List of unmade Doctor Who serials and films

Reasons include strike action (which caused the partially-filmed Shada to be abandoned), actors leaving roles (The Final Game, cancelled after Roger Delgado's death), and the series' going on hiatus twice—in 1985 and 1989.

[4] Some of the initial opening script was retained for An Unearthly Child when Anthony Coburn was commissioned to write a replacement on 14 June 1963, with details about the Doctor's home removed.

Also written by Hulke,[15] the story involved the departure of the Romans from Britain around the beginning of the fifth century amid clashes with the Celts and the Saxons; the time travellers brought the indigenous savages back to the safety of the TARDIS.

Story editor David Whitaker asked Hulke to revise his original storyline because he felt that the plot, with its many opposing factions, was too complicated and its conclusion echoed that of An Unearthly Child.

The Doctor and his companions are framed for murder as part of a conspiracy to kill Alexander the Great and must endure several trials, including walking on hot coals, to gain the trust of their bodyguard Ptolemy.

The four-part story idea involved the Doctor and his three companions arriving on an uninhabited planet to discover a spacecraft controlled by robots while its human occupants are in suspended animation waiting for additional crew members to again operate the crashed ship.

[35] This six-part Roger Dixon story,[35] submitted on 16 January 1967,[35] involves the TARDIS crew's arrival on a far-future Earth where a community of youths depends on unseen Elders who live in the mountains.

Although only fifteen minutes of material was considered unsuitable for Doctor Who, script editor Robert Holmes brought in Boucher to discuss ideas with himself and producer Philip Hinchcliffe.

Dawson, a veteran screenwriter, was approached by script editor Robert Holmes to develop a story that would introduce a new companion to replace Sarah Jane Smith after her departure.

[78] Written by Chris Boucher[80] and submitted after The Silent Scream was rejected in early 1975, it was based on a premise Hinchcliffe and Holmes wanted to use in which people and machines are controlled by a computer that malfunctions.

[81] Douglas Camfield's four-part story[82] was commissioned on 22 January 1976,[82] and involved the Doctor and Sarah arriving in North Africa at an isolated French Legion outpost.

[87] Written by Ted Lewis[88] and also known as The Doppelgängers,[89] the search for the fourth segment of the Key to Time takes the Doctor and Romana to Nottingham, where they meet Robin Hood and discover that he is actually a villain.

[90] Although a third script arrived on 12 May 1978, Lewis was inebriated at a meeting with Graham Williams and Anthony Read and the unsuitability of the submitted material led to its replacement by David Fisher's The Androids of Tara (in the same swashbuckling genre).

[91] After providing a second draft of the storyline to modify parts of the script to avoid issues such as the rules involving child actors,[98] Lloyd was forced to focus on his commitments as producer of Not the Nine O'Clock News.

[104] Written by Philip Hinchcliffe, this story involved the Doctor and Romana encountering an alien Luron named Godrin who crash-landed in a South American jungle in 1870.

[114] The story concerned a group of people living in the belly of a whale in space,[115] as the Doctor attempts to protect the creature from being slaughtered by a rusting factory ship.

[119] The Fifth Doctor's first story was originally intended to be the four-part Project Zeta Sigma, written by John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch,[122] (who had scripted Meglos).

[126] Written by Peter Ling and Hazel Adair, the story developed from plans by producer Nathan-Turner to create a sequel of the 1960s soap opera Compact entitled Impact.

[149] Gallifrey was a Pip and Jane Baker script for four 25-minute episodes[150] that was commissioned on 11 March 1985[143] in the wake of the hiatus announcement, which reportedly would have dealt with the destruction of the Doctor's home planet.

In 1988,[165] writer Marc Platt discussed with script editor Andrew Cartmel an idea (inspired by Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace) about stone-headed aliens[137] looking for their god-king in 19th-century Tsarist Russia.

[168] Bad Destination was later adapted by Aaronovitch and Cartmel for Big Finish's The Lost Stories in July 2011 as Earth Aid (a title invented by Dave Owen for his "27 up" article in DWM).

[169] Platt planned to have bikers controlled by the Ice Warriors (wearing similar helmets), scenes on an Earthlike, pastoral Mars, a more mystical bent to the aliens and a deepening of their history.

[175] With Tom Baker not unwilling to appear, an original production was considered and there was a meeting in June 1992 to discuss the special; by 21 July 1992, writer Adrian Rigelsford (later joined by Joanna McCaul) had completed an initial outline for Timeflyers.

The Earth is dying under the onslaught of industry, the polar caps are melting, the ozone layer is nearly destroyed ... To save the planet, the Doctor must overcome the combined forces of some of the most feared of his old adversaries.

[187]Early in the process that led to the 1996 Doctor Who film, Universal Television had Amblin Entertainment produce a writers' bible detailing John Leekley's proposed pilot and episodes of a new series.

[205] Steven Moffat asked former showrunner Russell T Davies to return to the programme after his initial departure and write an episode for the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond.

When Davies reassumed his old position as showrunner in 2023, he adapted this idea into the episode "Dot and Bubble" with the Fifteenth Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson).

[223] Elisabeth Sladen was approached to return to Doctor Who as Sarah Jane Smith to aid the transition between Tom Baker and Peter Davison, but declined the offer.

The Doctor encounters the Devil (who calls himself Harry Scratch or Scratchman), the Daleks, robots known as Cybors, scarecrows made from bones and, briefly, the Greek god Pan.

Among script proposals profiled by Lofficier are several submissions by Doctor Who and Space: 1999 alumnus Johnny Byrne and others by Robert DeLaurentis, Adrian Rigelsford, John Leekley, Mark Ezra and Denny Martin Flinn.