Doctor Who showrunner, Russell T Davies, has revealed that the Series 14 episode, Dot and Bubble, was originally going to be a story for the Eleventh Doctor, aka Matt Smith.

The episode focused on Lindy Pepper-Bean, a resident of Finetime, and a devotee of the social media giant, Bubble, which literally encased her head and guided her through everyday life. And though it featured the Fifteenth Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa), Davies initially visualised it as an Eleventh Doctor story. Russell explains:

“I thought of it way back when, around 2009, when I was still working on Doctor Who, because I pitched it to [then-showrunner] Steven Moffat in a restaurant in Los Angeles. He was saying, ‘Would you come back and write for the programme?’ Every year, he’d ask me. How lovely.

“So I pitched this episode [in April 2010], in a restaurant called Hal’s on Abbot Kinney Boulevard. Karen Gillan [who played companion, Amy Pond] was there. They were in LA to launch their first series [Series 5], and I remember pitching – I used to call this – ‘visible Twitter’.

“We didn’t go very far with the conversation, because the idea was literally too expensive. But you wait 15 years and here we are.”

That would presumably mean Dot and Bubble were destined for Series 6.

Bearing in mind the episode ends with Lindy and co. turning away from the offer of the Doctor’s help because they’re racist, we presume Russell’s idea hadn’t been cemented back in 2009 so was lacking an ending (unless he planned to make them racist against white people or something instead). But we don’t know!

I could see Dot and Bubble being an Eleventh Doctor story, though in some ways it felt closer to a Seventh Doctor one — and RTD is known for having ideas that linger and eventually make it to TV; The Long Game (2005) was apparently conceived as a Seventh Doctor tale, for instance.

This just goes to show that no idea is wasted!