blogtorwho.comOriginal Plans for Ncuti Gatwa’s Third Doctor Who SeasonDaleks, the Great Fire of London, Rogue’s return and more would have featured in this year’s season of Doctor Who Ncuti Gatwa’s time in the TARDIS came to a premature end last year with The Reality War and a regeneration that showed every sign of last minute rewrites. We know the Scottish-Rwandan actor originally intended to film a third season, from his comments in a Graham Norton interview. And now, thanks to Russell T Davies’ memoir, Queerest of Folk, we have an idea of exactly what that would have looked like. Back before the 2025 season even aired, Davies had updated Doctor Who Magazine with progress on the next. An outline for the next year of adventures already existed, he wrote, and scripts for more than one episode already existed in draft form. We now know that there were three completed scripts Fifteenth Doctor scripts. There were also concepts for a further two, and rough plan for three more. Of course, ‘complete’ is a relative concept when it comes to screen writing, and there would likely have been a few more drafts of changes before filming began. But probably those changes would have been relatively minor. Even the completed scripts didn’t have actual titles yet, but we do know their focus. Ncuti Gatwa’s third season, story by story The Great Fire of London by Laurence Clark and Jack Thorne Of course, as any fool knows, the Great Fire of London in 1666 was started by an overloading Terileptil power pack during the Fifth Doctor’s fight to stop a genetically enhanced version of the Black Death being unleashed upon humanity. However, over ten regenerations later, it seems there would have been more to tell. Davies’ comments suggest this would have been one of most lavish stories of the Gatwa era, pushing that Disney budget to its limit to bring one of history’s worst urban disasters to fiery life. Laurence Clark and Jack Thorne are both first time Doctor Who writers. Clark has written for a number of series, including super-powered CBBC teen drama Gifted, and the comedy Perfect for U&Dave. Thorne meanwhile, is a BAFTA and Emmy Award winning writer whose standing in British television rivals Davies’. He’s the author of the searing dramas Adolescence and Toxic Town, the latter starring Jodie Whittaker, as well as energetic genre fare like the Enola Holmes films and Bad Wolf’s own adaptation of His Dark Materials. Trypophobia in Space by Lydia Adetunji Like many phobias, trypophobia is both very specific and easily triggered. Moreover, it effects people with anything ranging from mild disquiet to debilitating terror. Strictly speaking, it’s a fear of a pattern of small, tightly packed holes, though bumps and flat dots in similar patterns can also trigger it. It’s a visual phobia, meaning someone could eat a strawberry or be aware of their own skin pores. That is, so long as they don’t look at the them too closely. One of the episodes originally planned for this year would have added trypophobia to the list of things Doctor Who has made viewers terrified of, alongside statues, shadows, ticking clocks and more. The script takes place about a NASA space station in the present day, or close to it. All in all, it would have been the season’s dark SF horror entry. Lydia Adetunji is another first time Doctor Who writer, having previously written episodes of His Dark Materials, Noughts + Crosses, The Last Kingdom, and Rivera. Urban Horror in Manchester by Sharma Angel-Walfall Sharma Angel-Walfall, writer of last season’s The Well would have been one of the returning writers for the season. Her new script would have taken place on a Manchester council estate. Davies compares it to the 2019 film Rocks, in which a teenage girl attempts to fend for herself and evade social services after her mother abandons her and her baby brother. Of course this is Doctor Who. So presumably the episode’s young protagonist would have had even darker, more alien, terrors to contend with. But fortunately, unlike Rocks in the film, they’d have had
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