Irish Fiction Friday: Johnny Byrne: Doctor Who The Movie

Doctor Who It’s Irish Fiction Friday time, where we showcase SFF from Ireland to encourage you to support the bid for Worldcon in Dublin. Today we’re bringing you something special from a giant of the SFF world: Doctor Who.

Johnny Byrne is an Irish writer, born in Dublin, who wrote several classic Doctor Who episodes including The Keeper of Traken and Warriors of the Deep. But did you know that he also scripted a Doctor Who movie?

There were many rumours about a movie after the show went off the air in 1989, and in the early 1990s, Byrne wrote one a draft for one of those potential films. It featured all the usual trappings of a Doctor Who adventure–the Doctor, companions, strange crystals, bad guys with nefarious plots–turned up to eleven with a feature film budget.

As with so many of those potential films, it never moved beyond the script stage, but if you want to know what we could have watched on our cinema screens, you can read the script here.

We’ll be over here, zapping things with our sonic screwdrivers and mourning what could have been.

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