The Earth has once again fallen under the thrall of some wizened cadaverous monsters, who demand our love, our loyalty, and our uncritical acceptance of the Great Monk theory of history. And the only way to throw off their yoke is with a lot of laborious exposition. It’s The Lie of the Land.
Notes and links
Simon quotes from the Yes, Prime Minister episode The Bishop’s Gambit (1986), which discusses the Church of England’s dual roles as a religion and as “part of the rich social fabric of this country”.
The Doctor’s broadcasts from a ship somewhere outside the five-mile limit inevitably remind several of us of an episode of The Goodies called Radio Goodies (1970), in which the trio broadcast a pirate radio station into the UK from international waters, satirising real-world events chronicled in the Richard Curtis film The Boat That Rocked (2009).
We’ve mentioned it before: Doctor Who: The Complete History is a ninety-volume book series covering the series from 1963 to 2017, which means that this episode comes up in Volume 88. The books themselves were beautifully produced, but the series is also available digitally.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
Brendan, Richard and Steven also recently released another episode of their Avengers podcast The Three Handed Game. It’s the first episode of their triptych The Pop Explosion, covering a monochrome Emma Peel episode called Death at Bargain Prices, in which Steed and Mrs Peel go undercover in a London department store and discover a plot to blow up much of the city.
This week, Tom Salinsky joins us for a World War III–adjacent chat in Madeupistan, while a global apocalypse is self-organising somewhere in Yorkshire. Also, some scary people keep trying to invite us to a free Bible study. It’s The Pyramid at the End of the World.
Joe 90 was a Gerry and Sylvia Anderson supermarionation show from 1968–69, which stars a nine-year-old super spy who wears special glasses which contain the brain patterns of expert adults and enable him to do all of his spy stuff.
James refers to Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Commander William T Riker as someone who, like the monks, has a real fetish for consent. This deep cut is a reference to the Star Trek podcast The Greatest Generation, which you are only allowed to listen to after you’ve finished all of Untitled Star Trek Project.
The Andromeda Strain is a 1969 book by Michael Crichton and a 1971 film directed by Robert Wise (The Sound of Music, Star Trek: The Motion Picture). In it, an extraterrestrial microbe gets loose in a research station and the staff need to prevent the station’s nuclear self-destruct system from releasing an irradiated version of the the microbe into the environment.
The Tralfamadorians are time-aware aliens who appear in a couple of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, most notably Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).
At the time that this episode was released, the Doomsday Clock was at 90 seconds to midnight, mostly thanks to the climate disaster and the involvement of nuclear powers in wars in Ukraine and Gaza. So sleep well, everyone.
And more
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
Brendan, Richard and Steven have also just released another episode of their Avengers podcast The Three Handed Game. It’s the first episode of their triptych The Pop Explosion, covering a monochrome Emma Peel episode called Death at Bargain Prices, in which Steed and Mrs Peel go undercover in a London department store and discover a plot to blow up much of the city.
This week, Brendan, Nathan, Steven B and Johnny Spandrell penetrate the heart of the Vatican, only to discover that behind its dusty and arcane lore lies an eldritch horror that threatens the very idea of existence itself. It’s Extremis.
Notes and links
The most important inspiration here is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), a massively popular and widely-panned thriller about a dark secret that threatens the credibility of the Catholic Church itself (but probably not the one you’re thinking of). Perhaps this review of the book will give you a good sense of its style.
It turns out that the dark secret in The Da Vinci code was originally revealed in 1982 in a best-selling book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (or in the US, more pithily, Holy Blood, Holy Grail). This book was, terrifyingly but unsurprisingly, co-written by our very own Henry Lincoln, co-writer of The Abominable Snowmen, The Web of Fear and The Dominators.
Steven remembers the first Doctor talking about his religious beliefs in a passage from The Empire of Glass (1995) by Andy Lane. Here, in Chapter 6, the Doctor is talking to Galileo. “In short, sir, I am currently an agnostic, and by the time my life draws to its close, and I have travelled from one side of the universe to the other and seen every sight there is to see, I firmly expect to be an atheist. Does that answer your question?”
Nathan has a website called the Randomiser at therandomiser.net, which can help you pick a random Doctor Who story to watch, but which can also (more importantly, perhaps) reassure you that you’re not living in a computer simulation.
The properly randomised Doctor Who podcast which Nathan appeared on is called Pull to Open, with Pete Pachal and Chris Taylor.
As a kind of public service, Steven alerts us to a 2015 article by Charlie Brooker about a group of German researchers created a version of Super Mario World in which Mario was self-aware and emotionally affected by his experiences in the game.
Steven also draws our attention to a branch of philosophy concerned with the possibility that we might all be living in a computer simulation. This 2020 article in Scientific American sums up the state of play.
Johnny refers to Kit Pedler’s original conception of the Cybermen as a race of Star Monks — an idea that El Sandifer runs with in a productive and interesting way in her essay on The Tenth Planet.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
Just two weeks ago, on Startling Barbara Bain, we faced what is perhaps the most memorable and terrifying episode of Space: 1999 ever with our usual mix of valour and prosecco. It’s Dragon’s Domain.
And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we visited a holographic jazz bar in Vegas in 1962 for a surpassingly brilliant episode of Deep Space Nine called His Way.
Episode 288: Honour the Invisible
· Recorded on Sunday 1 September 2024 · Duration 1:05:01
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Did you know that if we had a nickel for every Doctor Who episode in which you have to pay the Company for the right to breathe, we’d have ten American cents? Which still wouldn’t be enough — even with Kate Orman’s help — to pay for today’s supply of Oxygen.
Notes and links
A clear inspiration for this episode, and for the opening scene in particular, is Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013), which was a film about George Clooney and Sandra Bullock tumbling through space while discussing their relationship or something. It was huge at the time but it seems to have vanished without a trace. So it goes.
At the end of the episode, when Nardole joins Bill and the Doctor in a hug, he signals his intention (delightfully), by saying ‘Cuddle’. The Blu-ray subtitles incorrectly render this as ‘Glad though. [Chuckles]’. Neither line is in Mathieson’s script.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
On 5 October, Blakes 7 came to BFI Southbank for a screening of the newly remastered HD versions of Seek–Locate–Destroy and Orac and a Q & A with Jan Chappell and Sally Knyvette. And Maximum Power was there. So check out the latest episode with our hot takes on the new versions of these beloved fan classics; we’ll be back with another hot take when the new Series 1 box set is released.
Last weekend, on Startling Barbara Bain, we faced what is perhaps the most memorable and terrifying episode of Space: 1999 ever with our usual mix of valour and prosecco. It’s Dragon’s Domain.
And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, they went back in time to watch the crew of Star Trek: Discovery start off their second season in the far, far future in Kobayashi Maru.
Episode 287: Cowed or Crushed
· Recorded on Sunday 25 August 2024 · Duration 0:56:27
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This week, six millennials are astonishingly successful finding a large house to rent — the power points don’t work, there’s no mobile reception and the walls are quite literally made of alien woodlice. Oh, and it collapses into dust on their first night. It’s Knock Knock.
Notes and links
Brendan quickly identifies two of the film antecedents of this story: The Evil Dead (1981), with its demonically possessed trees, and Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), whose antagonist has a complex relationship with his mother.
Knock Knock was written by Mike Bartlett, who was famous for a TV series called Dr Foster (2015), starring Suranne Jones as a woman who starts to suspect her husband of infidelity.
David Suchet’s first appearance in a Poirot property starring Peter Ustinov as Poirot — the 1985 made-for-TV movie Thirteen at Dinner (1985), an adaptation of Christie’s Lord Edgeware Dies (1933), in which Suchet played Inspector Japp.
Simon refers to the vault-related theorising of Whovians, a comedy aftershow that accompanied Series 10, 11 and 12 of Doctor Who on ABC-TV in Australia. Our very own Adam Richard was a regular in the show’s first two seasons.
And finally, Brendan recklessly introduces us to another possible inspiration for this episode, the 1977 film Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, which we would all have been better off not knowing about.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
On 5 October, Blakes 7 came to BFI Southbank for a screening of the newly remastered HD versions of Seek–Locate–Destroy and Orac and a Q & A with Jan Chappell and Sally Knyvette. And Maximum Power was there. So check out today’s newly released episode with our hot takes on the new versions of these beloved fan classics.
And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, they went back in time to see the origin story of breakout character Peanut Hamper in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s The Quality of Life.
Episode 286: Pearl Clutching
· Recorded on Sunday 25 August 2024 · Duration 0:46:30
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This week, we’re joined by Melvin Peña for a day trip to the Thames Frost Fair in 1814, expecting a jolly afternoon of daydrinking, sword swallowers and juicy sheep hearts, only to find ourselves tied to a bomb and engaged in an intriguing discussion about race, class, death and the ethics of killing. It’s Thin Ice.
Like Martha before her and Ruby after her, Bill is concerned that treading on a butterfly in the past will change the present in terrible ways. That concern comes from Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder, which you should really just go off and read right now.
In Bong Joon-ho’s post-apocalyptic film Snowpiercer (2013), the poor people who live in the back of the train are fed on glistening black protein bars, which we discover are made from ground-up cockroaches.
Melvin alludes to the Slave Compensation Act 1837, which authorised the payment of about £20 million in compensation to slave owners in the British colonies. This sum was finally paid off when the British Government restructured its debt in 2015. (The people who had been enslaved didn’t receive any compensation, of course.)
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. Last week, they dropped in on the Q Continuum in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager called Death Wish.
Episode 285: The Ones That Make You Want to Raise Your Game
· Recorded on Sunday 11 August 2024 · Duration 1:12:45
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In a distant future where all life has been destroyed by technology, Brendan, James and Nathan sit down with their friend Bjay from The Bjay BJ Game Show to record a podcast about a Doctor Who episode called Smile.
Brendan admits that he is a regular reader of Lance Parkin’s AHistory: An Unauthorised History of the Doctor Who Universe, which is an impressively quixotic attempt to harmonise all the televised stories, spinoffs and deuterocanonical material into one vast, sprawling ridiculous chronology. We thank him for his service.
Grey goo is a kind of technical term for the possibility that everything on Earth might be consumed by rogue nanotechnology. The term was first coined in 1986 by Kim Eric Drexler in his book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. It’s also the basis of Michael Crichton’s 2002 novel Prey.
Erewhon: or, Over the Range (1872) by Samuel Butler is a satirical description of a utopian society, which bans machines for fear that they might become conscious and self-replicating.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
This week’s guest on Flight Through Entirety is Bjay Hobbs, who can be heard regularly discussing indie games with our very own Brendan Jones on The Bjay BJ Game Show. In their most recent episode, they discuss The Talos Principle (2014), a puzzle-based game that raises questions about identity, consciousness and religion. The episode Brendan mentions on Lost in Play will actually be out in a couple of weeks.
Brendan, Richard and Steven have just released another episode of their Avengers podcast The Three Handed Game. It’s the third episode of their triptych The Cool War, covering an early Season 2 episode called The Decapod, featuring Julie Stevens as Venus Smith, with a guest appearance by Philip Madoc, (probably) not in fishnets.
The Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power started recording its Series D coverage yesterday; new episodes will be released in December.
And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. Last week, they paid a visit to an idyllic bird person planet with deranged exocomp Peanut Hamper in an episode of Lower Decks called A Mathematically Perfect Redemption.
Episode 284: Happy to Be There
· Recorded on Sunday 4 August 2024 · Duration 0:58:59
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We’re back for the first episode of Peter Capaldi’s final year — a simple, well-told tale of Girl Meets Girl, Girl Becomes Puddle, Girl Loses Girl and, finally, Girl Goes off with Her Tutor on a Series of Adventures in Time and Space. Welcome aboard, Bill Potts. It’s The Pilot.
Unsurprisingly, Nathan is wrong about the music cue that greets Bill when she arrives in the TARDIS. It’s not River Song’s theme at all: it’s Murray Gold’s iconic A Madman with a Box, which you should listen to immediately.
Peter mentions the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Skin of Evil as another TV episode containing a high-concept puddle. It’s famously not very good, as Joe and Nathan discovered in this episode of Untitled Star Trek Project.
And you’ll be unsurprised to learn, again, that Nathan is wrong about John Peel: he doesn’t claim that Genesis of the Daleks took place in 1831. However, TARDIS Wikia dates it as set in the 15th or 16th centuries, probably because in The Daleks, one of the Daleks claims that there were two races on Skaro 500 years ago. But the whole idea is absolutely enervating, don’t you think?
The squishy thing Todd mentions as a possible companion for the Doctor is, of course, Mr Huffle from The Return of Doctor Mysterio. The Doctor does apparently take it with him at the end of the story.
Douglas is Cancelled is Steven Moffat’s most recent TV show — a four-part miniseries starring Hugh Bonneville, Karen Gillan and Alex Kingston, about a middle-aged male TV personality who is overheard making a sexist joke at a friend’s wedding. Worth a look.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We’ve covered the first six episodes of Series 1; Episode 7 should be out some times in the next couple of weeks.
The Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power has been on hiatus for a while, but arrangements for the recording of Series D are well underway, and we will definitely have some new episodes for you before the end of the year.
And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. Last week, they took a trip with Kirk, Spock and McCoy to the Planet of Space Ancient Rome in Bread and Circuses.
Episode 283: Just a Person
· Recorded on Sunday 28 July 2024 · Duration 1:00:47
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This Christmas in July, we are joined by Adam Richard on a sleigh ride that flies right past the Marvel Cinematic Universe and lands on Margot Kidder’s rooftop in 1978. Which is, it turns out, not a bad place to be. It’s The Return of Doctor Mysterio.
Notes and links
Steven Moffat’s clear inspiration here is Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie (1978), an astonishingly well-made and entertaining superhero movie starring Christopher Reeve as Clark and the wonderful Margot Kidder as Lois. If you haven’t seen it, put your phone down at once and go and find a copy.
In Episode 271: Eels with Jazz Hands, we mentioned the previous life of director Ed Bazalgette as a member of 1980s one-hit wonder The Vapors. The one hit in question was called Turning Japanese, and it was a massive thing at the time.
Ang Lee’s unloved film Hulk (2003) liberally used comic book panels to transition between scenes (in a way far more sophisticated than what’s attempted in this Doctor Who episode). This brief video will give you the idea.
It was Adam’s job to watch Series 10 of Doctor Who as a regular on the ABC’s Doctor Who aftershow Whovians, which covered Series 10 to 12 and screened a day or so after each episode aired.
Attractive Coal Hill Academy student Ram loses a leg in the first episode of the Doctor Who spin-off Class, which screened over eight weeks leading up to the start of December 2016. And then no one ever mentioned it or even thought about it ever again.
Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993) was an insanely popular television show in the 1990s, starring Teri Hatcher as Lois Lane and featuring the incredibly beautiful Dean Cain as Clark. (He’s a horrid alt-right nutcase these days, which is a grim warning to all of us, I suppose.)
Adam Richard’s daily Doctor Who podcast is called Adam Richard Has a Theory: it’s the place to find Adam’s hot-to-lukewarm takes and wild-to-really-quite-sensible theories about everything Doctor Who.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We’ve covered the first five episodes of Series 1; Episode 6 should be out in the next couple of weeks.
The Three Handed Game is a podcast on The Avengers and The New Avengers. In the most recent episode, Brendan, Richard and Steven watched an episode from Diana Rigg’s first series, Two’s a Crowd.
Brendan’s gaming podcast is called The Bjay BJ Game Show, and in its most recent episode, Brendan and Bjay visited some tilt-shifted Minecraft-inspired holiday destinations in The Touryst.
And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. Last week, we visited the centre of the galaxy and met up with the Devil (who seemed nice) in an inexpensively produced episode of The Animated Series called The Magicks of Megas-Tu.
Episode 282: Finger on the Zeitgeist
· Recorded on Sunday 21 July 2024 · Duration 0:45:45
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A big week for beginnings this week, with a new Doctor, a new origin story for the Daleks, and a whole new approach to defeating the bad guys. Oh, and a new podcast to discuss them all on. So let’s welcome Patrick Troughton to the studio floor, as we discuss The Power of the Daleks.
Notes and links
The most recent Blu-ray release of The Power of the Daleks was the Special Edition in 2020, which includes a compilation of all the surviving footage, including material shot on an 8mm film camera pointing at a TV screen. This material was also included on the Lost in Time DVD release way back in 2004.
Simon also mentions a site which chronicles the upsetting history of Doctor Who’s missing episodes. It’s called The Destruction of Time, and it’s well worth reading, if a bit dispiriting at times.
The Omnirumour was a series of rumours arising during 2013 that as many as 90 missing Doctor Who episodes had been found and were ready for return to the BBC Archives, possibly as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations. This didn’t happen, obviously, but we did at least get nine episodes: five episodes of The Enemy of the World and four of The Web of Fear.
Let’s continue the tradition: here is Elizabeth Sandifer’s essay on this story, which (inevitably) discusses the importance of mercury to the new Doctor’s character.
James very thoughtfully plugs Brendan and Richard’s new podcast about The Avengers, called The Three-Handed Game, in which they are joined by old friend of the podcast Steven B to discuss episodes from different eras in the history of the show.
At the end of the episode, Simon recounts the story of the gradual revelation of The Power of the Daleks throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s. Among the things he mentions are Peter Haining’s Doctor Who: A Celebration (1983), the Radio TimesDoctor Who 20th Anniversary Special (also 1983), The Making of Doctor Who by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks (2nd edition, 1976), an edition of DreamWatch Bulletin (possibly issue 121 in December 1993) announcing the upcoming publication of the telesnaps in Doctor Who Magazine, and the discovery of some clips from this story in an Australian TV Show called Perspective: C for Computer.
For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll write next week’s shownotes in a completely incomprehensible acrostic code.
And more
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be back a couple of days after the screening of the first two episodes of Season 1 of the Ncuti Gatwa Era on 11 May. In the meantime, you can hear our hot takes on the fourepisodeswe’veseen of Doctor Who’s second RTD era.
There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We’ve covered the first four episodes of Series 1; Episode 5 should be out in the next couple of weeks.
Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.
No, you can’t. They’ve been there for millions of years, through storms and floods and wars and time. Nobody really understands where the music comes from. It’s probably something to do with the precise positions, the distance between both towers. Even the locals aren’t sure. All anyone will ever tell you is that when the wind stands fair and the night is perfect, when you least expect it but always when you need it the most… there is a Song.
This week, the Doctor and River live happily ever after, and Jack Shanahan joins us to discuss The Husbands of River Song.
Notes and links
Brendan mentions that this story was recorded after Alex Kingston started working with Big Finish on her long-running series The Diary of River Song. In fact, the first volume of that series is, like The Husbands of River Song, released in December 2015.
We get our first sight of Peter Capaldi’s wedding ring on 4 August 2013, during a close-up of his right hand in Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor, the thirty-minute live broadcast in which Peter Capaldi is unveiled to the world as the Twelfth Doctor.
Night and the Doctor is a series of five minisodes released on the Blu-ray box set of Series 6 — Bad Night, Good Night, First Night, and the completely unrelated Up All Night. In Last Night, the Doctor runs into a future version of himself, with a new haircut and a suit, about to take River to their last date on the planet Darillium.
Speaking of Moffat recycling his own ideas, Sally Sparrow is first featured in a short story in the 2006 Doctor Who Annual called What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow, in which Sally receives messages from the Ninth Doctor, who is trapped without the TARDIS in 1985. Here’s a link to the story itself.
There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. Two episodes have been released so far: our commentary on the pilot episode Breakaway, and our commentary on the episode Force of Life. We’re planning to release the next episode, Collision Course, just before the start of the new year.
Maximum Power continues its journey through Series C of Blakes 7. This week, a proper science fiction writer takes hold of the show — with remarkable results — in Sarcophagus.
And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. It’s taking a well-earned break during the holidays right now, but it brought in the festive season with a commentary on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, featuring friend-of-the-podcast Tom Salinsky.
Episode 280: He Finds a Way to Fix It
· Recorded on Wednesday 6 December 2023 · Duration 0:49:16
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From Skaro to Gallifrey, twelve episodes of one of the strangest seasons in Doctor Who’s history. What did we think, what did we learn, and what are we most looking forward to? And, as always, who would we snog, marry or avoid?
Notes and links
Thanks to Bob Gilbey (@bobgilbey), Bryan says… (@bryan1981) and DJ Alpha-T (@DJ_AlphaT) for contributing their questions to this episode.
As we well know, an anthology of short stories about the life of Ashildr was indeed published in 2015. It was called Doctor Who: Legends of Ashildr, and it includes stories by Justin Richards and James Goss.
In the shownotes for last week’s episode we discussed the fact that Heaven Sent was nominated for a Hugo Award in 2016, Doctor Who didn’t receive any awards at all for its 2015 season.
And, since we properly failed to mention it (or even remember it, you might say with some justification), the Jenny Laird Award goes to a season or era’s most puzzling creative choice, and the Bonnie Langford goes to someone or something that is surprisingly and delightfully good.
There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. Two episodes have been released so far: our commentary on the pilot episode Breakaway, and our commentary on the episode Force of Life. We’re still planning to release the next episode after Christmas.
Maximum Power continues its journey through Series C of Blakes 7. This week, Servalan kills a bunch of people in Children of Auron.
This week, the Doctor learns that mere relentless persistence is no match for the inevitability of loss, and a Doctor Who spinoff is created which we will never get to see. It’s Hell Bent.
Notes and links
According to Todd, the old woman in the barn is either Leela or Aunt Adah from the Star Trek: Voyager pilot episode Caretaker — a hologram created by a vast pan-dimensional being to make the crew of Voyager feel at home by offering them lemonade, sugar cookies and corn.
Magic or magical realism is a genre closely associated with Latin America, and particularly the writers Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges, although the genre has influenced other writers like China Miéville (who got a mention in the shownotes a couple of weeks ago). Here’s an article about the genre published by Vox in 2014, just after Márquez’s death.
We speculate about awards which Heaven Sent might have won. It was nominated in 2016 for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), but it lost to the Jessica Jones episode AKA Smile. (The Saturn Awards don’t include an award for an individual television episode.)
We’ve just launched a new podcast called The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, which broadcasts to the world our ill-considered first impressions of each new episode of the new RTD era. Here’s our take on The Star Beast; our take on Wild Blue Yonder will be out on Monday.
Our second newest podcast is Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, whose second episode was released a week ago. In that episode, we talked over the show’s second story, Force of Life. We’re planning to release the next episode after Christmas.
Episode 278: The Shooting Gallery of Retired British Thespians
· Recorded on Sunday 12 November 2023 · Duration 0:51:32
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If you think because she is dead, I am weak, then you understand very little. If you were any part of killing her, and you’re not afraid, then you understand nothing at all. So, for your own sake, understand this. I am the Doctor. I’m coming to find you, and I will never, ever stop.
This week, Rob Valentine drops by to spend four-and-a-half billion years admiring how clever Steven Moffat, Peter Capaldi, Rachel Talalay and Murray Gold are. It’s Heaven Sent.
Rob feels that this episode echoes another tale about digging an escape tunnel: The Shawshank Redemption. Here’s Morgan Freeman’s character red, talking about Tim Robbins’s Andy: “I remember thinking it would take a man six hundred years to tunnel through the wall with it. Old Andy did it in less than twenty.”
In Viktor E Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1959), he argues that the primary human drive isn’t pleasure or sex or the avoidance of suffering; instead, he says that we are motivated by a desire for meaning.
And finally, after the closing credits, Simon offers us a pick of the week courtesy of his husband, Brian. It’s Helen O’Hara’s Women vs Hollywood: The Rise and Fall of Women in Film (2021), which talks about the way that female film directors like Rachel Talalay are punished more harshly for their failures than men are.
Did you all enjoy The Star Beast? Of course you did. But if you want to know what we thought, check out our new Doctor Who flashcast, The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire. Like Jodie into Terror before it, The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be released a day or two after each new episode of Doctor Who and will contain our ill-considered and half-baked initial reactions to the episode. Keep an eye out on the new podcast website or on our social media accounts for details.
Our second newest podcast is Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, whose second episode was released yesterday. In that episode, we talked over the show’s second episode (sort of) Force of Life, featuring a young Ian McShane who frankensteins his way around the Moonbase freezing people and causing a great deal of fancy camerawork.
Maximum Power is continuing its journey through Series C of Blakes 7. This week, Servalan gets her end away with one of the help in The Harvest of Kairos.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. No new episode last week, instead they recovered from watching perhaps the worst episode of the entire Star Trek franchise, the Star Trek: Voyager episode Threshold.
Episode 277: The Time on Him
· Recorded on Sunday 12 November 2023 · Duration 0:58:31
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This week, we’re hanging out in a mystical London street full of Sontarans, Judoon and Cybermen, investigating a murder with Johnny Spandrell — only to find, to our horror, that the murder hasn’t happened yet. And, of course, that it’s time for Clara Oswald to Face the Raven.
Notes and links
Fridging or Women in Refrigerators is a trope in which a woman is murdered and the emotions of her male parent/lover/friend become more important to the narrative than the death of the woman herself. This article from The Guardian discusses its use in Strangers, an ITV drama in which our very own Devla Kirwan’s death evokes trauma in her husband, our very own John Simm.
China Miéville’s novel Kraken (2010) also depicts a London with secret hidden streets, these ones full of monsters and cultists. (It also features a villain called the Tattoo, who is literally a crazed sentient tattoo.)
Rigsy’s offscreen girlfriend Jen, who we hear on the phone but don’t see, is played by Naomi Ackie, who goes on to star as Whitney Houston in the 2022 biopic Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody.
On 27 November we’ll be launching a Doctor Who flashcast called The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire. Like Jodie into Terror before it, The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be released a day or two after each new episode of Doctor Who and will contain our ill-considered and half-baked initial reactions to the episode. Keep an eye out on the new podcast website or on our social media accounts for details.
Our second newest podcast is Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, whose first episode was released just a couple of weeks ago. In that episode, we talked over the show’s pilot Breakaway, in which the moon is hurled from its orbit by a terrible nuclear explosion. We’re hoping to release Episode 2 next weekend.
Maximum Power is continuing its journey through Series C of Blakes 7. This week, the crew of the Liberator run into a strangely disappointing figure from Auron mythology in Dawn of the Gods.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, they watched perhaps the worst episode of the entire Star Trek franchise, the Star Trek: Voyager episode Threshold.
Episode 276: The Planet Quantos
· Recorded on Sunday 29 October 2023 · Duration 1:00:19
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This week, in orbit of the planet Neptune, a Doctor Who story is created which kills literally everyone who watches it. Which is why we should probably have thought twice before inviting the lovely Jeremy Radick to discuss it with us.
Notes and links
Steven Moffat’s version of Dracula (2020) is actually Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s version of Dracula. It stars the beautiful and terrifying Claes Bang in the title role, and it features the full complement of Moffat and Gatiss tropes, which will either be to your taste or not.
And The Ring (2002) — a remake of the Japanese film Ringu (1998) — also contains a video which will kill all the people who watch it. (In seven days. It’s nice to have a definite timeline.)
Nathan and Erik Stadnik also share a birthday with Samuel Anderson. Forgot to mention that.
Our newest podcast is Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, whose first episode was released just a couple of weeks ago. In that episode, we talked over the show’s pilot Breakaway, in which the moon is hurled from its orbit by a terrible nuclear explosion.
Maximum Power is continuing its journey through Series C of Blakes 7. This week, the crew of the Liberator encounter some pacifists with a surprisingly deadly weapon in the third episode, Volcano.
This week, we’re all enjoying bombing and threatening one another, until the Doctor comes along and delivers a long speech about New Cruel People, which starts making us feel bad about ourselves. And fair enough. It’s The Zygon Inversion.
Notes and links
The Decimas were tiny squeaky-voiced aliens, who looked like nothing so much as miniature Zygons; their leader was played by our very own Deep Roy. They appeared in the fifth episode of Blakes 7, Web, and so you can hear more about them in Maximum Power episode 5, Color-coded Anoraks.
Sonequa Martin-Green is the astonishing beautiful lead in the first of the new new Star Trek series, Star Trek: Discovery. Her ability to convey genuine emotional distress in Series 1 was so impressive that they required her to do it in just about every scene in Series 2.
And Truth or Consequences is a real place in New Mexico, a small town that voted to name itself after a radio game show in 1950. (Before that, it was called Hot Springs.)
Picks of the Week
Simon
Simon recommends seminal Cold War-era horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), which has been an influence on Doctor Who all the way back to The Faceless Ones.
James
James brings us back to 2023 with his recommendation of Marvel’s TV miniseries Secret Invasion, which itself goes back to a comic book crossover storyline that ran for a few months in 2008.
Peter
Peter suggests Barbenheimer, which was this year’s weirdest media trend, watching Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) on the same day. If Bonnie is still around in 2023, you have to believe that she participated.
Last week, we released the first episode of our new Space: 1999 commentary podcast, Startling Barbara Bain. In that first episode, we talked over the show’s pilot episode Breakaway, in which the moon is hurled from its orbit by a terrible nuclear explosion.
A couple of our podcasts are finished or on hiatus right now. Jodie into Terror was our flashcast on every episode of the Whittaker era, recorded just a couple of days after the broadcast of the episode. Bondfinger was our James Bond commentary podcast, which also covered some of our favourite spy-fi TV shows of the sixties and seventies.
Maximum Power is back! Our podcast about Blakes 7, co-produced with the Trap One podcast, continues its coverage of Blakes 7 series C, with a discussion of the second episode, Powerplay.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we watched a lovely episode of Star Trek: Voyager. B’Elanna crash lands on a bronze-age planet and becomes the inspiration for a beautiful young playwright in Muse.
Episode 274: Orange Babies
· Recorded on Sunday 17 September 2023 · Duration 0:54:41
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This week, we’ve invited twenty million Zygons over for cocktails, and now we’re starting to feel self-conscious about cooking up all that salt-and-pepper squid. And so soon we’re involved in an international political thriller that takes us from Fake New Mexico all the way to Madeupistan. It’s The Zygon Invasion.
Notes and links
Sister Lamont from Terror of the Zygons was played by Lillias Walker, who died in August at the age of 93. I hope she knew how many small children she terrified. Bless her.
El Sandifer’s interview with Peter Harness was broadcast on the Pex Lives podcast feed. You can find it here.
Friend-of-the-podcast Erik Stadnik has just finished the RTD1 era on his podcast Doctor Who: The Writers’ Room, in which he and Kyle discuss the various writers and eras throughout the show’s history. In their most recent episode, they start their long journey through the Steven Moffat era with a discussion of The Eleventh Hour. Highly recommended.
Yesterday, we released the first episode of our new Space: 1999 commentary podcast, Startling Barbara Bain. Space: 1999 was, at times, a thoughtful and beautifully realised British science fiction show that dealt with questions about the very nature of the universe, and at other times was mostly about astronauts trying not to get eaten by unconvincing monsters with rubber tentacles. Our first episode, Breakaway, sees the moon hurled from its orbit by a nuclear explosion and heading off into space for some thrilling new adventures.
A couple of our podcasts are finished or on hiatus right now. Jodie into Terror was our flashcast on every episode of the Whittaker era, recorded just a couple of days after the broadcast of the episode. Bondfinger was our James Bond commentary podcast, which also covered some of our favourite spy-fi TV shows of the sixties and seventies.
Maximum Power is back! Our podcast about Blakes 7, co-produced with the Trap One podcast, makes a start on Blakes 7 series C, with a discussion of the first episode, Aftermath.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we were astounded to find ourselves enjoying a late-era episode of Star Trek: Enterprise in which the Vulcans go completely rogue — Kir’Shara.
Episode 273: Electrified Pubic Merkins
· Recorded on Sunday 10 September 2023 · Duration 0:55:51
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It’s been a mere 900 years since last week’s episode, and it’s time to check in with Ashildr to see if she’s still the naive and loving young girl she was back in her Viking village days. Or — like the rest of us — has she simply turned into Peter Capaldi’s Doctor? It’s The Woman Who Lived.
Notes and links
Nathan refers to the Blackadder the Third episode Amy and Amiability in which a young woman played by Miranda Richardson disguises herself as a highwayman called the Shadow, who has a serious problem with squirrels. The first scene of this story is very much written by someone who remembers that episode.
In his massive best seller Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell proposes the theory that it takes 10,000 hours to become really proficient at something. If you want to hear two of our favourite podcasters rip Gladwell’s book apart, they do that in an episode of their podcastIf Books Could Kill.
The Doctor Who production crew gave Maisie Williams and Rufus Hound video cameras so that they could record things that took place during the production. One of Rufus’s videos made it onto the Series 9 blu-ray release; three of them can be found on the BBC’s YouTube channel — here, here, and here. Watch them: they’re adorable.
Picks of the week
Todd
Todd recommends the Torchwood episodes also written by Catherine Tregenna, particularly the sad and beautiful Captain Jack Harkness, as well as Meat and Adam (and Out of Time, a brilliant episode that we didn’t mention).
Simon
Simon wants you watch The Beast (2023) starring Léa Seydoux, who played James Bond’s love interest in the two most recent films. It’s a romance set in three different time periods, 1910, 2014 and 2044. It’s due for release some time early next year.
Richard
Richard has headed into Big Finish territory, particularly those stories starring Rufus Hound as the Monk, particularly The Missy Adventures, whose first three box sets also feature Rufus Hound. He also appears with Tim Treloar and Katy Manning in Volume 4 of The Third Doctor Adventures.
Nathan
Nathan’s back on his Star Trek thing again, and this time it’s Star Trek: Lower Decks Series 4, which is nearing its end as we release this episode. You can also catch our coverage of Lower Decks on Untitled Star Trek Project.
We are launching a new commentary podcast on Space:1999 next weekend, so keep an eye out for more details during the week. (The title is, for now, still a closely-guarded secret.)
A couple of our podcasts are finished or on hiatus right now. Jodie into Terror was our flashcast on every episode of the Whittaker era, recorded just a couple of days after the broadcast of the episode. Bondfinger is our James Bond commentary podcast, which also covers some of our favourite spy-fi TV shows of the sixties and seventies.
Maximum Power is back! Our podcast about Blakes 7, co-produced with the Trap One podcast, returns today with a pre-Series C episode based on the Big Finish Blakes 7 story Warship, set between Star One and Aftermath. We’ll be back each week to cover each episode of Series C.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week we watched a surprisingly enjoyable episode of Star Trek: Voyager, which gave Janeway and Chatokay some time to pursue a mostly non-cringeworthy romantic relationship.
Episode 272: John Scott Martin in a Zarbi Suit
· Recorded on Sunday 10 September 2023 · Duration 0:53:31
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This week, we remind ourselves of what the Doctor stands for, as we watch him train up some very silly Vikings to be sweet and funny enough to see off an invasion by big stupid monsters with mouths full of teeth. Stacey Smith? joins us to discuss the story of The Girl Who Died.
Notes and links
Stacey discovered how much she liked this episode while watching it for Who is the Doctor 2, an unofficial guide to the Smith and Capaldi years, published in 2020.
Wallander was a Swedish TV series based on the detective novels by Henning Menkell. It was re-made in English, in a version starring Kenneth Branagh as the detective, and featuring our very own haematophobic Viking Heidi (Barnaby Kay).
And finally, the director of this episode, Ed Bazalgette, is very likely to have featured in this music video, familiar to both Nathan and Stacey from their childhoods: Turning Japanese by the Vapors.
A couple of our podcasts are finished or on hiatus right now. Jodie into Terror was our flashcast on every episode of the Whittaker era, recorded just a couple of days after the broadcast of the episode. Bondfinger is our James Bond commentary podcast, which also covers some of our favourite spy-fi TV shows of the sixties and seventies.
Maximum Power is a podcast about Blakes 7, a co-production with the Trap One Podcast. Our Series C coverage is impending. Clear your schedules.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. We took a break this week, but if you want to hear Nathan squeaking incredulously about the weaknesses of a Star Trek series, we recommend taking a listen to our coverage of Star Trek: Enterprise. We’ll be back this Friday with a commentary on quite a good episode of Star Trek: Voyager.
Episode 271: Eels with Jazz Hands
· Recorded on Sunday 27 August 2023 · Duration 0:52:42
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