Episode 187
No One to Blame but Himself
Sunday 3 May 2020
This week, Nathan, Peter and Richard are joined by renowned Doctor Who blogger Johnny Spandrell, but we spend most of our time lurking among the bookshelves frightened by our own shadows. And despite the customary non-stop chattering, it’s all about Silence in the Library.
Notes and links
Fans of the Vashta Nerada will also enjoy the episode of Scooby-Doo, Where are You? in which the gang are confronted by a terrifying skeleton in a space suit, characteristically called the Spooky Space Kook.
The Library of Babel (1948) is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which he imagines a library the size of the universe, which contains every book ever written, in a series of hexagonal rooms lined with shelves full of 410-page books containing every possible combination of letters. It’s a weird and interesting thought experiement. You can find a copy of the story itself here. Philosopher Daniel Dennett explores the idea further in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1996).
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Johnny is @JohnnySpandrell, and Richard is @RichardLStone. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam, and the strings performance was by Jane Aubourg. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
Johnny’s magnum opus is his blog Random Whoness, in which he goes through every single story from the first thirty-seven series of Doctor Who, in random order, and manages something surprisingly new and insightful about each one. It’s like Flight Through Entirety, only random and less tiresome.
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll feed your lunch to the shadows. And you were really really hungry.
And more
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well. Our Honor Blackman retrospective continues this week with her appearance alongside Roger Moore in an episode of The Saint called The Arrow of God.