Inspired by this discussion thread , if you had the opportunity to pitch an actual spinoff for Doctr Who, what would you pitch?
Limits: you have a budget on a rough par with the parent show. The parent show cast will be mostly unavailable, outside rare cameo appearances.
Posted Mar 7, 2019, 11:40 AM UTC
The Paternoster Gang. Victorian crime, aliens, and shenanigans with Madame Vastra, Jenny, and Strax.
Jenny: The Further Adventures of the Doctor's Daughter.
Big finish made both already! :) There is one season of Jenny and in June (if I’m right) there will be first season of Paternoster gang!
Yes, but I thought we were talking TV series.
To be fair, something like this would probably work better as a BF release anyways because building props for every single historical location and the aliens Shenanigans would be pretty expensive.
If it weren't for Trevor Baxter having passed away, I'd say to make it a team of five with Jago and Litefoot.
The Jo Jones Adventures, which would have a new cast of investigator kids with guest appearances by Kate Stewart, Ace, the original SJA cast, Miss Quill from Class, K-9, etc. now sure how you'd write out Jo's husband Cliff, though.
alternatively, a gritty New BSG-style space opera set during a war with the Daleks. Dalek duplicates, Dalek Troopers, plague warfare, some time travel and Daleks absent from the series for whole episodes at a time, so as to keep them fresh and scary.
Jo Jones Bizzare Adventures.
I’m suprised they didn’t do something like the Jo Jones Adventures. Maybe they didn’t want to do it as it’d be too similar to SJA.
RTD had said that Lis Sladen's death made them want to end the series.
Mickey and Martha; part space adventures, part family drama.
John Barrowman pops in for the occasional appearance, John Simm as a prime antagonist.
Given that Mickey and Martha were supposed to be in Children of Earth, Gwen popping by would also be cool.
Or just a fifth season of Torchwood would suffice ahaha
We can dream...
I don't really care for Mickey and Martha as a freelance alien-fighting couple. I'd much rather a spin-off where Martha rejoins UNIT.
Much more restricted in terms of scope that way. Plus Mickey/Martha have a dynamic worth exploring
Romana The Series.
I'm going to want a bit more detail here. How would this be different to the parent show?
I'd make it a little darker and less family oriented with a slightly more morally ambiguous protagonist rather than the noble hero trying to save everyone.
Sold.
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Oh my god that sounds amazing.
I like this a lot. If I personally was involved, I'd try and tie the Doctor's hand-picked team into the Order of the Custodians from Resolution, somehow - there seems to be a group of volunteer protectors of the Earth at a loose end now that the Dalek they were guarding got loose. The team could be a part of that wider network, and making them part of an ancient secret society would mirror the Shepherds nicely, I think. Just a thought! I think the Custodians have a lot of potential.
The Thick of It but each character is secretly one of the many interchangeable shapeshifting races. Like we’ll have a Slitheen, a Shoal, a Zygon and a Blathereen as the main cast, but also a Kamelion and someone from Frobisher’s planet.
Terri Coverley Passameer-Day Slitheen.
Time Agency
Whole new cast (perhaps led by James Marsters if they can get him).
It would follow new recruits of the Time Agency in the far future. Adventures in time throughout earth's history or the politics of time travel outside of it. It would deal with causality and paradoxes, people trying to abuse timetravel for their own personal gain.
Sometimes appearances by Doctor Who or Torchwood foes.
Guest appearances by John Barrowman, as an aged Captain Jack coming to settle a score.
Guest appearances by Lalla Ward (or if they want to make my Big Finish heart flutter Séan Carlsen) as a representative of the Timelords seeking to keep them in check.
Despite the adult-level cast, I feel like this premise would work much better for a young audience show (in the same vein as the Sarah Jane Adventures). Torchwood, by contrast, did what it did by not being formulaic--things were always getting shaken up. This sounds pretty formulaic. Not that that's a bad thing; just suited for a different audience.
Big finish have already made so many great Spin-offs so I don’t even have ideas.
I’d like a comedy UNIT spin-off (something like the office).
"Skaro"
Set millennia before Davros is born and tells the story of the early days of the Kaled/Thal war and how it started. It allows for WWI and WWII parallels and can be done on a very low budget.
I'd have the story-line of series 1 be the lead up to the war, with the final shot being the first shot from the Kaleds on the Thals starting the war.
Cameos? I'd have - and stay with me here - a Dalek cameo in the finale of series 1. How? I see the finale starting with a mysterious man with some high tech gadget on his arm who has appeared out of nowhere. We find out that he's from the future from planet under Dalek totalitarianism/control. He has travelled back to the start of the war to prevent the Skaro war from even happening that over 1000s of years lead to the creation of the Daleks. It all leads up to the moment where he is in a control room from which he can stop the missile that the Kaleds are about to fire the first shot on the Thals and as he's about to stop the launch we hear a familiar noise, he suddenly lights up, we see his skeleton for a brief second for him to fall and to reveal behind him a Dalek has killed him. A Dalek has time travelled following him and has prevented the alteration of history. We then see the Dalek temporal shift away and have a scene of him confirming the mission success to the Daleks. It then cuts back to the missile launch and series 1 ends.
I think this has promise. It's a little like Caprica, but the whole rise of Kaled facism thing is very on point with today's politics. And it could be very gritty and grown up.
My own pitch:
2150AD.
We recast entirely, of course, and the first episode establishes that Susan can regenerate. This allows us to watch her and her husband reconnect, giving us an excuse to get to know them both.
One of the overarching threats is the return of the Daleks. The other is the presence of Susan's TARDIS key, which is in the hands of someone who recognises it for what it is.
Tales of Gallifrey: Each episode bounces around current Gallifrey to a different person each episode, showing life at the end of the universe, as well as the lasting effects of the Time War (and maybe some Time Lord Academy stuff), but no revealing too many secrets. Maybe a lampshade of looms, but not much else.
The Ace McShane Adventures
Ace, retired from traveling, now runs the charity A Charitable Earth. However, when a group of children runs into an alien, the charity steps in and reveals its true purpose: Investigating alien invasions. Together, with former companion Ace McShane, they investigate things in their neighborhood. Sometimes, they meet current or former doctors, companions, and other characters. Aimed at a 6-12 demographic, but can be enjoyed by everyone.
Gallifreyan Retrieval Team
The recently-graduated Time Lord Aerisoramontytesa (Aeris for short) has always had one dream: To become a rogue Time Lord, and explore the universe. Unfortunately, she never got the chance. She ends up as a Retrieval Specialist, a job where she recovers lost Time Lord tech. Faced with the seemingly-dead end job, she meets the team: A veteran of the Time War for defense, a young-looking but actually quite old rogue Time Lord who can communicate TARDISes and has been contracted into working for the time lords to get them around, and a technology and captain who's just trying to wrangle her team together.
The F Files
A feature film chronicling the continuing adventures of everyone's favourite talking penguin.
With his latest investigation going south and an accident with a genetic manipulator leaving him stuck in the form of the Twelfth Doctor, Frobisher decides to lie low for a while.
Travelling to Earth in the late Noughties, and feeling like a penguin out of water, he is ecstatic when a strange quirk of fate sees him take up a role as a high ranking Home Office official. After all, what could possibly go wrong.....
A charitable Earth, Ace's charity from the SJAs but showing what they really did. Would star Bonnie Langford and Sophie Aldred with frequent guest appearances from Katty Manning and older UNIT personal eg Sgt Bennton and Mike Yates. Also maybe, an epsiode where Bernand Cribbens' Wilf accidentally gets caught up in an alien invasion at a WW II veterans event.
Sparrow and Nightingale: a thinly veiled spoof of daytime ITV detective shows. Larry and Sally, their book/video shop having seen better days since the introduction of BritBox, have taken to investigating strange local occurences. Almost every time, aliens are behind it all, but when they've solved it and the police turn up, it looks like it was something different and normal, despite their protests. They're just seen as two weirdos, but they're held in some esteem because they do seem get results in the end.
Reverse Scooby-Doo.
Now this one, I would watch.
Yep. I would commission this. Excellent idea.
I would watch the shit out of that.