Trivia / Doctor Who S30 E14 "The Next Doctor"

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• Completely Different Title: The French title is "Cyber Noël" (Cyber Christmas).
• Doubling for London: Gloucester doubled for Victorian London.
• Edited for Syndication: 60-minute distillations of this episode conclude on the "Bravo, sir!" scene.
• Recycled Set: The set for the cyberfactory is actually the Torchwood Hub set cleverly disguised.
• What Could Have Been:
  • According to Russell T Davies' autobiography, the original plan for the 2008 Christmas special was to depict the Earth being reshaped in the image of the Harry Potter books after an alien parasite starts feeding off of J. K. Rowling's imagination, with the Doctor having to fight witches and wizards to save Rowling and the world. The real-life Rowling was intended to portray her fictionalized counterpart in the special.
  • An early script draft had the story following on from the unused Cybermen cliffhanger for "Journey's End". The two inside the TARDIS would vanish, and the Doctor would realise that they were falling through the Time Vortex, and follow them to Victorian England.
  • Russell T Davies considered having the Doctor's companion be a grown-up version of the Little Match Girl.
  • Davies considered setting the story in the court of King Henry VIII, but rejected this notion on the grounds that it would not feature enough recognizable Christmas traditions (since these typically postdated the sixteenth century). He also mulled another completely new idea, about a hotel which becomes displaced in time.
  • Davies later realised that it would have been a better ending to have Miss Hartigan redeem herself by making the falling CyberKing disappear, rather than introducing what Davies calls "a silly Dalek continuum dimension vault" to the plot. Davies states that he "can't bear that there could have been a better ending than we actually transmitted".
  • Martin Clunes (who previously played Lon in "Snakedance") was originally cast as Jackson Lake but pulled out.
• Word of God: Neil Gaiman would later say that the Cybus Industries Cybermen who were defeated in this episode eventually met up with the Mondas Cybermen, and through their "mixing of technology" created the ones seen in "Nightmare in Silver".
• Working Title: "Court of the Cyber King".

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