In Time For Tea

A few more of the Eighth Doctor edits I’ve been working on.

The casting of Fitz and Compassion in gifs 2 and 4 was a bit difficult to decide on. While I had previously used the popular fan-cast of Callum Blue for Fitz in my alternative cover for The Ancestor Cell, I decided it would be a bit silly not to use Matt di Angelo considering that he was actually cast as him for The Company of Friends. 

(also I'm pretty sure you can modify the cutouts to make jackets for other Doctors as well)

So I have a big conspiracy theory about season 13 of Doctor Who ("Flux"), namely that there's a lost episode was scripted and even possibly filmed in near entirety, but ended up being cut and cannibalized in post production due to behind the scenes issues, and the fandom has yet to pick up on it.

For anyone who doesn't watch the show: Flux is a miniseries of Doctor Who; a full season was not commissioned because it was produced during Covid. The most important stuff about it for the purposes of this post are:

It's 6 episodes long (¹). The episodes are all directly continuous and could not be shuffled around. (I should clarify here that, no, the showrunner can't simply choose on a whim to make 10 episodes, or only make 4; they had to stick to 6, as that was the amount they were picked up and scheduled for)

The showrunner, Chris Chibnall , wrote every episode apart from episode 4 (Village of the Angels) which he has a co-writing credit on.

(More subjectively but perhaps relevant) The season is largely considered to be kind of a structural mess and (less subjectively) there appears to some abnormal and consistent production issues (²)

So the first thing I need to evidence here is that Chris Chibnall, aforementioned showrunner and writer of the entire season, was late. Like, really late.

Word of mouth gossip had been circulating for a while that there was some sort of on-set problem involving filming having to be paused because he was still finishing scripts:

This would later be confirmed at a Gallifrey One panel (³) with Matt Strevens, the executive producer, who suggests that filming stopped to allow Chris Chibnall to finish scripts; he further implies that large swathes of episode 5/Block 2 weren't written until Episode 4/Block 1 (in which Kevin McNally debuts) was filming:

So with that context, let's talk about that Episode 4, "Village of the Angels", the only episode not attributed solely to Chris Chibnall. Co written by Maxine Alderton.

The filming pics reveal an interesting bit of trivia for Village: namely, the clapperboards show that the story was actually filmed as episode 5, not 4:

As the above tweet suggests, this doesn't make much sense. The miniseries is, again, a single continuous plot. It's not like they flipped Village and the current episode 5, Survivors of the Flux; the latter explicitly takes place chronologically after it. And yet, Village having been intended as the penultimate episode 5 is further evidenced by the original trailer for it, in which a character states that the story takes place on the 28th of November. This line is dubbed over in the final episode and subsequent trailers to instead say the 21st:

Why is this line important enough to dub? Because that's meant to line up with the air date of the episode. Episode 4 aired on the 21st and 5 on the 28th. But something happened in post production, and now it's episode 4 on the 21st instead (⁴):

So if none of these episodes were moved around but it does seem like Village was meant to be episode 5, where and what is the original episode 4?

I have a theory.

Flux has a recurring subplot involving two side characters, a married couple (Bel and Vinder) who have been separated by the titular disaster and are traveling the universe to reunite with each other. This story is told through segments sprinkled throughout the episodes. These have a different writing style (including a diary-esque narration only present in these scenes) and an internally consistent visual style that looks somewhat different to the other parts of the season.

Village of the Angels, for instance, is a moody, dark episode set in a village in the 1960s:

However, Bel and Vinder's segments in the episode have a somewhat different look:

On top of this, they never intersect with the episode's A plot (literally or in any clear thematic way), and the majority of these segments piece together into one single scene that seems to have been cut up.

So, what I think is that the bel and vinder scenes across the middle of the season were originally a single full story, an episode 4 that took a breather from the main plot and characters to follow the lives of these two side characters; the differing visual and writing style is due to it originally having been filmed separately and with a somewhat different artistic intent. I believe Chris Chibnall's cowriting credit on Angels exists because these specific scenes are from a script he wrote, but that otherwise the Angel script can be credited solely to Maxine Alderton by normal cowriting standards.

"But wait," you might say, "I thought there were already 6 episodes that are all plot relevant? If no episodes existing right now can be cut, how could this 7th episode exist?"

Remember this tidbit:

The adventures in question comprise a large amount of the next episode (Episode 5: Survivors of the Flux), nearly 20 minutes of a 50ish minute runtime (and frankly, much of the rest of the episode is somewhat fluffy build up that feels like it's taking advantage of an extended runtime). A version without this added plot would, in my opinion, only warrant one final episode rather than two.

I think the showrunner, still scrambling to finish scripts as the episodes were being filmed, and making a snap decision to include a new major subplot (⁵), wrote a finale script so long and with so many plot threads that the only way to keep all this material of was to split it into two episodes, 5 and 6. And because they only could only make 6, he had to get rid of one of the previous 5 episodes - the already scripted and filmed ones - to make room for this new episode 5. A tough order when it's a plot-heavy miniseries... if not for episode 4 being a standalone divergence from the main plot about the lives of two side characters, one that could, in theory, be cut up and dispersed throughout the season without continuity issues for the main story.

(Some notes and clarifications under the cut)

i do indeed remember! it’s in half-life, here’s the excerpt: