The conclusion to the 2005 episode ‘The Doctor Dances’ has been the subject of much debate, mostly on our Facebook page. What was really going on in the final moments of this classic adventure?
In ‘The Doctor Dances,’ the streets of London are being terrorised by gasmask-wearing zombies, crying out for their mothers. Worse, it’s 1941 – the height of the London blitz. The Doctor finds himself in a desperate race against time to stop the DNA of the entire human race from being rewritten in the form of a terrified boy looking for his “mummy.” It’s all because of a Chula warship deposited by Captain Jack Harkness which (unbeknownst to him) contains nanogenes which can ‘fix’ people.
In this case, though, the nanogenes have gotten confused, and they think all human beings should be wearing gasmasks. At the end of ‘The Doctor Dances,’ the Time Lord stops them by (spoilers) uniting the boy with his mother, and proving to the nanogenes that they have the same DNA; she’s the mother, and she doesn’t have a gasmask welded to her face, so the boy shouldn’t either. The nanogenes realise this, and change the boy, and his victims, back to their original forms. Problem solved.
However, there is one line of dialogue in ‘The Doctor Dances,’ that has proven controversial – at least in the comments section of our social media channels. So we thought we’d elaborate on them here.
You see, just after the nanogenes have changed all the humans back, Jack Harkness appears in the sky astride a bomb, telling the Doctor that, “the bomb’s already commenced detonation; I’ve put it in stasis but it won’t last long!”
The Time Lord answers, “Change of plan. Don’t need the bomb. Can you get rid of it, safely as you can?”
Now, we wrote previously about this moment from ‘The Doctor Dances,’ claiming that this line of dialogue was a mistake and shouldn’t have been included. However, some fans disagreed, pointing out that the Doctor’s words made perfect sense, and the references to the plan and the bomb were fully explained in the episode.
Certainly, the bomb was an important plot point. Captain Jack mentioned it earlier; his plan was to sell off the Chula warship (something that he believed to be a worthless piece of junk) and blow it up with a German bomb before his unwitting customer could inspect the goods. This is the same bomb that he appears with at the episode’s conclusion.
But ‘The Doctor Dances’ doesn’t clarify how the Doctor intended to use this bomb for himself. If he’d devised some sort of scheme with Captain Jack, it wasn’t elaborated upon. And the reason we listed this moment as a Doctor Who mistake was because the episode’s writer, Steven Moffat, identified it as such.
In the 2005 book The Shooting Scripts, Moffat gave an introduction to ‘The Empty Child’ and ‘The Doctor Dances’ in which he said this…
“So, as [the cast and crew] suffered in the bitter cold of those January nights, longing for the warmth of their pubs and mistresses, I sat down at the computer again, with instructions to lose two minutes from the climax…
“You remember that bit where Jack has reappeared astride the bomb – oh, the imagery – and the Doctor shouts, ‘Change of plan, we don’t need the bomb’? ‘What plan?’ you ask. Well, the plan I cut, in fact. We just forgot to take out that line. Oops!”
And so, according to Moffat, there was indeed another plot detail in ‘The Doctor Dances’ relating to the bomb that ended up the writers’ room floor. Perhaps the Doctor and his friends planned to use the explosive to destroy the Chula warship as originally intended, and somehow ‘kill’ the nanogenes in the process?
Knowing Steven Moffat, the explanation is probably more complicated than this, and as far as we know it has never found its way onto the webosphere. But we have confirmation from the writer himself: the line, “Change of plan, we don’t need the bomb” is indeed a mistake. It refers to a plan that was cut from the original script.
Interestingly, there was more controversy in store for ‘The Doctor Dances,’ as it turned out that the writing on the German bomb was similarly erroneous. If you look carefully, you will see that it has the words ‘schlecter wolf’ stamped on the side, in-keeping with Series One’s motif (every episode, bar one, contained the words ‘bad wolf,’ and ‘schlecter wolf’ is a rough translation.)
But apparently, ‘schlecter wolf’ is not accurate. According to our sources (and by ‘sources’ we mean Doctor Who Wikia) a more appropriate translation would be ‘böser wolf.’ The bomb, it seems, is proving more contentious by the second…
It would be fascinating, though, to read the unedited first draft of ‘The Doctor Dances.’ What else was cut from Moffat’s script? Was the Eighth Doctor originally a porter at Albion Hospital? Was the Seventh Doctor slated to appear in his duffel coat, accompanied by an army of haemovores? Did the bomb contain the fourth episode of ‘Planet of Giants’? If the truth ever comes out, we’re sure it will be… explosive.
Interestingly, in the preceding episode ‘The Empty Child,’ the scene with the self-writing typewriter was missing from the earliest draft, being added at a relatively late stage as the episode was underrunning.
Anyway, at least we can finally settle this debate about Captain Jack and his contentious bomb. We’re sure no one will argue with us when we post this article on our Facebook page. So tell us, internet: were you confused when you first heard the line? Let us know in the comments below.
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