The Ocean Liner (unproduced TV story)

✅ The Ocean Liner was an unproduced script written by David Ellis for Season 4. It was submitted in January 1966 as a potential exit story for Ben and Polly, but ultimately rejected by Gerry Davis in April 1966 when Patrick Troughton's schedule opened up and allowed him to be in one more story that season.

It would have been a spy thriller set sometime in the 1980s. The Doctor and Jamie would not have appeared. Ben and Polly would have been stranded aboard the titular ocean liner at the beginning of the story, leaving them and a British spy to foil a Russian plot involving a nuclear bomb.

At the end of the story, Ben and Polly would have decided not to wait for the TARDIS to come back, and simply to settle down in the 1980s. This would have been the last audiences would have seen of them.