The television adaptation of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy brought to Netflix by David Benioff, Dan Weiss, and Alexander Woo has done well critically and commercially, so much so that the three are currently working on the scripts for a second season.
It turns out that some of what they shot for Season One, however, didn’t make it to the screen. That’s not uncommon, of course, but in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Woo shared that one scene involved a star from another sci-fi series.
“There was another sequence that was really fun and played really well and would have been a fantastic cameo appearance for an actor that I don’t want to name—because I don’t want to make someone feel bad for being cut out of the show. However, it is a former Doctor Who, I’ll say that much. Fans of that would probably would have found it delightful. But for the sake of the rest of the episode, we had to set it aside.”
Alas, Woo doesn’t share the name of the former Doctor. The likely candidates are David Tennant, Matt Smith, Peter Capaldi, Jodie Whittaker, Christopher Eccleston, and even possibly Jo Martin. My bet is on Tennant, because why not? Although Whittaker would have been the most recent Doctor when they filmed the season.
That cameo wasn’t the only thing cut from Season One. Benioff also shared another scene they loved had to be cut for budgetary reasons. “There’s a scene in the book when Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) leaves Red Coast base for the first time to look for a site for the new base and she goes to a village and meets an old woman,” he told THR. “It’s a nighttime scene and the old woman is looking at the stars and she grabs her and says, ‘I hear you study the stars. Tell me because I’ve always wanted to know: Why don’t they fall out of the sky? What keeps them up there?’ It’s a beautiful moment from the books that all three of us loved and we thought it would be a good moment for the character. But it meant building a whole other exterior village set in period rural China. It was one of those early casualties because you can’t have everything.”
You can see the final cut of Season One right now on Netflix. No news yet on when Season Two will premiere, but given the show is still in the script-writing phase, it will likely be awhile.
