If one thing became clear in the months of speculation between the conclusion of Doctor Who‘s latest season and the confirmation that the BBC and Disney’s partnership on the show was deader than a victim of the Daleks, it’s that something had seriously changed behind the scenes between what had been planned for the show, and what was ultimately broadcast in “The Reality War”. But while the BBC is now willing to let you peek behind the curtain a little, it’s not willing to let you see too much.
The BBC has released a new, almost-20-minute montage of deleted scenes from across the 2025 season of Doctor Who (as well as last year’s Christmas special, “Joy to the World”). Most of the scenes are relatively minor or extensions and alternate takes of moments we ultimately got in the final product. There’s definitely some interesting ones, like an extended version of the showdown between Belinda and the Doctor in the TARDIS from the climax of “The Robot Revolution” that shows just how interesting her character arc and friction with the Doctor felt like they were going to be, before the show just entirely lost interest in that and forgot to make Belinda a character altogether. A fun trip down memory lane!
But there is a significant elephant in the room, of course: a deleted scene that everyone now knows exists but that the BBC is distinctly unwilling to acknowledge. That is, of course, the alternate ending of “The Reality War” that would’ve not just seen the Doctor and Belinda seemingly continue travelling together but also set the stage for an arc built around the return of Doctor Who‘s first companion, the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan Foreman. The montage of scenes does include a few brief moments cut from the version of “Reality War” that we got, but not the completely different ending altogether.
The BBC and Disney themselves initially accidentally confirmed the deleted scene shortly after the broadcast of “The Reality War”, releasing a promotional image from the scene of the Doctor and Belinda dancing in a club from a moment that was nowhere to be found in the final episode. Months later, as speculation continued to brew over the future of the show, Susan actress Carole Ann Ford acknowledged the original ending, describing it at a fan event in Australia:
You didn’t see the episode, which was to sort of introduce my coming back, where I was holding hands with a little—beautiful little tiny Black child, three years old. And we were watching through the window somewhere where the audience wasn’t supposed to know where we were supposed to be. And we were watching my newly embodied grandfather, who was now Ncuti [Gatwa], and watching him have a wonderful time singing and dancing in a party in a shop opposite where we were. And obviously I, my character Susan, was longing to just go there and fling her arms around her grandfather and say, ‘Grandfather, how lovely to see you after all this time and how did you survive your floating about in space… and why have you changed?’
It’s clear at this point, especially considering how long it took to eventually resolve that Doctor Who would go on without Disney support, returning at Christmas 2026 (no further episodes have been explicitly confirmed beyond that, however), that the BBC would rather have everyone forget just what happened to radically transform the latest season of the show. Maybe in time, and with hindsight, we’ll eventually get the official story. For now though, we’ll just have to glean what we can from reports and wonder about the veritable chameleon circuit the BBC has placed around this particularly wild moment in Doctor Who history.
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