Jonathan Blum on GB has kindly picked out tidbits on the original drafts for Name of The Doctor & Day of The Doctor from the 2013 Series Companion. Also includes extra hints for Time of The Doctor.
Quote:
“* Rather than Clara floating in a flaming void between the flashbacks of meeting the Doctor, we see Clara living in a cottage and dreaming of the Doctor every night (the flashbacks). The flashback contexts seem different -- rather than actual footage, they appear to be designed to be newly staged scenes with doubles.
* There doesn't seem to be a stealing-the-TARDIS flashback in this version.
* In the morning Clara receives two letters (one from the family she was looking after which just says "MISS YOU"), and looks out the window to see an overgrown and abandoned TARDIS. The sequence ends with her sitting against the overgrown TARDIS and crying: "Don't go! Whatever Vastra says, or River, or me, please Doctor, just don't go... Don't go to Trenzalore!"
* After the Doctor and Clara sneak into the tunnel through the gravestone, outside the giant TARDIS... Another, older, 'pre-Matt' TARDIS without the St. John logo appeared alongside it. The door opened, and a coughing, spluttering figure emerged to see the first TARDIS...
* As the Doctor and Clara enter the lower level of the TARDIS... Suddenly, they hear a strange scream, which terrifies the Doctor... but it's a scream only he and Dr. Simeon can hear. Simeon tells Vastra that there was a word inside the scream... At the crypt entrance, the Doctor admits that the word was his name. "And logically it can only be one person."
* While most of the script up to the actual entry into the burial chamber is quite similar even down to the dialogue, from there on it's heavily different.
* When they get into the chamber... there's already a set of footprints leading into the time rift.
* The Doctor analyzes the rift with the screwdriver, and comments: "The Time War. The last day of the Time War. And the worst day of my life... And someone wants me to go back."
* Simeon's goal is not to destroy every moment of the Doctor's life, but "to learn everything". There doesn't seem to be an indication that he is actually destroyed.
* Clara stumbles into the rift (apparently to stop him), vanishes and reappears as Oswin and Victorian Clara before the Doctor pulls her out again -- we don't get the other scenes of Clara or Simeon interacting with past Doctors. Nor do we get an infinity of Claras, just a few echoes.
* We do, however, get glimpses of Clara elsewhere in the eleventh Doctor's life -- the original idea was to use shots from "Big Bang" and the Lake Silencio scene where there was a crewmember in the back of shot, and make them into Clara!
* As the Doctor thanks her for saving him, Clara starts to scream hysterically: "I know who you are. I've seen who you are!! I've seen what you become!! Keep him away from me!!"
* After Strax sedates her, the Doctor steps back towards the rift, saying that he needs to return to the Time War to resolve it... He then speaks directly to River, and the script concludes with River fading away.
* Not only is there no scene with Clara and the eleventh Doctor meeting the War Doctor, there's no place where it could go. The whole idea of the Doctor stepping into the rift to retrieve Clara didn't exist yet. (The actual War Doctor scene wasn't included in the shooting script; it was done months later once John Hurt had been cast.)
So in short... it looks like the original approach for "Day of the Doctor" would have cliffhangered directly from "Name of the Doctor", with a previous Doctor (presumably the tenth -- but at what point in time?) already having gone back into the rift to the Time War, and the eleventh Doctor joining him with the express intention of fixing the last day -- with Clara being horrified by both his past and his future, he could be attempting to change both. With that as the hook, that would have ruled out large chunks of the "Day" action we got -- the UNIT/Zygons and Queen Elizabeth threads wouldn't really factor into a story which had already got the Doctors to that point. This may well have been the Eccleston version of the story. But what about Simeon?
And possibly the most interesting thing? These are not ideas which were discarded early on; this was the script as of two weeks before shooting! Meaning that the changes in approach to the version we got were done in basically an "Ultimate Foe" timeframe.
Whoa.
There's also a changed line which made it into the shooting script, which has some interesting implications for what became "Time of the Doctor"... when he describes the "minor skirmish" of the war on Trenzalore, Simeon says it was "The Neverborn Queen and the children of the Final Church" which were too much for the old man. Between this and Clara's reaction in the first draft, it suggests that Steven was planning a version of the war on Trenzalore in which the Doctor's experience was significantly less Christmas-cuddly...”
“* Rather than Clara floating in a flaming void between the flashbacks of meeting the Doctor, we see Clara living in a cottage and dreaming of the Doctor every night (the flashbacks). The flashback contexts seem different -- rather than actual footage, they appear to be designed to be newly staged scenes with doubles.
* There doesn't seem to be a stealing-the-TARDIS flashback in this version.
* In the morning Clara receives two letters (one from the family she was looking after which just says "MISS YOU"), and looks out the window to see an overgrown and abandoned TARDIS. The sequence ends with her sitting against the overgrown TARDIS and crying: "Don't go! Whatever Vastra says, or River, or me, please Doctor, just don't go... Don't go to Trenzalore!"
* After the Doctor and Clara sneak into the tunnel through the gravestone, outside the giant TARDIS... Another, older, 'pre-Matt' TARDIS without the St. John logo appeared alongside it. The door opened, and a coughing, spluttering figure emerged to see the first TARDIS...
* As the Doctor and Clara enter the lower level of the TARDIS... Suddenly, they hear a strange scream, which terrifies the Doctor... but it's a scream only he and Dr. Simeon can hear. Simeon tells Vastra that there was a word inside the scream... At the crypt entrance, the Doctor admits that the word was his name. "And logically it can only be one person."
* While most of the script up to the actual entry into the burial chamber is quite similar even down to the dialogue, from there on it's heavily different.
* When they get into the chamber... there's already a set of footprints leading into the time rift.
* The Doctor analyzes the rift with the screwdriver, and comments: "The Time War. The last day of the Time War. And the worst day of my life... And someone wants me to go back."
* Simeon's goal is not to destroy every moment of the Doctor's life, but "to learn everything". There doesn't seem to be an indication that he is actually destroyed.
* Clara stumbles into the rift (apparently to stop him), vanishes and reappears as Oswin and Victorian Clara before the Doctor pulls her out again -- we don't get the other scenes of Clara or Simeon interacting with past Doctors. Nor do we get an infinity of Claras, just a few echoes.
* We do, however, get glimpses of Clara elsewhere in the eleventh Doctor's life -- the original idea was to use shots from "Big Bang" and the Lake Silencio scene where there was a crewmember in the back of shot, and make them into Clara!
* As the Doctor thanks her for saving him, Clara starts to scream hysterically: "I know who you are. I've seen who you are!! I've seen what you become!! Keep him away from me!!"
* After Strax sedates her, the Doctor steps back towards the rift, saying that he needs to return to the Time War to resolve it... He then speaks directly to River, and the script concludes with River fading away.
* Not only is there no scene with Clara and the eleventh Doctor meeting the War Doctor, there's no place where it could go. The whole idea of the Doctor stepping into the rift to retrieve Clara didn't exist yet. (The actual War Doctor scene wasn't included in the shooting script; it was done months later once John Hurt had been cast.)
So in short... it looks like the original approach for "Day of the Doctor" would have cliffhangered directly from "Name of the Doctor", with a previous Doctor (presumably the tenth -- but at what point in time?) already having gone back into the rift to the Time War, and the eleventh Doctor joining him with the express intention of fixing the last day -- with Clara being horrified by both his past and his future, he could be attempting to change both. With that as the hook, that would have ruled out large chunks of the "Day" action we got -- the UNIT/Zygons and Queen Elizabeth threads wouldn't really factor into a story which had already got the Doctors to that point. This may well have been the Eccleston version of the story. But what about Simeon?
And possibly the most interesting thing? These are not ideas which were discarded early on; this was the script as of two weeks before shooting! Meaning that the changes in approach to the version we got were done in basically an "Ultimate Foe" timeframe.
Whoa.
There's also a changed line which made it into the shooting script, which has some interesting implications for what became "Time of the Doctor"... when he describes the "minor skirmish" of the war on Trenzalore, Simeon says it was "The Neverborn Queen and the children of the Final Church" which were too much for the old man. Between this and Clara's reaction in the first draft, it suggests that Steven was planning a version of the war on Trenzalore in which the Doctor's experience was significantly less Christmas-cuddly...”
