Hello, dear listener, and welcome back to Flight Through Entirety
the only Doctor Who podcast, whose hosts have all the clothes and
the breeding, but who talk like some sort of wild things.
I'm Nathan.
I'm Todd.
I'm James.
We're back in the Victorian era, like the talons of Wing Chiang
only slightly less racist.
It's 1869.
We in Cardiff disappointingly, and it's time to confront the
Unquiet Dead.
So, my depressing thought about all of this is that we're all the
unquiet dead.
We're all, sooner or later, dead, and we're still wandering around
and making noises and recording podcasts and things like that's
never going to happen.
Right, that's the end of this.
Okay.
That's all we have to say.
So, Todd, we have been to the future and now we're in the past.
We are, and I think this is what Russell's setting up that we have
a present.
We have the future.
We have the past, past, past, and future, and that's going to be
the go to for the next few seasons where one of these 3 episodes
will be in the present one will be in the future one will be in
the past and then we'll have a 2 parter.
So it's a template.
I think, like, he does it, and then Moffatt does it in his 1st
season as well in series 5.
And I think that he does it again in his last series when he's
introducing Bill.
He does the go to the future. go to the past.
But it is so important because, like, we've got to see the Doctor
Who can do the past.
Like if we hold off any longer, that would be a problem.
People wouldn't know that that's what to expect.
It would be too jarring and it would probably impact negatively on
the ratings as well.
In fact, there's a whole long periods of time where Doctor Who
doesn't do the past at all.
So in the Pertuy era, we basically have a bit of the time monster
and then the time warrior.
But apart from that, we don't go to the past at all.
And, you know, there's a lot of space corridors in the Graham
Williams era.
I don't think we do the past there.
So there are long periods of time where we don't go to the past.
Remember the visitation when it finally came along.
It was kind of like, 0 my goodness, it's a period piece and we
just haven't done that on Doctor Who for a while.
And I think the new series has to go back to the past because it's
not going to be a story of space corridors anymore.
It's got to show us that it can do a whole bunch of different
things.
And this era, the BBC do so well.
Yeah.
Well, that's right.
That's always said, isn't it?
Whenever anyone mentions things like horror fang rock or talons of
Wang Sheyang, all of which are set sort of within a few decades of
this, you know, they just do it very well.
And here I think they do it better than they've ever done.
You've got massive locations.
You've got that incredible theatre that they use, which is packed
full of extras.
You've got great outdoors, things and coaches and horses and
stuff.
I mean, it's only in those sequences at the beginning, and then
you get into the house, but they use it very effectively.
It also, it probably sets up a template, which the new series
tends to get stuck in, which is, when we go to the past, it
generally is always the Victorian era in the new series.
Not always, but generally.
I don't mind that because it's an age of before our modern
technology, right?
But it's not so far in the past that it's like, we're rubbing 2
sticks together to make fire.
Yeah.
You've got to be, you've got to be modern enough, I think, in
order for characters to be able to understand what's going on if
they're meeting the doctor.
And I think, too, that there is a kind of Victorian sort of feel
to the doctor's character anyway as that sort of eccentric
inventor adventurer thing.
No, no, like it's a bit steampunk.
Especially, especially with Eccleston and his TARDIS.
Like they're that sort of steampunk sort of, you know, Jules Verne
kind of...
Yeah, there's a lot of brass.
Yeah, you can understand why that meshes so well.
I like the fact that they build it around an historical
character.
It's something that Doctor Who has done before in the Common Baker
era with George Stevenson.
And here, you've got Simon Callow, who's the go to for playing
Charles Dickens in every theatre production, television spectacle
on the BBC, ITV, whatever it happens to be.
And I always like it when the doctor meets a real historical
character who has some sort of journey with the doctor and there's
some sort of influence of the doctor on that character.
Look, I think that this story is a little bit thin in a way that
the end of the world's plot was thin and was really not the focus
of the story.
Here, I think the focus of the story is kind of the various world
views of all of the characters involved.
And Charles Dickens starts off.
He's tired and kind of estranged from his family.
I don't know the historical details about Dickens's family.
And I do know that he didn't go to Cardiff and do a performance at
any point that's made up.
But he's ready to do his performance and he is going on stage to
tell the story of a Christmas carol and, you know, it's Christmas
Eve.
This is a kind of proso Christmas episode.
And he kind of thinks he knows everything at this point, you know
that he knows what the world is like and doesn't think there's
anything more to learn and he's cast off, you know, ideas of sort
of superstition and ghosts and stuff like that.
And that's left the world sort of rather unenchanted. for him.
Yeah, he's he's a he's a man who has no life left in him.
Tired of life.
Yes.
Yeah, I think so.
Um, and he's he's the unquiet dead as well.
He is only a year away from his death, we learn at the end.
He dies the following year, but he doesn't have much life in him.
And, you know, this is a story about sort of dead bodies wandering
around the place, still doing the thing that they were going to do
anyway in this sort of rather mechanical way.
And I do think that that is a sort of reasonably bleak commentary
on the human condition, sort of generally.
They're terrifying you, miss.
Like, they really look terrifying, like the old biddy at the
beginning.
I think their plan is to try and get the time vortex of the
opening credits out of their mouth.
It doesn't quite work, but it's almost there.
But also when they're down in the cellar at the end where they all
come to life and there's one of them that's just completely freaky
when he turns to the camera.
Like I think they look really, really scary.
And that's all just done with makeup.
There were no prosthetics on any of those actors.
Does Doctor Who do zombies before these?
I guess it does Captain Cook.
That's the only zombie that I can think of for just a brief
moment.
It's certainly gone back to zombies quite a lot.
I think it has.
No.
No, they are, aren't they?
Like, I'm just trying to, my brain's trying to go like animated
corpses, really.
Yeah.
And I mean, this whole story is about death.
It's set largely in a funeral parlour.
And even sort of Gwyneth's spoiler alert at the end becomes an
animated corpse as well.
Like there's dead people walking around.
And I do think they're sort of fabulously scary, but it is also
wonderfully funny in places as well.
Certainly, the scene at the very beginning in the cold open is
funny because of Sneed's reaction.
So the old lady gets up and, you know, strangles her grandson and
Sneed walks in, but instead of being horrified, It's something
that he's seen before a whole bunch of times and he's sort of
struggling.
You know, oh, it's happening again, you know.
Gwyneth, we've got another one.
So all of that sort of atmospheric stuff is something that Gatus
does particularly well.
We'll see him do it again in The Crimson Horror.
He's someone who loves the Victorian era and also loves the sort
of trappings of traditional horror.
So Mark Gatis has written this.
So he's the 1st non-Russell T. Davies writer.
Yeah, that's true. for the new series.
And he will go on to play significant roles in Doctor Who?
Well, at both as an actor and as a writer, he's written quite a
large number of Doctor Who stories all the way through, you know
the 10 seasons that we've had.
And he was running for Big Finish.
He wrote Phantasmagoria, and Simon Callow's character gets to say
what sort of Phantasmagoria is this in such a stagey way?
And I kind of sit there going, oh, you shoehorned that reference.
Oh, yeah.
Quite honestly.
I, until that big finish your day came out, I'd never really heard
of that word, like I've heard of Phantasms, but not Phantasmagoria
and then when this came out, I'm going, oh, please, like, it's a
very Gaitus word and a very sort of Victorian word, you know, who
knew that the vocabulary of the Time Lords could be so
antediluvian?
I think that Simon Kello delivers that line in such a stagey way.
It almost sounds like I'm going to say that I really get irritated
by his performance.
I think it's very old school Doctor Who performance.
I could imagine him being a doctor back in the old days.
Like that sort of performance that he does give.
I think that he is capable of some subtlety too, and he certainly
conveys the shift in Dickens mood throughout things, but it is, you
know, we talk about the different performances where the sort of
British tradition is to convey information about a character
through their performance, and certainly that's what Callo's doing
here.
Whereas there's a sort of more modern or more American approach
where you're kind of trying to convey a real person's interior
life.
And I think that, that's something that happens a little bit more
in the new series as it goes on.
But certainly Callow is giving a very good performance, but a
performance that would absolutely not be out of place in the old
series.
You have to bear in mind also the lineage of of Simon Cullo as an
actor.
He's a stage actor.
He's done a lot of Shakespeare, a lot of Dickens.
He is not a young man.
I think that very much feeds into the way he plays a part.
Like you say, It's not a bad performance, but it's a very actly
performance.
And we've seen his Willy.
Not in, not in the unquiet dead, but in Room of a View.
He plays a sort of hilarious old reverend in a period piece, and
there's sort of lots of running around naked with Rupert Graves.
I do love Rumour View.
Yeah.
There are 2 other performances which are central to this.
Mr. Sneed.
I think he does a really great job as the undertaker.
Well, because he does the sombre undertaker thing, but he also
kind of drops that every so often to talk about stiffs.
It's tough.
He's kind of, uh, you know, shifty and appropriate and slightly
creepy and he's got a perfect Dickens character name as well.
And of course, the other one is Eve Miles as Gwyneth.
I think it's a stunning, stunning performance.
And even watching it originally.
She just stands out, every scene that she is in.
She's magnetic on the screen.
And I can see why they would then cast her in torchwood.
Yeah.
Of course, she's the 1st of the torchwood people to appear here in
Doctor Who.
There will be one next week and one coming up later the season.
But there's classic series characters that stand out for me, like
you know, Pamela Salem as 2 or Amelia Rump.
She's another one that just stands out when she's, she's just
magnetic.
And I just think she's a tremendous actress.
And she just sells this character and her view of the world of
that time and and when she shifts from having to be to go from
being the maid or this insistent person in the house to her
psychic ability.
Like, it's very subtle, but it's done so well.
I think that that scene, we talked last week about the scene where
Rose and Rufallo speak, but we get a really tremendous scene with
Eve Miles and Rose talking.
And I've got to think that that has to be part of the script
rather than something added for time reasons because it just sort
of feeds thematically into everything that's going on.
But the 2 of them are chatting in the kitchen, and we see a huge
difference between the past and the present, which is not just, you
know, frocks and hansom cabs and stuff like that, but it is about
their conception of the universe and how different it is.
And kind of like Charles Dickens.
Rose lives in a kind of world that's sort of post-religion in a
sense.
It seems very strange to us to hear about how Gwyneth went to
Sunday school and that was where she had her education and that
though her parents are dead, she's super confident that they're
waiting up for her in heaven and that she'll rejoin them.
And Rose doesn't quite know how to react to that, and particularly
since we discovering that scene that her father's dead.
And that's the 1st indication of Eve's psychic powers in this
isn't it?
Because she knows without having been told that Rose's father is
dead and that she's been thinking a lot about him lately.
Yes, and she mentions the metal birds in the sky and then the
darkness and we get the big bad wolf.
What did you think of that at the time?
What did you think that was a reference to?
I really had no idea, but I somehow knew that this word was
significant to the season.
I don't know if I'd been spoiled by it.
Like, I was suddenly from this point on looking for it.
Obviously next week it's going to be written on the side of the
TARDIS, but there's suddenly 3 episodes in a row where it is, but
am I misremembering?
Can't remember, James.
I think the publicity for aliens of London, World War 3 had
already started appearing.
So we probably saw a shot of the Tartars with Bad Wolf on the side
and maybe that was deliberate on the part of the production team
to sort of release that just before that episode went out so
people would go, oh, is that on the Tartars?
What does that mean?
And then they'd hear it in the episode?
Do you remember when they released all of the upcoming episode
titles?
Like they actually released them all?
And I don't know whether it was by this point or not, but they
didn't tell us that episode 12 was going to be called Bad Wolf. but
all the other titles were kind of released.
Like they even said, we're holding this back. we know what to
spoil you or something to that effect.
I think of all of the new series, linking plot devices, arc
storylines.
Bad Wolf is the one that I enjoy the most.
I'm not saying it's the best.
I think maybe it's because the subtlety of it for the most part.
Do you think also too, because it then comes back into play at
certain points as well?
I actually wonder whether it's because at this point of watching
Doctor Who, we don't know that it does season arcs, and so we
don't know what to make of that.
We're so used to discrete stories, you know, and a lot of the time
all of the characters have forgotten the previous week's story in
episode one of the next week's story.
We never speak of it again.
I mean, there are exceptions to that, like in the heart and the
era or the Davison era.
But we don't know that Doctor Who does season arcs.
And so that does start to be intriguing.
I actually think in context, the Big Bad Wolf sounds like it's
going to be a reference to the doctor.
Or some sort, or the master or like a big villainous character at
the end.
The fact that it turns out to be rose, spoiler alert, that twist
is actually not what you expect.
The bad wolf is the iconic, frightening predator that humans are
sort of threatened by, you know, the big bad wolf lives in a
forest and eats people and it's a very, very old primal fear.
So I kind of like it in context.
I don't think it sticks out the same way the bad wolf scenario did
last week and the phrase will be shoehorned in in some wildly
inappropriate ways sort of coming up.
But the mere fact that someone paints bad wolf onto the TARDIS
next episode made me think at the time that it was about the
doctor, you know, that thing that we said about the doctor last
week where he brings death and destruction in his wake, that
there's something dangerous about him.
And so I like that scene and I certainly like the way that Eve
Miles delivers that line because she's immediately frightened by
what she's seen and by what she's said.
I'm not a huge fan of Bad Wolf.
I really didn't like, at the time, the resolution of it.
I thought, 0 god, that's so weak.
But I have grown to like it a lot more now.
And over time too, when it comes back into playing, like it's a
very powerful.
Whenever it comes up, it's like, ooh, you know, unlike you are not
alone or whatever, you know.
But that whole scene, both of those 2 actresses.
They just totally kill that scene. in a good way.
I think it's a really good scene as well.
It's well written in the sense that we are given the opportunity
to see that the world has changed in more ways than just our means
of transportation and the population density and, you know, our
architecture, that we think in fundamentally different ways about
the world and what it's like, and that that's all told in a fairly
believable, interesting scene, which is acted by 2 superb
performers.
I mean, I don't know how much time we're going to spend talking
about what a great actor Billy Piper is, but it almost certainly
won't be enough.
I mean she is amazing.
And Eve Miles is amazing in that scene.
In this season. really just kills it and she doesn't has this
subtlety.
I don't know whether and we'll talk about this later in season
two.
I think the performance does change, but I think in this season
she's new.
She's really into it, and she just sells so many things.
Yeah.
And again, last story, we had a confrontation between the doctor
and Rose.
And again, in this story, we're going to have one over not only
Gwyneth's involvement in the events that are about to occur, but
in allowing pity the Gelf to inhabit cadavers.
Yeah, and I think too, that that confrontation is a mirror of the
conversation between Rose and Gwyneth that we just talked about.
So the doctor has a different morality from Rose, and he's not
really prepared to put up with her take on this.
Rose doesn't think that we should allow the Gelf to inhabit human
cadavers.
But her reason for that is that it's just wrong or it's just
improper, that she has an idea, which we all share, that we need
to treat dead bodies respectfully, that that would be desecrating
the dead.
But, you know, the doctor is beyond that belief, in the same way
that rose is beyond Gwyneth's kind of simplistic Sunday school
take on religion.
And it's a little bit like what they do in an unearthly child
where Barbara and Ian confront the sort of futuristic Dr. and
Susan in episode one and then they become the people from the
future in episodes 2 to 4.
And I think that that's a sort of very deliberate thing.
And certainly I like that a great deal.
And I do like too, the way that Rose is shown to be wrong about
Gwyneth, but Gwyneth isn't stupid despite the fact that she has
this belief about heaven and angels and things like that.
And she is entitled to her own agency, that she's entitled to make
decisions for herself in her own world, in her own time, in which
she finds herself.
And again, it's another one that Eve Miles plays beautifully.
Do you know what I mean?
She's not angry at Rose.
She smiles at Rose, but sort of gently castigates her for, you
know, thinking that she's stupid and refusing to allow her to make
her own decision.
I mean, all those sequences are brilliantly paid by all three.
And it's easy to forget these early disagreements between Rose and
the doctors.
We're discovering their relationship and their building their
relationship and how they come to their different point of views
and can work together to overcome an obstacle or a problem.
The girls are interesting because when they appear, like, Pity the
Gelf, as I just said.
As a classic series fan, you're going, okay, like, yeah, pity the
girl for, right, but honestly, they're going to be evil.
I remember thinking of this at the time, I was like, I really
wanted them not to be evil.
You know, Modron and those guys who look, they're all set up to be
evil and they've got horrible spaghetti brains and stuff like that
but instead they're kind of merely tragic and like Doctor Who has
gone for periods of time where it's not that interested in evil
aliens.
It could have even been something like Modern Undead, and I'd
never thought I would say that.
Where the twist is that they're desperate.
I mean, and it is pointed out that they are desperate, but then
they're made to be unequivocally evil.
In that last scene.
Like, you know.
Oh yes, you know, like we're not just doing this because we we
need to survive.
We're doing this because we've decided to invade your world and
take care of the entire population.
Yeah.
Maybe it's also modern storytelling in that you've got to keep
heightening the tension and the odds and the danger in that last
act.
Like if suddenly they were all good and we'll just transport you
in the TARDIS, you'd be there going, really?
Like, oh, like it could be a bit of a letdown.
So, I mean, I think it's one of the things with Doctor Who is that
it writes itself into that corner where you've got that denouement
that has to happen. whether you agree with it or not, or whether
it seems cliche or not. 9 times out of 10, that's where we're
going to go and we're so early on in the series, we really need to
go there because if we didn't, it'd be a fizzler and people would
go, hmm.
You kind of really need to establish the pattern before you break
it.
And we don't have the luxury of an audience that's watched all the
way through Doctor Who, like, you know, or who's cared about it.
And so I think you are kind of stuck with that idea.
But it's not an idea that the program started with.
I mean, I know that we had the Daleks, but, you know, that 1st
season also has the sensorites and various other things
happening.
And I think we tend to date the shows kind of obsession with
monsters as a kind of artefact of the Patrick Troughton era.
And, you know, the Patrick Trouton era is full of bases under
siege where the monsters are outside is trying to get in and
there's that sort of very cold war feel to that conception of
monsters.
And here, you've got these people who are presenting as refugees
who are victims of a war that they didn't start.
And they mentioned the time war.
So it's sort of like the stakes of this time war have just been
raised again, and it seems to be affecting everyone.
Well, the nestines as well, remember in rows that their feeding
planets had been destroyed in the time war as well.
So these are people who come in need of help, and then suddenly
the moment that we let them in, we discover that they're evil.
And the doctor is culpable for that.
Yeah, yeah, he's to blame.
No, we don't know that. yet, but he feels guilty, which is why he
chooses to help them really.
He's driven by his guilt for having been in that war.
So when this episode comes out, Lawrence Miles, who was a new
adventures author and a sort of famous internet curmudgeon
attacked Mark Gaters for writing something that seemed to be
hostile to refugees.
And it's hard to avoid that, you know, there's certainly some
truth to that, but it seems massively unlikely that Gaitis would
like we know Gaitis and we have some idea of his politics and his
personality and stuff like that.
It seems massively unlikely that that was something that he
intended to say.
He's not Hazman and Lincoln, for God's sake.
You could argue that he should have been aware of the possible
reading of that.
But it's a problem with Doctor Who, isn't it?
And it's a thing that Doctor Who does try and escape, but the fact
of the matter is it's the doctor meeting monsters in various
locations and defeating them. the outsiders are generally evil.
Yeah exactly.
And I guess you need to be aware of events that are going on in
the world and how things can be read into what you're writing.
You need to think about how that's structured and how that's
delivered and when that goes out.
I mean, you've mentioned all this now, but I didn't even think of
it at the time and until you mentioned it, I hadn't really picked
up on it.
Yeah, well, you wonder if the Zigons in Terror of the Zigons are
the same.
Do you know what I mean?
Their world's been destroyed, they come to earth.
I mean, they don't ask for help, do they?
They just smash up oil rigs and stuff.
But, you know, it is something built into the program that is
sometimes problematic and that the show sometimes interrogates.
Yes, in a much better way in many more years.
Well, even next week.
We're going to have a story which has a massively obvious subtext
that is deliberately intended to comment on contemporary politics
but that's not what Gatus tends to do.
Gatus tends to go for kind of nostalgia and stuff in a way, maybe
that sort of Bob Holmes and Terrence Dix did.
You know, you get all that inadvertent racism which you get at the
beginning of pyramids of Mars or all the way through talons of
Weng Chiang.
And it's not because Holmes is necessarily a big racist.
It's just that he likes to trade in nostalgia and he is writing
stories set in a world with racial attitudes that we now
recognises pretty appalling.
So I'm not sure that the tone of the attack was necessarily fair
but it's not without some sort of foundation anyway.
The death of the Gwyneth character is interesting because like, the
doctor says she's already been dead for 5 minutes, but her essence
is still alive.
Like, it sort of does my head in a bit to try and think about
that.
I mean, obviously the girl for sustaining her because she is the
gateway, but she has enough of her own personality to still
destroy them or close that gateway.
But it's something often in the writing of the new series with
Russell, where I kind of go, if I think about that, I don't
understand it, and I'm not going to think about it because it just
does my headache.
I actually think that there's a deliberate thing going on there
because as we said before, Dickens comes to us living in a world
emptied of kind of magic and wonder where everything is sort of
well understood and well categorised.
Do you know, like light in ghost light?
His aim is as a sort of Victorian kind of character, to have
everything catalogued and understood and have a world that's...
Enlightenment thinking.
Yeah, everything that's very pinned down.
So you're saying that here we're presented with magic.
Yeah, well, so he is initially annoyed or upset that he appears to
be wrong about ghosts that they apparently exist and so do mediums
and things like that.
But then eventually he uses his knowledge of science to draw the
Gelf out of the zombies and prevent their attack by opening all
the gas.
You know, he clearly knows something about...
Bones and burners.
And so then he's sort of excited by the world again, the world is
full of things that he doesn't know yet and that he doesn't
understand and he finds that thrilling and invigorating and we
find him sort of brought back to life at the end.
And then he turns to the doctor and says, and you know, this thing
about Gwyneth being dead for 5 minutes.
You don't understand that either, doctor.
There's more things than I dreamt of in your philosophy.
And that's not just directed to him. directed at the doctor. and I
think that there is a deliberate attempt to leave that unexplained
to have that as something magical that not even the doctor
understands.
Look, I think the death of Gwyneth is also a, is a deliberate
parallel between the character of Rose.
She's a shop girl.
You know, she doesn't have an education.
She doesn't have much going for her, in her own words.
Um, when you meet her in the series.
And and there's that last line, you know, she was a, you know, she
was a servant.
Yeah, no one believes.
Seven girl, Save the World.
No one will even know.
And it says sort of normal, ordinary people can change the world
which is something that is woven throughout Russell's era of
Doctor Who.
And even Moffatt, who I think shows a great deal of respect and
affection for Russell's Doctor Who, picks up on that as well.
Do you remember the line in a Christmas carol where the doctor
says, you know, in so many 100 years of travelling through time
and space, he's never just met anyone who doesn't matter.
The idea that ordinary people are important that they matter.
Yeah, it's a nice sentiment.
He also says to Gwyneth, I'm sorry.
And it's interesting, like, in the new series, it often says like
I'm sorry, so sorry.
And all the doctors sort of say that, but it hasn't, that phrase
hasn't quite formulated yet, but you watch these early episodes
and next week as well.
And the doctor will say sorry at a certain time.
It doesn't necessarily, I'm sorry, but it's just something that I
picked up on when I was watching this, that it wasn't quite the
phrase that he always goes with.
But the gestation of this, I'm sorry, so sorry business is just
something that I think is starting.
I wonder what it's for, actually, because he does it next week.
You know, he actually will say sorry next week to another
character who's died.
And like there's an attempt this week to portray him as alien and
having a sort of advanced morality or a different morality from
us.
And that's something that Doctor Who probably hasn't done
explicitly so much before, although it has happened from time to
time, I think.
But is it that there's a kind of level of realism in modern
television that doesn't allow us to just let people get killed and
then never mention it again, but you don't want to weigh the story
down with a lot of handwringing and mourning and stuff.
And you need to show the lead character of this series where a lot
of people die is feeling something for all the people that are
dying around him.
So when he witnesses it, you have to draw attention to the fact
that he feels remorse for them for their needless death.
In a way where, in the classic series, it's just like, bang.
Yeah, now that whole bus exploded and we'll never mention those
people again.
Lord, we're going back to that.
Sorry, listeners, I've blocked that out of my mind.
I always liked to think that the bus had actually managed to
dematerialise before it was blown up, indulge the better man.
It was terrible.
Um, the direction.
Neurosthen has directed these 2 episodes in this block.
I do think, and also in the 1st episode, and even in the next
episode, I do think at times, some of the direction when it comes
to really tense scenes.
The way it's cut together, I kind of think, oh my goodness, just
get on with it.
Like in the 1st episode, yeah, Jackie, you know, with the
mannequins going to fire at her and then it cuts to rose and I
just kind of think that's a bit...
It's a bit cut, it cuts backwards and forwards way too much.
It's too slow.
And then like, it belabours the point.
And next week, again, Paul Jackie is menaced in the kitchen, but
by all means, like that thing takes forever to kill her.
This week, I find that down in the cellar when they go behind
the...
Like there's a grill, isn't there?
And it just seems to go on and on, I'm thinking, oh, my goodness.
I can't they get in there?
Like, it's just ridiculous.
But then there's this conversation that Rose has with the doctor
which has never sat well with me about her dying in the past, but
I don't, it makes no sense.
Look, and fans at the time were like, oh, wow, this is, you know
this is the modern series redoing that classic Pyramids of Mars
scene where, you know, the doctor takes Sarah to 1980 and says
1980, Sarah, if you want to get off and shows her that if, if they
don't stop Sutek in 1911, her future will be destroyed and she
says, oh, I'm from 1980. and time is in flux, he says, time is in
flux.
That's what they're trying to get at with this.
But she says it works.
I'm born in the present, but how can I die in the past?
And that's where it loses me.
Because it's like, in pyramids, it's very much a, well, I am from
the future.
If my past is destroyed, then I'm dead.
I never existed.
Whereas this is saying, I think the line is can be born in the
20th century and die in the 19th.
Well, yes, that's obvious.
If you've got a time machine.
Yeah.
Um, that scene always fell flat with me in Unquiet Dead.
Is that because we're classic series fans?
Yeah, I think so.
We're looking at it through that lens.
I think probably that is an instance of underestimating the
audience a little bit.
I think it was the right decision to have the doctor explain that
your whole world could be rewritten in an instant.
That's what he says.
And that's the right thing to do, and we establish that there can
still be stakes in a story set in the past.
Now, in practice, we know that that won't actually happen.
You know, that the Doctor Who story set in the past don't actually
tend to rewrite history completely.
With, well, we get the exception of the next doctor, of course
which does very strange things to the past.
But generally speaking, that's not something that Doctor Who
does.
But I think that the audience is literate enough with the kind of
basic tropes of science fiction to understand that the characters
themselves can still be killed if they go back in the past.
It just isn't an objection that makes sense and it does make Rose
seem a bit stupid.
But she seems to be playing it as if she's trying to convince
herself of that in a tight spot as well.
Do you know what I mean?
The objection is, I can't die in the past.
And the reason that she really wants to think that is that she's
behind this flimsy grate being sort of threatened by a whole bunch
of zombies.
But yeah, no, I think I probably have the same feeling as you.
I'm not quite sure why we needed to be told that.
But and without that line, it works.
Without that one line it works, you know, it's it does write the
character as as being stupider than she normally is.
Normally she's very smart.
Yeah, and I mean, you can explain that away. you know, she's about
to die.
She's freaking out, but that scene just doesn't really work for
me.
The one thing that we haven't really talked about is the fact that
here we talk about the rift, a weak point in time and space, which
the TARDIS will use to refuel.
It'll also be the central point of torture, but it's introduced
here in this episode, which again is significant, but we don't
realise that yet.
I think that they're trying to find excuses to set stories in
Cardiff because it's BBC Wales.
So if we've got this, then they have to come back to Cardiff in
the present, in the future.
And that's our budget and this riff thing is going to be
significant, it's a device.
I don't think it's just a budget thing too.
I think it's actually a locally produced TV drama thing.
I think you actually had to set some of it in Wales originally at
the beginning.
Yeah, onto the BBC's guidelines.
I could be misremembering that.
No, but I can understand that they would want to show Wales
because it is a Welsh production.
There's lots of Welsh voices a lot more than you kind of might
expect and we've got Boomtown later in the series where we go back
to Cardiff.
But we don't actually end up going back to Cardiff very much at
all.
It doesn't seem to be something that we pick up on and we kind of
seem to delegate the responsibility for representing Cardiff to
the spinoff torchwood, where the rift is doing the job of, you
know, the hell mouth or whatever the hell it is in class that lets
all those aliens come through.
Whatever the hell about.
Who cares, people?
Who cares?
I do love the shadow reference.
Where?
What?
First left, 2nd right, 3rd on the left, goes straight ahead, under
the stairs, past the bins, 5th door on your left, and he's telling
her where to find the wardrobe. is a reference to Shada.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's great you brought that up because, like, we don't see the
rest of the Tartars, we can't afford the rest of the Tartars.
For another 5 seasons.
Well, no, for a while, but it's telling people that it's more than
just this one room.
I like that it has been as well.
I wonder who collects the bins.
It might be that cyberman that was left in the TARDIS after
Earthshock who got a job as a bin man and he empties the doctor's
beins.
That's just my theory.
It's Dodo.
So like Utah, I'm a little bit surprised that we managed to go
this long on this, because it is a first.
So there are things to say about it, but it's not one, I have to
say that I look back with a great deal of affection, and it does
seem to be a little bit disposable.
You know, it's well directed.
It has some good images.
It's nice to see what the BBC in 2005 can do to recreate the past
but I guess the big thing about it is the introduction of Eve
Miles to the kind of world of Doctor Who.
Yeah, I quite liked it when I watched it again.
But it's not something that I want to necessarily revisit.
Like, I'm happy to watch End of the World again.
Like, of these 1st three, like, that's the one that I like to go
back and possibly rewatch.
I like rose, but it's rough around the edges, whereas I think end
of the world for me is much funnier and polished.
I would say that over and over again.
This is the thing I noticed on rewatching the series recently is
Series one looks like someone smeared Vaseline on the lens.
Everything's in soft focus.
There's a sort of glossy kids show thing, but I know what you mean
particularly there's some scenes, and I think partly because it's
emphasising gaslight for plot reasons here, that it is sort of
slightly hazy and stuff like that.
But that's that's the case throughout series one.
Not so much in series two, series one.
It reminds me of of season one of RuPaul's Drag Race, which is
referred to by many people as the lost season because logo that
the channel that's on basically didn't ever repeat it.
And they'd have this crazy soft focus on the lens, which didn't
lend itself well to review it.
Right.
You would think it would just be there to help the drag queens out
though, presumably.
Or maybe Rue.
I also think, too, that we're doing an episode per episode.
We're doing an FT episode per episode of Doctor Who, but there's a
real way in which this season isn't quite structured the way that
a Doctor Who season used to be in that it has more continuity.
It is more of an adventure.
And thinking of the unquiet dead as something that you might just
pop on a Blu-ray player one afternoon to watch something.
That's not the original intended context of it.
And certainly this season, not just with the arc, not just with
the bad wolf arc, but just generally speaking, is one big giant
adventure that the doctor and Rose go on that goes to different
places.
And so there's a buildup.
You know, we learn more about the doctor, Rose and the doctor
their relationship changes, Rose's relationship with all of her
friends and her mother and stuff changes throughout it.
And so, you know, the Unquiet Dead doesn't have to be a giant
blockbuster that we're hugely excited to tune into.
It's just there, you know, if we were to decide to rewatch series
one again.
And I think, you know, it does a good job when seen in that line.
Well, then, sir, that's all we've got time for this week.
We've been away for a while, so we really should head back home to
Earth just in time for aliens to invade for the very first time.
So tune in next week for our first ever FTE Guest Spot, it's
aliens of London.
In the meantime, you can find us at FlightthroughEntirety.com
flight through entirety on Facebook and Apple Podcasts, and at FTE
podcast on Twitter.
Over on Bondfinger, if you feel like the James Bond films would be
improved by listening to us talking nonsensically all of the way
through, then why not catch up with us at bondfinger.com
bondfinger on Facebook and iTunes and at bondfingercast on
Twitter.
Until next time, may your worldview remain unchallenged by Gas
Monsters, happy mediums are a surprisingly sci-fi ending to the
mystery of Edwin Drood.
Thank you very much for listening and good night.
See you soon.
Ta-ta.
That was slightly entirety, starring Todd Beelby, Nathan Bottomley
and James Selwood.
Theme arrangement by Cameron Lamb, strings performance by Jane
Orberg.
This episode, outside is trying to get in, was recorded on the
11th of June 2018 and released on the 9th of September.
Here at FDE Home Insurance, customers are warm, but turning on all
the gas taps in the house to exorcise the whispering voices in the
basement may result in an abrupt and cataclysmic cancellation of
your policy.
Okay. anything else?
There's nothing else.
Do you hear me?
longer on this than we did on the other one.
Cut out, God, it's a lot to cut.
All right.
I'm going to try the outro.
Did I mention the wicker placement?
The wicker-faced aliens of the Sisterhood of the Wicker Place
match.
I actually thought that they looked like the ends of cigarette.
They were cigarette, they say.
Before we recorded.
They were Ret Condas, the scholars of the University of Rocco, Rago
56 Rocco in the comic book.
God's sake.
Oh, there you go. from a straightforward planet, either they're
from a university.
And Davies had intended to bring them back in Journey's end in the
shadow.
Oh, he was going to bring everything.
Yeah.
Have you ever seen have you got the writer's tale?
Yeah.
Because Davies is a cartoonist, like, and he's a really skilled
cartoonist, and he draws this picture of the shadow proclamation
with, like, literally every alien that they've ever had on the
show in the background.
It's just so great.
He's so good.
We'll talk more about him next week, James, because we're going to
have we're going to have pics of the week, but we're only going to
do them in episode twos.
We can't do it at the end of the season because that would mean we
would just never end up doing them.
You know, you know, they've now reconned the psychic paper back to
the 2nd doctor.
Can we?
Let's record the thing.
Yeah, because it's getting on for 12.
Yeah.
We want to go out to lunch.
Well, dear listener, that's all we've got time for this week.
We've been away for a while.
No, let me try that again.
Sorry.
Well, dear listener, that's all we've got time for this week.
We've been away for.
We've been away for a while, so we really should back.
We've been away for a while.
Yeah, back.
Where's Brendan?
Why isn't Brenda doing this?
His contract came to an end.
That's it.
He had to marry Andred and stay behind on Gala.
He's been evicted from life.
God, I love that story.
Well, dear listener, that's all we've got time for this week.