Killers of the Dark (unproduced TV story)

	Fourth Doctor
	Leela, K9 Mark I
	Cat People
	David Weir

Killers of the Dark, also known in fan circles as The Killer Cats of Geng Singh, was an unproduced six-part serial written by David Weir that was to have concluded Season 15.

After the success of The Deadly Assassin ^[+]Loading...["The Deadly Assassin (TV story)"], Graham Williams wanted a Gallifrey story to be written to explore life outside the Capitol, with an emphasis on the philosophy and morals of Time Lord society. Weir was commissioned for the slot by script editor Anthony Read on the basis of their earlier collaboration on The Troubleshooters, which explored similar themes. The story would feature Cat-People native to Gallifrey, who would live in a culture similar to that of many Asian countries.

When Weir submitted the scripts for parts 1-5 on 15 August 1977, Williams and Read turned them down, as they believed the story would have been too expensive to film. Williams described in In-Vision #29,

There were crowd scenes in Wembley Stadium stipulated which would have required something like 96,000 human-shaped cat costumes! In a way, that is text-book proof that some writers are more suited to Doctor Who than others, irrespective of their background and work on other shows. David Weir is a fine writer, and had obviously been brought in by Tony Read on the basis of work they had done together in the past. But I still remember Tony in my office, with his head in his hands, saying "I don't understand it. How can he have done this to me?"Graham Williams

In addition, the slot was going to conflict with the annual BBC strike. With only a few weeks before filming was to begin, Williams and Read wrote The Invasion of Time ^[+]Loading...["The Invasion of Time (TV story)"] to replace the finale slot.

The name Killer Cats of Geng Singh is based on a misunderstanding of something Graham Williams once said at a convention. Trying to remember the name of the unproduced story, he said it was "The Killer Cats of... something", and substituted "Ginseng" for the noun he couldn't remember, riffing on the sometimes odd-sounding proper nouns used in Doctor Who. This was misreported in the fan press as The Killer Cats of Geng Singh; this was never the actual title of the story.

Notes

Dee Robson's 1977 designs for the Killer Cats.

• Dee Robson's 1977 designs for the Killer Cats were printed in DWM 336.
• The Killer Cats of Gin-Seng have since been referenced in Invasion of the Cat-People ^[+]Loading...["Invasion of the Cat-People (novel)"], The Return of the King ^[+]Loading...["The Return of the King (short story)"], The Last Fairy Tale ^[+]Loading...["The Last Fairy Tale (audio story)"], and Erasure ^[+]Loading...["Erasure (audio story)"]; Erasure even mentions them as having once attempted to rise against the Time Lords.