the Doctor and Rose in Doomsday

he realised what a terrible idea it would be to go ahead with the spin-off show

Discussing his reasoning with Doctor Who magazine, Davis said, quote, It spoils Doctor Who if we can see Rose

if we see as a concrete fact that her life continues to be as exciting without the Doctor

Cancelling Earth Defence was definitely the right decision for Doctor Who, especially as Freema Adjaman had a hard enough time following Billy Piper

without the former companion also having her own TV show. Number 4. Mark Gatiss' Doctor Who revival

When Russell T. Davis brought back Doctor Who in 2005, it was zippy, vibrant and modern

The faster pace was a breath of fresh air that reinvigorated Doctor Who for a new generation

while staying true to the show's core ethos. However, things could have been much different

In the early 2000s, future new series writers Mark Gatiss and Gareth Roberts

along with future Doctor Who magazine editor Clayton Hickman, were devising their own Doctor Who reboot

Instead of introducing the young, energetic Doctor blowing up a central London department store

their pilot introduced a 60-something Doctor working in an antique shop in a sleepy village

And instead of 13 episodes at 45 minutes, Gatiss wanted to do seven three-part serials

totaling 21 episodes. Gatiss, Roberts and Hickman acknowledged that they were too meek in their Doctor Who pitch

highlighting ways to save money rather than sell an exciting adventure series

It's likely that if this version of Doctor Who had got off the ground, then it would have been a fun little curio like the TV movie

But it feels highly unlikely that it would have spawned 19 years of telly

Number 3. Killing off the Brigadier Writer Ben Aronovich originally intended to kill off Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart

in the 1989 serial Battlefield, before realising that he couldn't bring himself to do it

It's just as well, as it's hard to imagine a story that would have had the sufficient magnitude

to kill off the Doctor's oldest friend. Battlefield is a lot better than people give it credit for

and it would make a degree of thematic sense to end the Brigadier's story there. It's a story about old soldiers

and the never-ending cycles of war and violence. However, it's also poorly directed

meaning that the darkness of the subject matter largely gets lost in the sunny scenery and slapstick battle sequences Against that backdrop the death of the brigadier would have been an insult Aronovich inability to kill the brig meant that we never had to endure the sharp tonal gear shift from Arthurian

knights trampolining over explosions to the doctor losing his oldest friend. Instead

the brig went out as he always should have, peacefully. Who knows if his corpse would

have still been turned into a Cyberman, but this is terrible ideas that nearly happened

Not definitely happened. So let's move on. Number two, The Doctor's Rose Experiment

Though Boomtown feels like it was always part of the Series 1 plan

it was actually a late replacement for an unusual story by shameless creator Paul Abbott

Abbott worked on his outline for a few weeks, which revolved around the idea

that Rose had been created by the Doctor as an experiment to find the perfect companion

First of all, what on earth? Second of all, quite how this would have even worked in the context of the rest of the series

is anyone's guess. That's a pretty huge shift in the Doctor Rose dynamic, and by that point

there were still two episodes left, not to mention Rose's return in series two. It was all for naught

in the end though. Abbott had to abandon the project due to other commitments, and Russell T

Davis wrote Boomtown in its place. The Ninth Doctor had a lot of darkness in him coming off

the Time War, but going so far as to reveal that he bred a companion in some twisted experiment

feels like a step too far. Also, it's bloody weird. Number 1. Stephen Taylor returns as a cow

If you're ever in Cardiff very late at night and your heart is in the right place, you can sometimes

hear a giant Welshman hooting in Tetley's-fueled delight as he comes up with another insane Doctor

Who concept. This is the noise that Russell T. Davis makes when he comes up with ideas like

Captain Jack is the face of Bo and Sue Tech. Thankfully, not all of Russell T. Davis's late

night brainwaves have made it into the show. One particular plan to bring back Peter Purvis

in The Giggle was so ridiculous that it rightly received a lot of flack from David Tennant and

Phil Collinson. During the video commentary for The Giggle, Russell T. Davis outlined his

abandoned plans for a character called the Ruminant, which was a giant cow. So far

so Russell T. Davis. But the giant cow would later whip off his mask like something out of

Scooby-Doo to reveal that he was none other than First Doctor companion Steven Taylor

returning to help the Doctor fight the Toymaker. Even in an episode as insane as The Giggle

the ruminant is clearly a step too far. Thankfully, we got Stephen and Vicky's Tales of the TARDIS episode instead

which was much better. Not a giant cow in sight. So, James Corden fighting a cactus

No thank you. But not every idea is naff. So while you're here

why not check out 10 awesome Doctor Who ideas that nearly happened

In the meantime, I've been Ellie for Who Culture, and in the words of Riversong herself, goodbye, sweeties

Thank you