Trivia / Past Doctor Adventures

• Development Gag: In The Face of the Enemy, Koschei was trapped on Earth after his TARDIS was destroyed by the Great Intelligence, leaving only the console. This was a plotline considered for stranding the Doctor on Earth at the end of Season 6, abandoned because the rights to the Great Intelligence weren't available.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: Illegal Alien was pitched as a TV script for Season 27.
• Milestone Celebration:
  • The Infinity Doctors celebrated the show's 35th anniversary. It features an unspecified Doctor and is filled with continuity nods.
  • Deadly Reunion celebrated the 40th anniversary. The first half of it tells the early years of the Brigadier before meeting the Doctor.
• Parody Retcon: Terrance Dicks' novel Warmonger was initially criticised for its gratuitous gorn, cynicism and sexual violence (both threatened and joked about), as well as forcing the Fifth Doctor into the role of a literally jack-booted war leader. However, critics since have suggested that it's so gratuitous it could be intended as deliberate parody of the Darker and Edgier Continuity Porn tone of the Eric Saward era.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The Third Doctor novel The Devil Goblins of Neptune was originally conceived as a Virgin Missing Adventure.
  • The Seventh Doctor novel Matrix was pitched as a New Adventure. It was presumably rejected because one of Virgin's guidelines was "Don't use the Valeyard."
  • Jonathan Morris and Lance Parkin submitted a proposal for a story which would have covered the Doctor's first visit to Karfel, which would have gotten extremely meta - the idea was that it would deliberately echo elements from "Timelash", as if "Timelash" was actually a derivative sequel that recycled ideas from its predecessor, like "Attack of the Cybermen". It would also have been split into six episodes, with one episode being based on a board game from the 1973 annual. The range's editor rejected the idea, with Morris theorising that he thought it was an elaborate practical joke.
  • After the disruption of the Doctor's personal timeline in Interference, (the Third Doctor got killed when he was returning home to Earth after "The Monster of Peladon") it would slowly be revealed that the entire TV show era had been changed, not just because of the disruption, but also because the Doctor had unknowingly been turned into a Faction Paradox Sleeper Agent. Because of this nothing the readers assumed they knew about the past could be taken for granted. Unfortunately none of the other writers seemed interested in pursuing this plan, and Lawrence Miles's proposal for the story that would've kicked it off (Beneath The Planet of the Spiders) got rejected. The plan would have been for the Eighth Doctor to repair his timeline (since the disruptions would have caused so much damage that the Ninth Doctor would have been some sort of Eldritch Abomination) at some point down the road when the EDA writers got tired of the alternate timeline.

---