Doctor Who’s Steven Moffat reveals he SCRAPPED his first attempt at writing Boom

Virgin Radio

13 May 2024, 17:00

Doctor Who writer and former showrunner Steven Moffat has admitted he scrapped his first attempt at writing a script for the show’s fourteenth series.

Moffat, who last wrote for Doctor Who back in Peter Capaldi’s era of the show in 2017 when he was still the programme’s showrunner, is returning to write for his childhood favourite show with this Saturday (18th May)’s episode Boom.

Boom will see Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor trapped in a terrifying situation after he and his companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) land on a war-torn planet and the Doctor steps on a landmine.

Speaking in an interview ahead of the episode’s broadcast this Saturday, Moffat explained it was around “two and a half years” ago that he first started writing Boom after he heard Russell T Davies was returning to the show and would be interested in a script - if he wished to write one.

But despite the fact he was excited to get to work on a new Doctor Who idea for the latest incarnation of the Doctor, the Douglas is Cancelled screenwriter admitted he didn’t immediately succeed with his first draft.

“I started tentatively writing and got about twelve to fifteen pages in, and realised I had got it completely wrong,” Moffat said. “I started the story in the wrong place, on the wrong foot, so to speak! So I threw that away and started again. 

“I don’t think I had even told the production office that I had started writing,” Moffat continued. “So when I sent it to just Russell he was quite surprised - he didn’t know I had been working on it. Mainly, it felt pretty good and pretty familiar to be back on the TARDIS. It doesn’t seem that long ago since I was writing for Capaldi.”

Explaining his thought process behind the episode, the writer shared: “It occurred to me that Doctor Who doesn’t often do suspense or tension – it does adventure, love stories and comedy all the time. It does just about everything, but not a lot of suspense…

“I had this idea of the landmine - which of course is a short sequence in Genesis of the Daleks that I happened to love when I was a kid. I thought: ‘What if you did it for a whole episode?’ The Doctor on a knife’s edge, one wrong move and it’s all over. It would take so much away from him – he can’t run about, he can’t bamboozle people and he literally can’t move. I thought: ‘That’s something that I haven’t done’.”

Doctor Who will continue on BBC iPlayer and BBC One on Saturday, 18th May.