Literally Mooning the Audience

Hello, dear listener, and welcome back to Flight Through Entirety the only Doctor Who podcast, which has a wingspan of 50 feet and blows fire from its nostrils. I'm Nathan. I'm Todd. I'm James. We're 5000000000 years in the future. We've got canapes, cocktails, and several 1000000 gallons of sunscreen, which means that we're ready to face the end of the world. So, James, apparently you're allowed on the podcast now. Apparently. Welcome James. Yeah, welcome. This is great. This is the 1st and last time. Yes, that's right. very, very well behaved. You won't be back. So let's talk about this because this is a crucial episode in the history of Doctor Who because, oh my god, we've actually had some news since the last episode aired. And that being that the doctor's leaving? Yeah. already. I know. It was heartbreaking at the time, don't you think? I was really crushed by it because this is something we talked about this last week about how incredibly excited we all were. It's sort of makes you feel like, 0 my goodness, like change already, or is it going to jeopardise the future of the show really, you know, and we're only just getting an audience now. Well, they stick with it if somebody's already leaving. Yeah, I mean, I was questioning whether it would actually be back off the 2nd series, if it couldn't keep, I mean, it just, it just threw the entire sort of future of the show into kind of question. I mean, obviously that's not what happened. And whatever people personally think of David Tennant, he made the role his own and Yeah, became incredibly popular. Had he been announced at this point? No, I don't think so. I think were there rumours? Well, I think the smart money was on David Tennant because he'd been in RTD's Casanova and he actually had been with Mark Gatas in a live action version of the Quatermass experiment. And I think that he knew about that then. So I think he was kind of big and I don't think anyone was particularly surprised when it was announced that it was going to be him. There's an in joke in the Quage Mass experiment remake, where I think it's actually Geisha's character says, the doctor, I presume or something along those lines. Yeah. So he'd found out, I think the day before it was made, because it's filmed live. and and they slipped that line in there. Right, right. interesting. It's very good, actually. It is well worth a look. It's kind of amazing that they managed to do it. And there was only one kind of line fluff in the entire sort of 90 minutes or however long it runs for. Wow. But of course, we've got Christopher here, and of course, this starts off, you know, segueing straight away from the previous episode, straight into this, and they're in the TARDIS. so organic. I just find it as a classic series fan, you know, all the pumping of the Fiston thing and the turning of the stuff, like straight at the beginning of this episode, it's so different from the classic series who, like the way in which he's dealing with the TARD. Yeah, well, the last 3 doctors apart from mum, that one fateful night, one night in the 1990s, had a TARDIS console that was just buttons essentially and had one lever. And so running around. I mean, they did do a little bit of running around and business with the console. But here you've got an incredibly physical console and a really physical kind of working class doctor who's pumping things and using all sorts of physical effort. He's got that bong on the console that he turns around. I never thought of it like that. Oh, dear. It's actually a really funny scene. And we will come back to it later because they do think that it does talk a little bit about Russell T. Davies' conception of the future and the way that he uses the future in Doctor Who. But let's talk about the role of this episode, because this episode has an amazingly important job to do, which is to kind of convince us that this show is a going concern and to kind of show us what the show is capable of. Yeah, it's so crucial. I mean, I consider it to be Rose Part 2. Because it just segues into it. And in the 1st 15 minutes, it's very much Rose dealing with a lot of new things and the audience dealing with it as well. But as we'll see in our discussions, I think it then changes throughout the episode and suddenly to the doctor's story and and the audience getting little bits of information before a final sort of scene where there is a payoff to that. But yes, you're very right. This, I mean, this sets the scene of what the tone of the show's going to be like. And straight away, I mean, we're out of the TARDIS onto this platform. And I'm absolutely amazed at the visual effects, like straight up with the earth and the sun and the platform that could never have been done in original who. You know, they spent most of the budget of series one on that one episode. This episode. Yes. I'm not surprised. Well, it has a massive number of effect shots, like a huge, huge number. Slightly over 200 special effect shots in that episode. It was, we need to throw everything and the kitchen sink at this to sell how Doctor Who is going to look now. Uh, you know, this is Doctor Who. This is not the creaky old cardboard set show that you saw when you were a kid back in the 1970s. This is big. There's a very definite attempt to ground this season on Earth. And a lot of fanboys, you know, complained that we never left Earth this season and there weren't any alien planets. We were all around Earth. And I think Russell T. Davies was afraid of Doctor Who's reputation as being a bunch of stuff that happens in space corridors. And so the 1st time that he goes to the future, he takes us to a beautiful kind of, what's the location called? Platform one. No, but I mean, it's like a hotel in Cardiff or something. It's temple. Yeah, it's a temple and it's used over and over again. You see it all the time in Doctor Who, even in the Moffatt era. This location comes back. But it is incredibly beautiful and, you know, impressive looking. And because we've got to sell rose's kind of dislocation about being in the future, it throws just heaps and heaps of ridiculous aliens at us. And they're not just men in suits, although there's plenty of men in suits, but there's, you know, the face of Bo, who's in a giant big tank, and then you've got Jimmy V as the mocks of Balhoon, and they're all sort of strange, odd looking aliens. And when they're introduced, none of them are like Sontarans or Cybermen. Like they're not from a particular alien race. They're from financial family 7 or, you know, from a company or a family or a forest. You know, they're they're not just sort of generic alien races from the planet Zog. They're strange and sort of incomprehensible, even, I think, to people who've watched Doctor Who before. It does your head in. It really does. I sit there going, what does that actually mean? But at the same time, I'm sort of laughing at the names that have been thrown at me, like they bring a smile to my face. Yeah. I think it is really quite significant that the steward is the 1st alien that we actually see as classic series fans since 1989. Last week we had the nesting consciousness with the plastic autons but the classic series fans, that's something that we know. And they're not characters. They't speak or anything. No, that's right. Whereas here, he is the 1st real alien. And then Rose is suddenly confronted with this litany of different looking aliens. Yeah, and the audience is having to deal with this as well. I think it's a wonderful scene. It's comedic, but at the same time, you also have Christopher or the doctor being introduced to these, these aliens and how he interacts and Rose is watching that and you're what. I mean, when I was rewatching this, I'm watching her reactions to him and his reactions to her, it's quite, it's very cleverly written, and also to intimacy that the doctor has with Jade or the intimacy that she shows back, and seeing Rose's reaction to that. So Jabe says she's from, um, she's descended from the planet below and she's a direct descendant of the tropical rainforest. She's a village in South London. Yeah, it's a real place. It's not a sort of crazy planet. Yeah, until I lived in London, I had no idea. It was just like, oh, that's a funny sounding name. But no, it's literally she's from South London. It's trerendous. And, you know, she's one of many races that have evolved on the surface of the planet. And you've got to think that that's a reference to the Silurians which are, you know, yet another race that evolved on earth. So humans, Silurians, trees, all of them reached sentience and then sort of developed spaceships and, you know, headed off world. Even those bird head creatures that appear, what's her name? Mrs. what is it? Mr. Mrs. Pacoo, is that there? I really think it's very clever, the way the way that whole scene is set up and then, you know, then Rose does have a moment and she has to leave the situation. And that's really well told using something that we've never actually seen in Doctor Who before, which is the use of tainted love, which whose lyrics actually tell us what Rose is feeling, and she has to get away. You know, she is overwhelmed by sort of culture shock. In a way that we probably are as well, the way you were talking about your reaction to all these aliens, Todd. I mean, they're sort of funny, but they're incomprehensible and they're nothing that we've ever seen before. And that means that we're experiencing a kind of disorientation the same way that rose is. You are very overwhelmed by lots of things and things have been thrown at you. Like, we've already had at this point, the introduction of psychic paper. And it's a very subtle introduction. It's something that as a classic series fan, you kind of go, well how are they going to do these 45 minute episodes, because in the original series, the doctor turns up, gets accused of something it's put in jail, a cell, a dungeon, and then has to spend time breaking out and proving himself. The middle part of the 4 parter. Or even the 1st episode, James. Whereas here it's like, okay, we've got our in. We can get into the story and we can be whoever we need to be which I think is just brilliant and it's just done quickly. It's over with, but I'm processing that going, oh, oh, oh. And then when Rose leaves that scene, Jade scans the doctor. And she's looking at her little device going, this is impossible. As a classic series of stands, I'm going, well, I know why it's impossible because you're a timelord, but do new series fans really, do you pick up on what's on that little scanner and what's going on? It's just this, it just seems, it seems, well, there's something about the doctor, you know? And then we have a little break. Where we're trying to process all this stuff, but it sort of just it goes from being really rushed to rose talking to Raffello. Is that... And wasn't that scene added later or am I... The Rafallo scene was was a late edition to the script because it was underrunning, yes. But it's so crucial because it just gives us time to process. Rose is talking to a real person in this environment, finding out that this real person does real things. Yeah, she's a plumber. We still have plumbers in the future. That's right. And I just really love that connection. Of course, it's the kiss of death because in the last episode Clive only interacted with Rose, not the doctor, and he got killed off. And here again, this character only interacts with Rose and, well she's gone, you know, moments later. Gee, I'm really worried about Gwyneth next week. But she does get to interact with the doctor, but it's sort of it's setting a precedence. But those characters die so pointlessly as well. You know, they just die off screen. But of like, from the point of view of the lead characters. They die without any lodge of that. I think that that is a really great economical scene that sells the threat really early. Like, we don't really know what happens to Rafallo. But she's very funny and very sweet and very human and super likeable. And it's interesting that they cast a woman to play that part. I think that's really good. But it does what Doctor Who does. You know, it's what Clive said in the 1st episode, like death and destruction follows him and that is a feature of Doctor Who. And it's reinforcing that to the new audience, you know, that, as you said, death and destruction do follow the doctor even when he's not around. It influences what events are taking place. And that builds and builds over the next 9 seasons. And and sort of reaches its apotheosis that last year's Christmas special. The doctor being in someone's life is, is, is kind of a death sentence. is the way Moffatt tends to have sort of aimed towards... Yeah, I think Moffatt... You know, Russell does interrogate that a little bit later on in his in his run, but I do think that that is something that Moffatt really kind of plays with. And, you know, I think we also do need the alternative story which does happen, which is that the doctor is called the doctor because he makes people's lives better. Which is what they're reaching for. But but they're doing it by going, oh, well, look at all this death and destruction, but he, you know, he's trying. Yeah. But we then get another scene, which I just think is so crucial. And that is the doctor and rose. Having an art, well, she is, you know, questioning why, who are you? Why am I here? What's going on? They have one of their arguments, and I think they have disagreement, I should say. And they have it in this episode and they have it in the next episode as well, where they they argue about something. It's really interesting to see their dynamic working through that process. But it's so, it's so interesting to me here again. Rose is making it all about her. She wants to know about the doctor. She wants to know what's going on her feelings. The doctor is not ready to give her certain information at this point. He can only go so far, but, you know, he has to connect her with Jackie. You know, he's we're getting fed a bit of information. Again very cleverly. It's explained how everybody speaks English. Another thing that's not really dealt in the classic series except for once with Sarah. But I never thought of it like it invades your head and is not given permission. Like, it's, again, a very clever thing from Russell, it really questions for those of us who are original series fans, how preconceptions or what we believe to be the show. So it's like a really, it makes a really interesting point about consent. Yeah. And and whether Rose is a character really consented to what like is happening to her life. She's jumped into it without all of the, all of the information that she necessarily needs. Yeah, well, I mean, that's what that whole thing is about, isn't it? Like it's, she even says to Raffallo that she didn't know what she's doing. She's jumped into this thing with a stranger, she doesn't know who he is. And there's a sense in which she goes on the attack. Like when she tells the doctor, like demands to know where he's from, and he sort of accuses her in some ways of being racist, you know, the deep south line. But that aggressively asking someone what their background is, is kind of impolite in a sort of normal human context. Especially if you're British. Yeah, yeah. And so, and so, um, she backs off and they do repair it, but they repair it in a nice subtle way, and it is what you said, Todd where he fixes her phone so that she can speak to Jackie. Did you notice that that that's actually a flashback that she's ringing Jackie before Hendrix explodes? Yes, I will say that because I was watching it going, like, is this even Jackie's flat with those trees outside and I'm going like, is this set before the events of Rose because, you know, in a couple of episodes time, like she's never gone back after the events of Rose. Like, so it must be before that. So I was trying to place that. like I... Well, I think that Jackie actually says that she wants Rose to put some money into the lottery syndicate, which is run by Wilson which is, you know, the very, very 1st time that we see Rose last episode. So I think it is explicitly like the Wednesday before or something like that. I've got a big spot on my face. That's fantastic. I hadn't really picked that up. And it's just a clever sort of subtle little throwaway that you just, unless you're really listening to the lies, you don't get. But it doesn't matter if you don't get it. But it's also to the fact that we're speaking to one of the semi regulars as well. We haven't quit completely detached from the earth that we know. So it's also sending out this signal that those characters can still be at least Jackie or whatever can be involved in a small way, but not just in space away from the earth that we know. I do find it intriguing that this is one episode where there's not a significant other than the doctor male in the cast. If you look at this season, next week we're going to have Simon Callow as Charles Dickens. Thank you. Then we've got a two-parter where Mickey is back. Then we've got the companion that ever was in 2 episodes. Then we've got Rose's dad, and then we've got Captain Jack or Mickey for the rest of the season. Right. So this is the one episode where we don't have another supporting male character. Yeah, we've got the steward, but they kill him quite quickly and he's more of a comedy performance than an actual character. And I think that's important because we've got to start focussing on the doctor. And that scene, going back to that scene with Rose and the doctor. There are questions there, and you want those questions answered but we, like Rose, have not earned the right to those answers as yet. And that will suddenly, you know, play out throughout the episode. The doctor's relationship with Jade. is beautiful. Yeah. She's terrific. Has she been back? Yasmin Bannerman, who plays Dana in the big finish audios. Is that right Oh, and she is fantastic as Dana in Blake 7. I don't I don't know if she's been back to Doctor Who? No, not in the TV series. Big finish has just brought her back as James's... Clone... Sapling? I'm surprised there isn't a Jab box set, actually. In their new spinoff series, New Earth. Oh, Tales from New Earth. But I'm surprised that those trees have not been back to Doctor Who. We've had trees in that, what's that horrible Christmas special? The Andrazani one. The Doctor the Widow and the Wardrobe. Yeah, in the forest of the night. And then we've had tree character in that wood episode with Capaldi and Pearl Mackie, you know, yeah, that's terrible. Knock knock. But she's such a great character. They have some wonderful moments and she's so intimate with the doctor. Like, just her concern over him, like, and you know there's more there when she puts her hand on his arm. And the tears that Christopher Eccleston gives in his eyes, like at that moment when she talks about his race or being the last of his kind. I can't remember the exact words, but I'm just thinking, 0 my goodness. I still tear up in that scene, even watching it in preparation for this. And I remember at the time thinking that that's a difference between the new series and the classic series... Is that the 1st time we've ever actually seen the character cry? The doctor. Possibly, yeah. It's certainly the 1st time he has the same kind of interiority as another... Yeah, it's a real human and it is really, really good. And it also shows that the doctor is hiding this the whole time. And we saw that in the fight with Rose, where he just says, all that matters is the hero now, and that's me. And Jabe says, you know, maybe someone seeks excitement or danger or something when that's all he has left. Yeah, and the tears thing, he instantly pulls himself together and gets on with the adventure, which just we see the mask go back on almost immediately. That character, just the way she connects with the doctor, the intimacy of it. And he doesn't, in their initial meeting, he doesn't, he sort of flirts with it, but he doesn't realise he's doing it. But she trusts him and ultimately she makes the ultimate sacrifice. That sequence where she burns in the background as he's trying to save the platform is just for me anyway, heartbreaking that she you know, and it's the music. So, music is now playing such a huge part of this selling the emotion of what's going on. It's modern television. Yeah, there were a lot of people who complained about it, you know who said, oh, well, here's Murray telling us how to feel and how to be a motive. But that's what music is for. That's a common complaint of all grumpy old men who watch television these days is that you're telling me how to feel constantly. But I mean, that's what that's what drama is supposed to do. We could go back to Aristotle for that. You know, we meant to feel in a particular way, and we now have a massive orchestra and a talented composer, and that's a cinematic technique as well. I mean, that's one of the reasons why we continue to love Star Wars, even after it's had so many misses, is that the music is always so great. I actually found that the mix on the Blu-rays was kind of strange. The mix on the 1st few seasons of Doctor Who is strange, right? Like, you know, like there was like music. Yes, we've got a great composer, music, music, music, music, music and then they don't get it right in the mix. I thought that at the time when I was watching, I was just like, oh this is jarring. Like, I mean, I love Marigold's music. for Doctor Who, but it, in those 1st few seasons, it just drowns the production. There are whole swathes of rose where you're looking at the scene and you're going, what are they saying? I can't hear them. You don't think it's just that we were all quite old? By the time you watched it. Wow. Oh, you weren't. No, you weren't. Oh, no, what? Like dear Brendan, listeners. James is a decade younger than the rest of us, at least. Yeah, but having a talent composer, Russell is still willing to go with modern music, and I put that in quotes, like the iPod will play toxic by Britney Spears, that classic ballad. Like any, I love the fact that it's, it's a modern music track for the time, but he plays with the humour of it. Like, they get it wrong. Well, in fact, Cassandra quotes burn baby burn as well. So this is a future, 5000000000 years into the future. The only earth music that survives is disco and you've got to think that's that's a pretty impressive conception of the future. And in fact, I love the conception of the future here because like there's new numbers that have been invented, you know, Apple and Cup are now numbers. And I think that stuff is really funny and it draws from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I think. And it also plays with the idea. I think it kind of sells the idea that the future in Doctor Who has always been slightly ridiculous and it kind of leans into that and lampshades that. And Doctor Who was sort of always a cheesy program where people in rubber monster suits would stand around in corridors talking to one another. And Russell knows that that's how people or just, you know, the ordinary TV viewer has conceived it. And he leans into it. And I think it's really successful. This is a massively, massively successful season of television. And I think it knows how to talk to a general audience in a way that the show really hadn't for, you know, quite a considerable amount of time. It does it with humour. with throwaway lines that aren't crucial to the plot, so you can pick and choose what you get out of it. But for the casual view it, you can still follow what's going on after something's thrown at you. I love the fact that Raffello is from, not even from a planet. It's from some other thing and I'm going, what the hell does that mean? You've just blown my mind. You've blown my mind. Like everybody has to come from a planet. No, I just come from... The jacket brocade. Yeah, yeah, yeah. whatever that might happen to me. It's elusive affiliation around Scarlet Junction. Well, there's the silver devastation gets its 1st name call here too. No one seems to be from our planet. And I think that that's a really good thing because it puts the old fans and the new fans, you know, in the same footing with respect to what the universe is like. And I think too, there's a very deliberate attempt to move out of Doctor Who continuity by setting the future stories vastly, vastly further in the future than we've ever been before except maybe the Ark. And even the arc is clever enough to, you know, not have a year. It's set in the 57th segment of time and, you know. So it clears all of that stuff. We can still have our space war between the Earth Empire and the Draconians and that gets left untouched. Isn't the 57th segment of time when the Earth originally burnt up. No, we're never speaking of that again. You make a really good point there. It means that we're all on the same page. Old fans and new fans. And Russell's redrafting what it means to be Doctor Who rewriting not rewriting. He's telling us this is what the show is now, and we have to be on the same page, moving forward. We get lots of the Tanoi voice. I love that voice. Whoever does that voice, you know, earth filter descending and there's little throwaway things outside when we see the visuals as well, that we forbid the use of teleportation and weapons and religion on platform one. We get another throwaway line by the mocks of Belhoon, about the this is a bad wolf scenario. This is a bad scenario. I don't think that's going to be important in any ways. We don't watch all. Do you know what that tanoi voice reminds me of? What? Earth shuffle arriving. Yes, from the leisure hive. Yes, yes, very true. I mean, it's obviously it's nowhere near as iconic. But it has the same sort of Tom, bro. Yeah, the same feel to it. Yeah, totally agree. totally agree. So there is one other thing that Russell does to put us old fans on the same footing as the new fans, and that is the mystery of the doctor, which is finally revealed. And I think that you talked earlier, Todd, about how both Rose and the audience needed to earn that revelation about who the doctor is. And I think that the way that Rose earns it is, because their 1st date, the doctor takes Rose to the future so that she can see her planet burning. And so when she reacts to that and she reacts to that with sadness because the world ended and they were caught up in this stupid capture and escape and pressing buttons plot, and no one was paying attention to the world, and she has a little moment of kind of mourning for something that's passed. And that's the moment where he says what happened to him, and neither the new fans nor the old fans knew that during the time when the show was off the air, that the doctor's home planet was destroyed, and that he's the last of his kind. And that revelation gives the doctor a kind of more epic backstory. And, uh, it obviously sweeps away all those sofas that were scattered around Galifre and gets rid of. Yeah, yeah. Like gets rid of Gallifrey, which is terrible and, you know, I hope never ever comes back. But it also gives the doctor this sort of, you know, tragic scale. And I think it's so well done. It's so cleverly seated. We had references to the last great time war in the last episode. And we'll learn more about the time war as things go on. But I remember watching the series for the 1st time and being intrigued, like wondering what the time war was. And, of course, being terribly grateful that Russell had got rid of Gallifrey. And it's, you know, Jade even calls, like even says, stop wasting time, time lord. So again, we had the word time lord last week. We've got it again, but Rose hasn't necessarily heard it properly until the end of this episode. But yes, it's great. Getting rid of Gallifrey and giving him a backstory that we're intrigued about what has happened. It just gives him emotional depth and there's a pain behind everything. And when Jada dies. He gets really angry, you know? Christopher just turns on a dime to deal with the character. We have not talked about yet, which is Cassandra, O'Brien.belta 17. He was once a little boy, which is another amazing line that at the time I kind of, what? And he just gets thrown away. Do you know, this is my most favourite thing and it's slightly spoiled by new earth, but my favourite thing about the conception of Cassandra. is that when we 1st see her, the camera goes around so that we can see how flat she is, and then on her backside, just immediately behind her mouth, there's a hole, and I am absolutely certain that that's her asshole, yeah. Because, you know, basically human beings are a sort of giant tube with an elementary canal sort of starting at the mouth and ending at the other end. If you remove the middle, that's all you have left. So this is the 1st character whose bum hole has actually appeared on screen. She's literally mooning the audio. I'm just going to go past that for a moment. as we grapple with that. You're welcome to ignore that completely now, Todd. It's a wonderful performance by Zoe. And it's also an amazing piece of special effect. Yeah. But the doctor at the end lets her die. He brings her back and because of that, his actions actually kill her. and every's in action. Oh, he brings her back. Yeah, but he doesn't help her. He doesn't help her. Like, he doesn't help her. And then he says everything has its time and everything dies. He knows that he's sentenced her to death. So it sets up the sort of person that he actually is. He is dangerous, you know? You push him too far and he will get to a point where, you know, I take no prisoners. Like, you know, there are consequences for your actions. And he's just got this gravitas about him, which I don't think any doctors had. I think Capaldi's got it. I don't know whether his success has quite got there. Yeah, yeah. I think the idea that the doctor's performance is a mask is something that tenant does in silence of the library or the sequel to it, where River tells him his name, and he's really shaken by that, and then he's instantly back to being doctor-ish. And I think that's a great, great conception of the character because you've got doctors who are, you know, charismatic in the way that Tom Baker is charismatic or Colin is charismatic, but neither of them have much interiority. Do you know what I mean? There's not much idea that there's something behind that or under it. And it's not something that you get very much in the classic series at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm not I'm not dissing the classic series at all. But I do think that this was a much more interesting direction to take it rather than having a sort of happy wisecracking hero who's just travelling through the universe for fun. The idea that the doctor's travelling through the universe to escape something, which still allows him to have fun still allows him to be charismatic and funny, but allows him also to be just a bit more complicated and interesting. You push those triggers. And that hurt and that pain and that anger come bubbling to the surface. Something Christopher does really, really well. I often think that this episode is overlooked. I think people often talk about Dalek or Father's Day or the empty child. We remember Cassandra. We should remember this story. Yeah. And it's just so important, along with Rose, as this handle at the beginning of the season, sort of mirrors the end of the season we're on, we're now on platform one, platform's going to come back. Bad Wolf is introduced. We've got psychic paper, TARDIS, Last of the Time Lords, time all of this stuff you set up. And from here on, it's just little bits seeding us through the rest of the season. Well, I mean, you are someone who has said over and over again that the TV movie doesn't work because it introduces all of those things in the 1st 30 seconds. Whereas here, there's a lot of backstory that's introduced here but they keep the rest of the plot fairly light. You know, it's a sort of whodunit plot and doesn't really have all that much going for it. But it does allow us time to get to know both rows and the doctrine to learn more about what this new show is going to be. I have to say, there are 2 things that I really love in this. Those stupid fans that are just impossible, right? always reminds me of Sigourney Weaver in Galaxy Quest, when she's going, what are these chomping, chompy, chompy things that we have to go through, the writers just don't know, you know, they're just hackneyed writers, and the fact that all these fans are speeding up and the doctor has to go through them. It's an impossible thing to get to the switch that he has to pull. I just love that, like, Russell sort of sending up that whole genre. does lampshade it, doesn't it? The doctor kind of goes, oh, yes, you know, of course that's where they would be. 42 is, I think, the worst new series story for inconveniently placed controls. But this... But it does it with humour. And the other thing is I love the spiders. When they hit the camera in the ventilation duct, which I think is a nod back to the 1965 classic, the web planet, when one giant ant hits the camera and the camera moves out of place and then goes back to the shot. I think it's a nod to classic series. I don't know if it is or not. Yeah, it was. It was actively, it was like they said that at the time. Like, I think, does Russell say it in the righteous tale or in a commentary, he says, no, that was a reference to the web planet. That was specifically that... In fact, the web planet gets repeatedly referenced in this season and it's worth mentioning that the face of Bo is the oldest inhabitant of the ISOP galaxy, and we'll have venom grubs coming back in Boomtown. Like, I think. And I think, uh, let's take a drink, dear listener, Elizabeth Sandefer, um, mentions that this story actually has something in common with the web planet in that it is an incredible weird spectacle that's designed to be like nothing else on television and it does that right up front. It goes all out to say, this is what we can do. You know, we've done the housing estate and the local shopping centre and running down Westminster Bridge, but we can be much much weirder than that if we want to. And I think it's a really ballsy, really brave 2nd episode and absolutely the right thing to do. What I love about this story is that, I mean, we've talked about the way that it shows what Doctor Who can be now. It also tells what Doctor Who can be now. Like the the concepts and the just the the seemingly throwaway lines, the the great line about continental drift, sorry. Um, and, you know, but the continents move. I saw it on news round extra. And then the doctor says, well, that's classic earth, the national trust, put it, put it back together. And, and, and, there's so much imagination there is showing the imagination that this show can have in a way that it probably hasn't ever done before. Yeah. Even in the classic series. And I think it's really important because I think a lot of people would have come into Doctor Who thinking that it's a science fiction program, and especially the American audience, I think would have a preconception of what science fiction shows should be like. And this is really just saying, well, this is Doctor Who. And like, let's blow your mind. And if we've blown your mind and you're going, oh my goodness, it's so different, then join us for this journey. Well, then, this nomads, all we've got time for this week. We're off to eat our own body weighting chips before our first excursion into the world of BBC period drama. Do come back next week for the unquiet dead. In the meantime, you can find us at FlightthroughEntirety.com flights through entirety on Facebook and Apple Podcasts and at FTE podcast on Twitter. Over on Bondfinger, you can find commentary podcasts on every era of the James Bond series. That's bondfinger.com, bondfinger on Facebook and iTunes and at bondfingercast on Twitter. Until next time, listeners are reminded that Flight through Entirety is a maximum hospitality zone. Please keep any lianas or heartbreaking personal backstories concealed at all times. Thank you very much for listening and good night. See you soon. Good night. That was Flight through Entirety, starring Todd Bilby, Nathan Bottomley, and James Selwood, theme arrangement by Cameron Lamb strings performance by Jane Alberg. This episode, literally mooning the audience, was recorded on the 11th of June 2018 and released on the 2nd of September. Fans of James's appearance on this podcast will also enjoy his turn as the mastering episode 112 and his upcoming sitcom in which he plays a former Doctor Who club president with a dark secret and a heart of gold. I'm not picking that up. Good, fine. Or you should maybe stop. So, I don't know. Just go around the house smashing all the clock. Yeah, we should. Yeah, I think if we delay pressing the fast return switch for long enough, they'll all just meld. It's 10 o'clock. It's gonna be 10 chimes. It's 9.55. They're all set to go off a different time. hilariously. That must be joyous. So it's sort of like, is that a, is that a sort of analogue version of searching the, searching your, um, your liability? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, God. Bong. Okay, okay. But let's talk about the role of this.