Doctor Who Season 15 Deleted Scenes Still Leave Out the Most Important Bit

Doctor Who turned 62 this week, but the celebrations were decidedly muted. This makes a certain amount of sense, given that the franchise is in what can only be called a state of considerable flux—the Disney deal is dead, the spinoff The War Between the Land and the Sea hasn’t aired yet (and won’t for a while in most countries), and we have no idea who the next Doctor will be, or why Billie Piper’s back on the canvas for some as-yet-undetermined reason. It’s, to put it mildly, a weird and slightly frustrating time to be a Whovian, which probably explains why one of the few items released to mark the occasion was a batch of deleted scenes from the series’ most recent outing. 

To be fair, this isn’t nothing — there’s almost 20 minutes of new footage from what turned out to be Ncuti Gatwa’s final season, with snippets from every episode except “The Well.” (Instead, we get one from the preceding Christmas special, “Joy to the World.”) It’s easy to see why most of these scenes were cut, if only because outside of Fifteen’s New Year’s Eve phone call to former companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) and Conrad’s (Jonah Hauer-King) visit to see Ruby’s family in “Lucky Day,” none of them add all that much to the stories the larger episodes were telling. 

In fact, what’s most interesting about these deleted scenes is the fact that the one we all most want to see has been completely left out: “The Reality War’s” original ending. 

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the most recent season of Doctor Who wasn’t originally supposed to end with Fifteen’s regeneration. In fact, according to former star Carole Ann Ford, it appears as though it was set to reintroduce the Doctor’s granddaughter, Susan, and perhaps even lead into some sort of answers about the long-standing mystery surrounding what actually happened to her character. Ford described filming a scene in which she and an unidentified child actor assumed to be Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps, who played Poppy, watch Fifteen and his companion Belinda (Varada Sethu) dance at a party. Viewers never actually saw that moment onscreen — in fact, the episode’s ending was almost entirely changed — and if Disney+ hadn’t accidentally used a promo photo from that moment on their landing screen, they might have never known it existed at all. 

Maybe it’s a lot to ask Doctor Who to release something like this to the public. After all, it would require publicly admitting to whatever massive changes clearly went down behind the scenes that so clearly altered the course of Gatwa’s time in the TARDIS in a way they’ve never been willing to do before. But don’t we kind of deserve to see it anyway? After bringing back Ford for a quick cameo in “The Interstellar Song Contest” and seeming poised to finally confront literal decades of Susan speculation, it’s almost insulting to pretend like it all never happened. And that it wasn’t obviously going somewhere very different from Piper poking her head out of the TARDIS door in the season’s final moments. Sigh. Maybe we’ll get it in a box set someday.