Trivia / Dark Season

• Deleted Scene: Most of what was filmed for Dark Season made it into the final cut. However, one brief scene involving Thomas from the first episode was cut for continuity reasons, and another more substantial one from the end of the second story had to be dropped for timing, despite it involving Miss Pendragon's group deserting her on-screen after realizing their leader's terrible mental state.
• Divorced Instalment: Russell T Davies originally envisaged the series as a spin-off from Why Don't You?, the Children's BBC magazine show he had recently turned into what was, for all intents and purposes, a fantasy drama. The first episode he wrote and submitted to his superior, Anna Home, still had this element intact — and was removed only at Home's request to make it an original serial.
• Inspiration for the Work: In creating Dark Season, Davies was influenced by a great variety of science fiction serials he had seen growing up, such as Timeslip and Sky on ITV. Davies has said a primary aim was to take inspiration from them and improve on what he saw as their odd disappointments, particularly what he believed were "weak endings" - which he got around with Stuff Blowing Up.
  • And yet, despite the numerous blatant parallels between it and his beloved Doctor Who above all else (the intro, the narrative style, just the entire character of Marcie Hatter herself), Davies has always insisted these were completely unintentional riffs at the time of creation — with the sole exception of Marcie's gravity-testing yo-yo, which was a direct Fourth Doctor reference. He has since said that he saw these elements as a way to show the BBC that they still worked, regardless of Who being at the very start of its cancelled "wilderness years" at that point (and long before it was brought back by RTD himself).
• Wag the Director: Alongside the rest of her group, Miss Pendragon was supposed be blonde — in their cases, it was donning rather dodgy blonde wigs, whilst for Pendragon's actress Jacqueline Pearce, she was intended to use dye. But Pearce refused, claiming she'd "look like the whore of Babylon!"... hence her turban.
• What Could Have Been: In the official BBC novelisation of Dark Season written by Davies, a teaser epilogue pointedly sets the scene for a potential direct continuation of the series, also left open-ended by the fact of the repeated disappearance of a potentially immortal Eldritch in the final episode itself.
  • The novel's coda describes the subsequent events over the course of three months. The media reports on the happenings at the school, with a collapsed mineshaft given out as the official reason. Wider attention soon wanes, but the town's speculation over what really happened becomes the stuff of Urban Legend. Whilst work is done on the school to reopen it, a nearby 'clothes shop' suddenly closes following the disappearance of its owner, and a national news story breaks — then conspicuously fades away — about a government raid on Inga's group. A closing paragraph reveals a state-of-the-art video arcade, Valhalla, has opened where the shop was... and three teenage friends have decided to bunk off school for a visit.
  • Despite this clear setup for a sequel series, one would never go into production. According to Davies, Dark Season was partly commissioned in the first place because Tony Robinson had placed Maid Marian and Her Merry Men on break, and a scheduling gap had opened up for the BBC. That series duly resumed production the following year; RTD would instead leave the BBC to work for Granada Television on the CITV drama series Children's Ward, and also going freelance by returning to the Beeb to make Century Falls, after a different production that Dark Season director Colin Cant was working on fell apart. Davies has additionally cited the aging of the young leads involved in the series - particularly Victoria Lambert (Marcie), at that time already 19 years old - causing concern for the viability of a second run.
  • Davies has said on one occasion that his vague plans for another series of Dark Season included what would become the basic plot of Century Falls as well. Though not directly connected in reality, this ultimately became a Spiritual Successor to it by being produced as its own six-part serial. If made, its plot would have served as the follow-up series' second plot; certain aspects of the first, meanwhile, appear to have later found their way into Warriors of Kudlak, a two-part story featured in the first series of The Sarah Jane Adventures (which was naturally produced and on occasion co-written by him).
• Word of Gay: Although her sexuality is pretty much implied in some scenes anyway, Davies would later confirm that Miss Pendragon is indeed a lesbian (and a "Devil-worshipping Nazi" one at that).
• Word of God: Though Davies may have denied that Dark Season's similarities to the series he would later run twice in its revived form were ever supposed to be intentionally done for the fans, this has not stopped him from making his first original production a small but justifiably interconnected part of the Doctor Who Expanded Universe. As he has it in the epilogue of Damaged Goods, his 1996 Doctor Who New Adventures novel, Marcie grew up to be a UNIT colonel by 2017... and in the audiobook editions of the series, there are one or two further indirect references to this.
• Working Title: In his first drafts, Davies called the serial The Adventuresome Three. This was scrapped in favour of director Colin Cant's idea, which became the final title. According to Davies, Cant lifted the phrase from a passage in the Book of Revelations.