Russell T Davies says three scripts were complete for the planned third season of his second stint on Doctor Who, and he expects they will never be seen. According to BANG Showbiz’s account of his memoir The Queerest of Folk, the writer, who returned to lead the series in 2023, wrote that “three scripts were fully written” and “it breaks my heart they won’t be seen”. The abandoned plans included a Great Fire of London adventure, a space-station horror story and a tale on a Manchester council estate.
Laurence Clark and Jack Thorne wrote the Great Fire episode. Davies says the production should have had the budget to bring the fire and the panic to the screen. Thorne’s other work includes This Is England, His Dark Materials and Adolescence.
Lydia Adetunji’s script was a horror story set on a NASA-type space station, about trypophobia, a fear of patterns of holes. Sharma Angel-Walfall wrote the Manchester episode; Davies said she had lived that life and compared the story to the film Rocks.
Further ideas were still being discussed. Davies wanted Juno Dawson and Kate Herron to return as writers, with Jonathan Groff reprising Rogue in a story set in the 1980s. Blackpool was a possible location, with video arcades at the centre of the proposed story.
The wider plan included a Christmas special and a 4-part Dalek story to close the season. BANG reports that those plans did not come to fruition after the BBC opened production of Doctor Who to competitive bids.
The report says the submission deadline has passed. Citing Deadline, it names Jed Mercurio’s HTM, World Productions and STV Studios as interested parties; 2 BBC Studios labels were also expected to bid. In its call for producers, the BBC asked for a vision combining ambitious science fiction with emotional storytelling, urging applicants to “innovate and surprise”.