#along with jamie and the doctor's argument in evil of the daleks

[wayward-wren]

What I wouldn't give to see Victoria and Jamie's goodbye in it's proper original form

[galacticlamps]

I know I mentioned this once before when I read about it in Complete History, but now that I’m looking at the camera scripts I think it deserves its own post:

After Maxtible takes the Doctor through the Dalek Factor machine in Episode 7 of Evil of the Daleks:

There was originally another scene between the other characters in the cell, before the Doctor comes back for them:

Maybe it’s silly of me to care about this, since the dialogue’s pretty minimal and it seemed to mostly rely on visual acting, and given this episode was junked, that would’ve been lost to us either way - but I really wish this scene had made it into the original broadcast!

Compared with how prominent Jamie’s involvement in the plot had been so far, I think it’s fair to say the storyline about his relationship with the Doctor gets noticeably sidelined in the last two episodes. Part of it makes sense - they’re suddenly thrust into a strange new environment with bigger concerns, and he’s received pretty solid proof his fears were unfounded and the Doctor was secretly doing the right thing all along, despite appearances, so they’re unquestionably on the same side again. But it still feels like a bit of an awkward shift to abandon such a strong plot thread in the finale, and I think keeping this in could’ve really helped it feel more complete. It’s not just about giving Jamie more screentime or the characters more closure, but seeing him essentially giving up hope because he did decide he could trust his friend after all, only to lose him again, this time to a Dalek conversion, would’ve really rounded out their plot nicely. And it shows us that his line later on, when he asks the others “I mean, how do we know we can trust him?” before they step through the machine themselves wasn’t Jamie reverting back to the argument from Episode Five - instead, it’s him wondering if there’s a chance the Doctor really is still himself, or if it’s naive of him to believe that just because it’s what he wishes were true.

Not to mention that, in terms of the bigger picture, the failure of the Dalek-Human converter is really the first time we’re told the Doctor is categorically, definitively, totally Not Human (rather than other serials that implied he was the same species, but just from a different planet/time, or possibly a human who had been altered by time travel and/or the Tardis itself, as the Daleks stated earlier in this same serial). Considering the weight that holds, both in the show as a whole and this specific story, spending a bit more time focusing on the mystery of ‘has it worked on him or not?’ certainly wouldn’t have hurt the narrative, but as I understand it, this had to be cut for time, which is a real shame.