Russell T Davies Had Impossible Plans For Daleks In Cancelled Doctor Who S3

Published Oct 9, 2026, 10:53 AM EDT

Once head of Screen Rant's Star Wars coverage and co-lead of Superheroes, Tom Bacon now works with the movies and books teams. He's a lifelong fan of the fantasy and sci-fi genres, and loves franchises such as Doctor Who and Marvel. You can find him on Twitter @TomABacon, on LinkedIn @tabacon, or on Muckrack under tombacon.

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Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies is finally revealing more about his plans for the show's canceled third season.

Doctor Who is on a break right now. Russell T. Davies' return was supposed to give the show a fresh start, but this particular regeneration was a failure. Davies has revealed why his Doctor Who failed in a tell-all autobiography, The Queerest of Folk, available now from retailers like Amazon. The book is a fascinating read, full of Davies' trademark ebullience, although at times it's hard not to conclude he was struggling to adapt to streaming — not least because of the reduced episode count.

Davies speaks at length about his plans for what would have been his third season:

It’s such a shame we never got to make Series Three, though. Three scripts were fully written for it, and it breaks my heart they won’t be seen. We had a brilliant story set during the Great Fire of London, written by the powerhouse team of Laurence Clark and Jack Thorne, and we should have had the budget to do it properly, with the flames and panic and everything. And we had a brutal horror story, written by the brilliant Lydia Adetunji, set on a NASA-type space station, all about trypophobia – look it up, it’ll make you shiver! There was a really lovely episode set on a council estate in the middle of Manchester. That would have been the ultimate place to bring the Doctor; I would have just loved to see that. It was written by Sharma Angel-Walfall, who’s lived that life. It was like Doctor Who meets the film Rocks.

I was talking to a lot of other writers as well, and I wanted to bring Juno Dawson back for another story after her amazing Eurovision episode. I was also talking to the writers Kate Herron and Briony Redman about bringing Jonathan Groff back as Rogue, which would have been glorious. That sequel was forever getting postponed. It didn’t appear in Series Two, but I would have tried for it in Series Three. We were talking about Rogue in an eighties story, maybe set in Blackpool with video arcades at its centre. So we had a lot of fabulous ideas, some fully fleshed out, with a Dalek four-part epic to end the series. We were ready to go.

Russell T. Davies' Doctor Who Season 3 Plans Just Don't Work

Davies (or RTD, as he's known in the industry) is a salesman at heart, and The Queerest of Folk feels very much like his attempt to sell himself. There are curious gaps in his account of the Disney/BBC Doctor Who partnership; he deliberately avoids discussing Millie Gibson's departure, and it's unclear when he knew Ncuti Gatwa was leaving after two seasons. That said, there's enough to suggest Davies struggled to adapt to being showrunner with such a large budget and the demands of streaming.

It's unclear, for example, just how many of the ideas he was discussing would have happened in season 3. Disney's Doctor Who seasons were shorter, so he seems to have had far too many plans. That four-part Dalek episode may sound exciting, but it would have been literally half a season under Disney. With the exception of Chris Chibnall's Doctor Who: Flux, modern Who has always been wary of running beyond two episodes. A shorter season is an odd time to try a four-parter. Elsewhere, Davies has claimed the Daleks were coming back for the canceled Christmas Special instead.

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Davies' account also differs to other reports about the failure of the Doctor Who partnership. Back in October last year, Deadline interviewed Disney and BBC executives who said they'd been able to see the signs for quite a while; "It was pretty apparent from early on that this wasn’t for the long term," they noted. "Everyone got the impression that it wasn’t doing what it needed to do [on Disney+] to be sustained."

Davies himself suggests the writing was on the wall before his second season had even aired, and that the BBC and Disney held off on the announcement until afterward so as not to damage its performance. That naturally raises the odd question about why he commissioned so many season 3 ideas, and whether any of them were in a serious stage of development. If they were, it's possible those abandoned Doctor Who ideas will eventually be adapted into another medium, perhaps on Big Finish.