The latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine arrives tomorrow, and in it comes news of an intriguing-sounding Who adventure that never made it to the screen.
It’s an episode that was penned by Mark Gatiss, and had been earmarked for the 2008 run of the show. Entitled The Suicide Exhibition, it was set during World War II, and would have seen David Tennant’s Doctor doing battle with the Nazis. According to Gatiss, the episode was “on the verge of production for a while”.
As Gatiss explained, “the title came from this thing I was reading about how, in the first World War, they were evacuating stuff from museums to various Welsh museums. All this precious stuff, they hid in places like salt mines. But what they had in both World Wars was this amazing thing called the Suicide Exhibition”.
Gatiss turned in his draft to Russell T Davies who liked the idea, and it was his idea to bring the Nazis into it, and give the whole episode an Indiana Jones feel. “The museum was a puzzle box of sliding doors and traps and stuff”, Gatiss recalled.
Yet it never made it to production, with other episode filling the 2008 run – series four of the revived show – instead.