Even though Doctor Who is off the air right now, the BBC's competitive tender process is finally moving forward. The interested studios have submitted their bids, and an announcement about who will be selected to take the beloved-but-troubled sci-fi series into the future (or past) is expected to be announced in spring 2027.
However, while Whovians are focused on new beginnings and what lies ahead for the Doctor, former showrunner Russell T Davies has been busy telling everyone what could have happened if Disney hadn't cut ties and run. As it turns out, Radio Times reports that Davies has confirmed there are three full adventures already penned that will now never see the light of day. Combined with the recent information about the now-cancelled 2026 Christmas special, the era that never was is looking to have been further along in the writing process than generally believed.
What the scrapped Doctor Who adventures would have been about
The all-but-confirmed assumption that Ncuti Gatwa was supposed to stay on longer as the Fifteenth Doctor means that Davies probably intended Gatwa to lead these stories. That said, it hasn't been confirmed whether Billie Piper or someone else was the actor the writers actually had in mind. Regardless, Davies has released the details about what these three scripts were about.
The first was "A brilliant story set during the Great Fire of London," written by Laurence Clarke and Jack Thorne. The latter had tried to make it in Steven Moffat's writers' room in the 2010s, but had never been able to make it work. This would have been a great shot of redemption, and I can only imagine how disappointed Thorne is by history repeating itself in such an annoyingly creative way. His impressive list of credits includes His Dark Materials and the Enola Holmes movie trilogy.
The second script, written by Lydia Adetunji (His Dark Materials), was set to be a "brutal horror story" set on a "NASA-type space station," with the story focusing on trypophobia — the fear and/or disgust when faced with a pattern of small or large holes. Given how cute the Disney era often tried to be, this is the Doctor Who episode I'm most disappointed we'll never see. It would have been a breath of fresh air.
Finally, Davies also mentioned a "lovely" episode set on a Manchester council estate, written by Sharma Angel-Walfall, who penned "The Well" in Gatwa's second season. Davies went on to discuss the early stages of planning a "four-part epic" built around the Daleks — a Doctor Who villain totally absent from Gatwa's run. Other writers, both new and returning, were also reached out to as Davies continued to prepare for Doctor Who season 3 of the Disney era before the plug was pulled.
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