Hello, dear listener, and welcome back to Flight Through Entirety
the only Doctor Who podcast, which carries a Fellman Lux coherency
warning of 5011.
On a good day.
I'm Nathan.
I'm Peter.
I'm Johnny.
And I'm a chatty disembodied donated park bench for this one.
Have a seat and mind me splint.
Well, it's the 51st century.
We've materialised in a library and we're staring into the face of
the very future of Doctor Who.
We are terrified, confused and obsessed with an analysis of the
nature of our own impending deaths.
Welcome to silence in the library.
Is it our dance or just our retirement?
I think we're going to spend a lot of time over the next few
episodes talking about Moffat's favourite tropes, but we might
save some of that conversation for next week.
This is your 1st time on the podcast, Johnny.
I was wondering if I could ask you how you have felt about series
4 so far.
Um, I really like series four.
I think it's probably the best of those 1st 4 series.
And I think it's really helped by the pairing of the doctor and
Donna.
And I was saying to somebody else recently, but I think it's the
1st time since the reboot, but the series has really had 2 leads
in that we've got 2 stars of kind of equal stature.
We've got, they, the storylines are divided up better between them
and also because Donna is such, she's almost a kind of anti
companion in lots of ways, kind of doesn't know how to act like a
Doctor Who companion.
She doesn't know how to run down a corridor, like she doesn't know
what a Santarin is.
She's kind of, and that reflects what Catherine Tate was doing in
the program.
So for the 1st time we really have something which feels balanced
in the way.
And in this two-party, you can see it happen again.
One of them gets more prominence in one episode than the other.
So it has such confidence this year of Doctor Who, I think.
She's the scabbard to the foil of tenant, isn't she?
And she's, and she's the mirror of tenant in, and I think the
truth of tenant.
I think Tenant was playing it truly, he'd be a lot more like
Catherine Tate's performance, but again, we'll get to tropes and
shtick later on.
But I know who I'm favouring.
I know who my eyes are watching on the screen when they're
together.
Yeah, yeah.
They have some, they have that chemistry.
And it's also, they just, it's sort of freed up a lot of it by not
having to be a traditional doctor and companion, um, sort of
relationship.
And on a practical level, I think, um, Donna, Catherine gets more
B plots and, if not, an actual B plot, more kind of relevance to
the thematic qualities of the stories than Rose or um, Martha ever
did.
For me, I think the big difference is that she is able to smack
tenet down, and one of the most annoying things about tenet is how
kind of bombastic he is.
And one of um, Donna's roles is to constantly kind of puncture
that balloon.
You know, the Sonic Screwdriver doesn't do wood, you know?
There's different lines in the whole series.
Whoa.
Like she's constantly mocking him.
She's constantly bringing him down.
There's that scene earlier on this season where it looks like on
their 1st meeting, Martha and Donna are going to fight, and David
Tennant is clearly excited about the prospect of being fought over
and they just refuse to do it, and Donna kind of sort of smacks
him down and just, you know, that's not going to happen.
Here I actually wonder whether Donna is...
There's something about Donna's boredom and kind of impatience and
stuff early on in this episode.
So they arrive in the library and it's almost as if Donna isn't
sort of interested in books.
But it's what we were just saying.
Johnny was just saying, it's the anti-doctor.
She was not a reader as a child.
She's the non-fan in our fan production.
So she's the outsider within the library.
You can really see any fan child watching this.
Oh my god, it's my head.
It's my life. why I watch Doctor Who.
She doesn't know who Terrence Dix is, does she?
She really doesn't.
I don't believe she even mourned Peter.
I believe she did.
And she also, she sort of immune to all of the doctor's shtick in
a way that the other companions are not.
Like that has no effect on her because she has her own shtick.
And really, she's the 1st companion allowed to be funny and
allowed to be charming in and of herself, not in combination with
the doctor.
So it's unsurprising that she's probably not excited by the idea
of following him around while he kind of sings beautifully about
books, you know, like that's probably of no interest.
So does this mean that because the doctor, the most doctor-ish
thing you can imagine, is to be excited about being in a library
Donna's function is to be a bit bored in the background and want
to wander over to the little shop.
I think too, though, she still manages to be as smart as the
doctor, and she is right about the books.
So when the doctor and her go up to the little computer terminal
and discover that there's 2 human beings here, but a 1000000 other
sort of living things.
And she goes, it's not the books, is it?
And it will turn out next episode, you know, in a very real sense
it is.
I mean, the doctor will use that 1000000 number to describe the
book's next episode.
So she's right.
You know, we've had those relationships in Doctor Who before, where
if the doctor and Donna disagree about something, Donna is right
and the doctor is wrong and that's an unusual dynamic, I guess we
probably had it with a doctor in Romana.
I think the Donna's, Donna's role is also to notice what the
doctor can't because he's too busy fighting the monsters and doing
the heavy plot stuff.
So it's her who kind of notices Miss Evangelister.
It's her who's picking up on the weirdness of river song in this
and so she plays a kind of, um, I will pick up on the important
stuff which you're letting drop to the floor.
The other thing about the Miss Evangelista thing is, of course, um
when Donna's character kind of gets rewritten to become a regular
and where they kind of throw out some of her kind of more sort of
abrasive personality, um, the big thing that they give her, which
is present, I think, in Runaway Bride, is her compassion.
Like the reason that she goes after Miss Evangelista is that
everyone else is being mean to her, that they're leaving her out.
And so Donna, you know, goes up and speaks to her.
And then later when Miss Evangelista is ghosting, she refers to
Donna as the kind woman.
And Donna is almost embarrassed to say, she means me.
And it's almost impossible to imagine anyone calling Donna from
the runaway bride, the kind woman.
I think it's a really good rewrite.
What they do for her character in series 4 is amazing.
It's interesting that Moffat homes in on that.
Because obviously we don't know what discussions happened between
him and Russell and how much of this was explained.
But we know that Moffatt's scripts were not, as a rule, rewritten
by Russell.
And so the fact that Stephen goes in on this, and that is really
Donna's defining characteristic.
And these episodes is interesting that he picked up on that same
thing.
I also thought along the same lines, the fact that we have a
little shop, which is just from New Earth, it's not a Moffat thing
it's not something that Russell has rewritten the episode to put
in.
I have a very strong feeling that Moffatt likes Russell's Doctor
Who a lot. absolutely.
Yeah.
Like he's a big fan.
And he continues to reference things from it in a really
respectful way, even though he himself takes quite a different
kind of approach.
They can't fail to be a mutual respect there.
They're both at the top of their game, and writers know quality in
other writers.
And respect difference because it's the joy of opening and of
getting your sheath out and ripping open those little French
novels and going all the way through them.
Yes, those prochets.
Hidden in some depth of the library somewhere. the joys, the joy
of it.
Access by special code.
Writing isn't ego.
Talking about writing is all ego.
Well, this is much like this podcast.
But no, writing itself is egoless, all creativity is egoless.
Your constructed self is somewhere up there in the cloud, just as
your ideas are.
I was talking about this to a friend yesterday who's big creative
force in Australian theatre and saying the same thing.
It's just, no, I've been doing it all my life and I don't know
where it comes from.
That's the humbleness of creativity.
It isn't you.
So when you do get somebody's brilliant ideas that are not yours.
It's a joyous childlike celebration.
And that's why I love this story.
There's a lot of levels in this story, but the main thing is, for
me, this is about the isolated fan and growing up as a person who
perhaps doesn't connect well with everyone else.
And there's lots of layers of this, as we'll get to further down
in the or what section beyond bibliography. way at the back.
Right at the bottom of our Dewey decimals.
There's a big sign out the window that says xenobiology that we
see a shot of quite a lot.
So way beyond there.
I do think we missed a trick from not having Donna being able to
employ her knowledge of the jury decimal system at some point in
this.
That was disappointing, wasn't it?
Yes.
Although it does link quite well with the previous story, which
ends with a scene where the doctor shows Donner a book from the
year 5 billion. and then the dialogue in this episode, after the
cold open starts with the doctor saying books, you know, people
never ever get sick of books.
You know, there's hollow vids and was it fiction missed?
Like all of these different things, but people come back down to
books.
And, you know, that speech, like everything in Moffat gets a
callback, the fact that it's physical paper books, you know
becomes important next episode.
Um, I've been long prejudiced against this story for a long time
and sort of biased against it, um, because I, uh, these really
rare thing happened to me watching it, which is as soon as they
show that bit at the beginning, which says 4000 people saved.
I kind of clicked and went, oh, right, they can save to a hard
drive.
And then I had to do, and I need to emphasise, this never happens
with me.
I absolutely hopeless at this.
And so that terrible thing happens where you've clocked it early
and you've got to wait for everyone to catch up everyone in the
story to kind of catch up to it.
So I've never enjoyed this story as much as I've enjoyed Moffatt's
other stories for the Russell T. Davies ear.
And so from the script's point of view, it always seems a little
obvious to me, and it always has, and that's probably not being
very fair to the story as a whole, because now when I come back to
it, it looks like a really sophisticated piece of writing, and it
actually, it's one of those rare things where the script has got
better with time, um, because we're all used to Doctor Who stories
having continuity references in them, looking backwards at stories
in the past, and watching in 2008.
We didn't have that extra layer of meaning to bring to this, we
watch to it now where we can see the future continuity references
have played out really well.
And so it actually becomes, and in particular, I think, for the
part of River song, the waiver that's written, becomes so much
richer now than watching it. back in the day.
Yeah, you can hear the grinding of the literary teeth of Paul
Cornell saying, that's my Benny.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, yeah.
In fact, it has a real new adventures feel to it.
Oh, yeah.
She came off it.
Yeah.
Well, I suppose a good idea is a good idea, right?
Like a time travelling archeologist who likes to drink and likes
to do the things the doctor doesn't weren't necessarily doing
something.
Is someone else's idea?
I can see the piano.
I'd be really nervous So that's a review of the script
plagiarism.
It's a characterisation.
Yes, I mean, book, we talked about this before.
It's actually Scooby-Doo.
You know, there was there was that Scooby-Doo villain that was a
skeleton in a spacesuit. going back in the day.
But it's also, it also, because he does read. he does he does like
his psychoanalytical texts, Mr. Moff, and you can see that because
he's still trying to work out who he is.
And he's still trying to work out, dare I say, his relationship
with women people?
Yeah.
And that comes across.
And I think this is actually a really beautiful piece of writing
because the protagonists, the vulnerable, the ones that lead the
narratives, the ones that actually perceive what's going on are
all women.
And some of them are very, very young women.
Some of them are children.
And in fact, the child turns out to be the one that is the
instigator of not, not, you know, jumping the shark till the 2nd
episode.
But even in this story, it's the person who is the character who
was actually understanding and leading the narrative, is the is
the observer.
And it's one of the stories.
I like Moffat stories, is that the doctor, even though he may be
the Dale-Sex Mac, and, as you prefer to say, is it a machine?
How do you say that?
in Latin?
Anyway.
We aim to be true on this one. is that he works best for me when
he's the narrator.
And he is not even a facilitator.
Others around him, show him how to be a better person, as Dawn is
doing in this one, but he, so he's kind of really peripheral.
He's just the sparkler on the side of the story, but it's the
movements within.
It's the stories within the stories.
I think this is probably the best defining metaphor for a Doctor
Who story that's been in this new series run.
Maybe we've had different ones that do it, you know, and but I
think as directness and and it goes quite deeply into into
feminine protagonists and how women are treated in narrative as
well, but I'll talk about that next step.
There's a lot to say about that in particular next episode where
we have kind of long stretches of time where the little girl is
watching Doctor Who on television.
You know, I mean, it sort of starts here, but that's a big element
next week.
Well, not to give him too much kudos.
Of course, wasn't it Alfred the pig did the same thing in
Greenacres?
Greekers is the place to beat.
It's so much to unpick there.
And I think it's interesting what you said, Johnny, about Moffat's
tropes being maybe a little bit more obvious than usual.
And I wonder if that's a function of us becoming used to them and
looking for something in the script, looking for the keyword or
something that's not going to be what you think it is.
Or I wonder if there's just too many troops in this episode
because let's not forget that this story was broadcast less than 2
weeks after it was confirmed that Moffat was going to be the new
showrunner.
Yeah.
And so people were looking at this through a prism of that.
And I think, although I do really like this story, and I think
there's great quality on display, and I think it's a great example
of proper adult Doctor Who, um, I think it's almost like the
greatest hits of Moffat before the fact.
And so there's so many Moffatian sort of things in there.
So all of his big ticket ideas, be afraid of the dark because the
shadows will kill you.
The data ghosting, people have been saved, but there's no
survivors.
There's trees in a library.
All of those really big ticket ideas, which would be the big thing
in any other episode.
He paused them in and packs them in.
And actually it feels like it's a little bit wearing.
Do you know, I don't feel like that.
I get that idea, you know, that it's like a Bob Baker and Dave
Martin thing where, you know, every 30 seconds we've got another
new sort of idea completely unrelated to all of the others.
I have Stephen Moffatt's libel suit.
You're comparing him to Bob Baker and Dave Martin. hell see you in
court.
But he is obviously a much more skilled writer than them.
And so I don't feel that the script is overstaffed.
In fact, I think it gets it about right.
And the sort of interesting things, you know, the other things
that maybe you didn't mention that sort of very moffity, the idea
of sort of levels of narrative and the relationship between the
narrator and the story, in particular, the idea that if there's a
narrator, their story will eventually catch up with them and
they'll become involved in the story that they're telling.
And so here, you have right from the cold open, you've got the
idea that the doctor and Donna are, the imaginations of a child.
So there's a child in a normal contemporary house, maybe even a
little bit earlier, there's a very kind of sort of 1980s style
sort of telephone and stuff, she is just sort of a normal child in
a contemporary setting, but when she closes her eyes, she goes to
the place where the doctor and Donna appear and that incredibly
strange moment where the doctor and Donna start interacting with
her, Like they notice her and starting to reacting with her just
before the opening credits.
Um, and, you know, she wakes up and, and, and then replaying that
scene again later in the episode and we see that what the doctor
and Donna actually saw was that sort of football, that, um, the
security camera.
Yeah, yeah, sort of wooden monopticon.
And what Dr. Moon says, like Dr. Moon, in those scenes, initially
Dr. Moon says, you realise the library's in your head and that
this is the real world, and then just before the cliffhanger, and
I think it's the most impressive part of the cliffhanger, is that
terrifying speech where, no, this world is a lie and the things
that you have nightmares about. those are real.
And so those different levels of reality.
Like, did you spot that, Johnny, I mean, you, you spotted that
saved meant saved to a hard drive.
Did you spot that the girl's real world was actually VR that was
taking place in the same computer?
I don't know if I spotted it per se, but I just kind of read it
that way.
You know, I didn't think there was anything too spot.
Right. in that.
Like I just sort of assumed that that's what was going on.
But it's interesting what you say about trying to turn the
characters into fiction, trying to turn the doctor and Donna into
fiction, so she's watching it through television.
We get this sense of people watching Doctor Who on television in
front of us in a kind of trial of a time lord kind of way.
And it's, I'm not sure what it means though.
Like I'm not sure why we want to point out the fiction of it at
this point.
It's a Moffatt thing though, isn't it?
Like Moffat is very, very much not creating a coherent world for
the doctor to have adventures in in the way that Russell does do.
Like Russell creates a coherent world where the cybermen all have
you know, like a story and all of that sort of thing and
everything follows.
And I love that.
Do you know what I mean?
That's the sort of world that a 12 year old watching Doctor Who
absolutely adores, whereas Moffatt is super aware of the
fictionality of the premise.
And so he will do things like reset the universe at the end of
series 5 and have it recreated through the power of stories and
stuff.
You know, that's a very, very Moffat thing.
One of my favourite things is going back to Edwardian Children's
Fiction, which Doctor Who is just the natural inheritor of, but
the story of being in a library in your head in a library is pure
British children's storytelling.
And in fact, you know, the outside of the library is this sort of
fabulous, futuristic, but slightly deco kind of city and then
inside the library is, you know, wood panelling and all of that
sort of thing.
But it's the safe place for fan children to go to to get away from
the sports field at school.
This is, I think, another level.
We were talking about the fan experience earlier.
Moffa is not only interested in the way that TV is presented and
consumed.
He's also interested in the fan experience, and so what could be
more fan than a young child watching the adventures of Dr. and
Donna on screen, closing their eyes and being back there.
And what could be more fan than the need to hide, and even the
touching on, and this is where Moffatt's depths can't be under
estimated.
The spectrums that a lot of us fans have and that need for
isolation and are not quite cluing into other people's emotions
how others connect, but being able to do so through a medium of
say, in this case, a library.
Can we take that even further and say that as a child, your world
was being surrounded by all those brilliant Doctor Who
novelisations?
I think absolutely.
I mean, the library is not alien territory for the people watching
this avidly.
In fact, there were 2 things going on as a fan.
You were watching it on television and then you were going to the
local library to look for the books so that you could relive the
experience.
So there's, I really like this idea, but that what he's doing is
mirroring the kind of fan experience of it.
And if I think about what this story is about.
I think primarily it seems to me about the power of relationships
and friendships and about how we need people around us.
But maybe in sort of trying to explore the fictionality of Doctor
Who.
Maybe what it's also saying kind of above just, hey, aren't books
awesome, you know, aren't stories awesome, but maybe is that the
imagination is a kind of is a kind of sacred kind of place.
A child's imagination is a kind of a locked off safe place for
kids which needs to be preserved and needs to be cherished.
It's definitely a place.
Yes, thank you, Johnny.
It's the place.
That's the plate.
Well, no, because it's what I was going to touch on with Miss
Evangelist later on.
The place of safety and for a young child, in this case, a female
young child who needs to find, I'll throw something up.
Did anyone else find a chill?
In this episode when Miss Evangelister is introduced and she said
I'm his miss everything.
I'm his assistant at everything.
Well, you reckon that I'm going to go further with this because
yeah, because it does.
It actually talks about the safety of the individual and the
safety of the small of the small child in this.
If we're talking about Miss Evangelista, I think there's something
kind of low-level problematic about her. character in this
episode.
And remember, she has got very different story next episode.
But it's partly to do with that line, which I think might get a
blue line through it these days.
Well, it was right at the time when things were starting to come
out.
Yeah.
And it's also, she's, she's um, a bimbo.
She's named after a supermodel.
Yeah.
And she's kind of low-level bullied by everyone else around her.
I'm just not sure you would put that character on screen.
I think it's the...
I don't know.
I think it's the same reason that J.K. Rowling writes Potter's
actual father as a bully.
It's the same reason that Moffatt looks as his own behaviour as
being one of the smartest kids at school and remembering how he
treated people in the group.
Because I think if we look back, there are very few of us who did
not treat other children like that, who we've read, did not come
to our level.
Yeah, I think, I think too, that she is like a child in that she's
uh, she talks about her father, you know, she's, she doesn't have
seem to have sort of like adult relationships.
She's not overtly sort of sexual, she's pretty, but she's not
described as sexy or anything like that.
And she does that thing.
The wandering off, you know, a door opens.
It, irresistible to her, she goes off exploring to see what's
happening.
She is a little bit like the protagonist of a children's story.
But I do also think that the reason that she's bullied.
And she is bullied in a way that doesn't make us like Anita or
other Dave any less.
She's bullied in a way, and I guess I think it's her kind of
obliviousness to that.
Like she, she doesn't understand the nasty things that people are
saying about her.
She gets that she's being bullied.
But I would say we all do when she when she cites the kind woman.
I want to speak to the kind person.
Everybody, everybody knows, every animal knows, the genuineness or
other of your intent.
It's quite a sophisticated take on bullying as well because yes
they are bullying her.
That's absolutely what's happening.
But you can really see why they're not bullying her because she
says she's pretty.
They're not bullying her because they view her as being something
less than themselves.
It's because she keeps doing annoying things.
And, you know, Moffatt's making her do that.
You know, Moffatt's making her go to the escape capsule instead of
the bathroom or whatever.
Like he puts those details in where she is kind of really stupid.
And I wonder whether the thing is that Moffat takes the most
cartoon. of the characters there, which is Miss Evangelist, right?
I think that she's so stupid that she doesn't get the plankton
remark, you know, and she's ditsy and sort of funny and stuff.
And then making her the person that we, like her death is one of
the most affecting deaths, I think, in the history of Doctor Who.
Miss Evangelista with maybe the candlestick in the library.
Let's not forget.
I guess my point is, could she have been a man?
Like to avoid that whole, that whole treatment of that character
in that particular way. agenda swap might have been the easiest
one. glad you went there because it's deliberate.
And even the notion of evangelical or ascendent or transcendent is
in the name as well as the supermodel thing.
No, she's a woman and let's not underestimate Moffatt's depth.
I'm seeing imposter syndrome.
A person will behave gullibly and stupidly and awkwardly when they
are told they're no good, and you can tame a child from a very
very early age to be told they're stupid.
Now she has enormous amounts of empathy.
As we now as Psych now reads, is actually a higher form of
intelligence than IQ.
So all of that is there.
But to be told, you're an idiot all your life.
That's why I love that line of, if they think I'm stupid because
I'm pretty, because all I have consciously is my face.
Because everything else is derided, but my face is the reason this
man has hired me and I am his factotum as miss everything.
It's, I really do think it gets as dark as that.
Mrs. Boundrel says hi.
By the way, and she has something to throw in at this point.
She wandered past the television as I was watching it.
She said, the scene which you describe is heartbreaking the scene
where she dies, and I agree, it's really, and it's tragically
written, all that bit about, if, you know, don't tell them, I said
that stuff about me being stupid.
But as, as Mrs. Banjo said, that device, the last thing that she
hears is the thing which lingers in her mind, right, towards death
is the sort of thing, is a warning, really, to be careful about
what you say to people.
Because you never know what if it's going to be the last thing
they hear and if it's going to ring in their ears at the moment of
their passing.
So.
Yeah, in fact, Moffat does shame those people.
Like he has them standing there listening to her talk about what
they've said about her and what they think of her.
So they are embarrassed by the way that they've treated her.
Can we talk about this?
Because there is this thing that Moffatt has about death.
You know, that's a big thing that's coming up all throughout his
era and kind of rubbing our noses in the fact of death.
Now, people complain that Moffat brings people back to life and
all of that sort of thing.
But, you know, the don't cremate me thing in dark water.
The, you know, what happens to Danny Pink in that same episode.
We saw Dracula earlier this year and Dracula is all about what
happens to you when you die.
And here, having us forced to watch her die slowly in a completely
kind of PG, non-gory way, but nevertheless, an absolutely
heartbreaking and terrifying way where her thought to break down
she's no longer able to think, like her brain has disappeared and
all that's left is this sort of degrading memory pattern.
I just find it absolutely chilling, like utterly terrifying.
And the fact that people turn into, you know, your death at the
time of your death, you'll turn from a person into an object, you
know, that that you don't think you, um, no one has quite the same
moral responsibilities towards you as as they did before, you know
your wishes and things.
Your plans, your hopes all vanish from the earth at that point.
And so turning her into this sort of data ghost that's just
eventually just repeating nonsense.
And, you know, Anita says the same thing about her grandfather who
just ends up spending a day obsessing about his shoelaces.
And that does happen to people's grandfathers.
Do you know what I mean?
Even now, even without that technology.
That's what happens to us.
And so Russell does that thing in cucumber episode 6 where he
forces us to live through Lance's death from Lance's point of
view.
And again, I find that one of the most horrifically scary things
that I've ever seen on television.
And this I think is like that.
I think it's incredible.
And the fact that it's not just done for a cheap trick.
It's how we solve the problem at the end.
But it really is incredibly good.
Can I offer a slightly different reading to that as well?
It is concerned with death and Moffat is concerned with the
experience of death and living.
How about Alzheimer's power?
Yeah, well, that's what I think.
I think we had the, you know, the grandfather who, you know, became
consumed with tying your shoe laces.
Miss Evangelis's data ghosting is about the breakdown of her mind
in sort of real time until she's left with nothing but repeating
herself.
Next episode, we'll have Donna consistently finding herself in new
and unfamiliar circumstances and having to be reminded who people
are and that kind of thing.
And then there's River, uh, who's someone who, uh, she's got
someone who she knows, but who doesn't know her and it's
heartbreaking.
Let's talk more about River and the doctor.
I'll talk about River because, yeah, she's she's definitely Benny
Summerfield.
She's also a kind of she's also kind of souped up Romana as well
too.
And like Benny.
And I think that, um, you know, we were talking about how Moffat
approaches female characters.
And Rivers, the River's another example of this enigmatic woman
who's a puzzle that the doctor has to solve.
And I find that a little bit wearing.
I founded an advent calendar into Moffatt's ideal woman.
And the handcuffs coming out.
It's Stephen.
I don't need to, I don't need to unpack this with you every time
you write a woman that you actually find attractive.
But I think that she's too, Alex Kingston's terrific in it.
And I think she's really watchable and I think it's a great
character, but it's more about how we keep seeing that repeat over
and over again that you do wonder why why we're positioning the
female characters in Doctor Who in that way.
It is all of his major female characters, isn't it?
It's Amy.
It's, you know, most obviously Clara.
It's Julius Swar impressed game.
Yeah, it's really Sparrow having to be kind of unpicked
emotionally.
But, I mean, he does it in coupling as well.
And the idea is that the women are hypercompetent because the men
are so useless.
And River will take on the role of kind of deflating the doctor
whenever he does something massively stupid, like shooting the
fares and the Stetson and stuff.
Like, you know, like, know that you're a stupid man, stop doing
that.
And she does it a bit here too, because she knows more than the
doctor about their relationship, she's the one who is on the front
foot, and the doctor is kind of clueless, and one of the things
that both of Moffatt's doctors are, is thoughtless kind of man
children, you know, like people who are oblivious to the effect
that they have on other people. around them.
Moffatt's very, very 1st sitcom is called Joking Apart.
And it is partly autobiographical.
It's about the breakup of his 1st marriage.
And all the way through, we're told that the ex-wife character was
responsible for the breakup because she had an affair, and he's
aggrieved that he's been cheated on, until it really becomes clear
throughout that 1st series, and the 2nd series is absolutely
embarrassing, and you shouldn't watch it at all.
But the 1st series, it becomes clear that the reason that she left
is that Moffat was an insufferable smart ass.
And both of his doctors are like that.
And so he is...
He has no one to blame but himself.
No, but he's working through that.
He's clearly acknowledging that.
And so although he has a sort of rather essentialist way of
presenting these sort of female characters, what he is examining
just as much is what's wrong with masculinity, I think.
I think there's another thing that this season is doing, which is
constantly trying to wrongfoot the doctor, like throwing in new
elements all the time.
Give him a, give him a daughter, put him on a space bus full of
psychopaths and see what happens.
And in its way, it's in a response to tenants kind of his own kind
of uber competence, an uber competence, you know.
So let's give him a wife and see what happens.
Um, I think that River, here in this story, is there's a kind of
reading this story, if you were, if you were really old school
fanboy and didn't like the idea of the doctor having a wife, you
could read this as River as a future companion.
Like she does a range of sort of companion like activities.
Whereas later as she develops, she becomes much more a sort of
alternative doctor, she becomes much more kind of doing the, doing
the sort of things the doctor would do only, only better.
You know, she's sexier, she'll shoot a gun.
Please fly the TARDIS properly.
Yeah, yeah.
She doesn't put the handbrake on.
So I think at the moment, there's this one thing of just trying to
throw in an element, to twist the whole thing into a new and
different way.
It's also in a way playing a little safe, this episode with
River.
Maybe that's because it's a kind of gradual thing and you've got
to start small.
I think next week it is 100% certain that they are husband and
wife.
I think there's absolutely no doubt that and we'll talk about it
next week.
Yeah, I'll talk about next week when I think that becomes
absolutely clear.
But they are clearly in a romantic relationship.
You know, very clearly.
When Paul Cornell 1st wrote Human Nature, he said that one of the
things that he missed, or one of the costs that that story imposed
on the show was making the doctor heterosexual.
And he was aware that the doctor's kind of lack of interest in
women may have been responsible for the big kind of following that
the program had, you know, among gay fans.
I mean, there's a camp sensibility to the show and all of that
sort of thing.
But the fact that the doctor isn't a romantic leading man, um, it
was a thing that appealed to us and that made him different from
other heroes, uh, in other stories.
But, you know, by series 4, that ship failed.
You know, so there's nothing to lose, I think, by giving him a
wife.
And just as a weird thing last night, um, I watched the Husbands
of River song last night because that's the end of that River song
arc.
And I think that the sort of marriage relationship that the 2 of
them are depicted as having doesn't break the program at all.
And that's one of the things.
Another thing that Moffat will do is that he will do things that
look like they're going to change the program enormously.
There's another doctor, you know, the doctor, his death planet we
know about, you know, all of these sort of stuff.
And in fact, it makes no difference.
The show goes on.
And we have had this relationship before with the 4th doctor and
Romana.
Yeah.
They are husband and wife time lord in space with the dog and
lately they get the kid.
So true.
And then it all goes to him.
Such a disappointment.
We've only been more perfect if David Tennant, Alex Kingston, had
got married in real life. rather than marrying his own daughter.
Let's not go there.
It's too Trumpian.
It would have been lovely if there'd been a doctor in river
special the following year, if one of those four.
We could have seen them, seen them normalised in that way.
I'm hoping we get one with Jody.
I wonder whether the whole arc is spoiled a little bit by the fact
that this is the only time that that river meets David Tennant's
doctor.
Like, you know, the next time they meet in the crash of the
Byzantium, it's someone else.
But I kind of have this sort of thing where she doesn't really
know what order the doctors come in and doesn't really care.
That's my thing.
And that beautiful thing where she's looking at him and going, you
are so young.
And he does, you know, I'm not, you know, and then she, he's wrong
you know.
But you see, I quite like the fact that you only get the one with
David Ten.
She looked at him saying you're so young because the bulk of her
adventures with the doctor have been with the 11th.
Matt Smith, but then she has one with the 12th, Peter Caboldi.
Then she has David Tennant and she's looking at him and saying
you're so young after she's just spent 24 years with the 12th
doctor.
Yeah.
I also like the thing, but she can't remember what any of them
look like until she actually turns up and sees them.
She's the sort of fan who goes, was that a Matt Smith story?
I can't remember the one that happened here.
There's a great moment in Husbands of River song where she drops
one of those card wallets with the sort of concertina cards and
she has like publicity photos of all of the doctors in it.
And she's sort of checking off Capoldi against it.
No, he's not there.
Wouldn't you have paid good money to see the special with the 6th
doctor back with River Song?
That would have worked. wonderfully.
I want to see the CG version with Pat Trout and...
Let's go back to Billy.
Peter Cushing.
Jolly good smacked bottom.
We've talked a little bit about the sort of virtual reality aspect
of the plot, but the one thing that we haven't talked about is the
actual monsters.
Well, we're back to Moffat.
Aren't we playing with his psych tropes?
Because the monsters are our shadows and most of this story is
about owning our shadows and what happens when we don't.
And then there's a lovely bit of environmental truth thrown on, but
that's for late.
Not for here.
I also think it is his thing where, you know, he thinks that the
real place, the Doctor Who takes place is under your bed and here
he makes something very, very common, very terrifying.
I think they're terrific.
And I think it's really brought home in the shots with the chicken
leg that they throw into the, it's all done through editing, I
imagine.
It's really, really effective.
You instantly know what the threat is.
And he's been holding off telling you for about 30 minutes in that
story.
So it's about time he kind of demonstrated what it was.
He knows how begrudging other Dave is in handing over his chicken
leg, by the way.
He's really annoyed that he's not going to have that chicken leg
for lunch.
Hell yeah, yeah.
So they come in 2 forms, these monsters.
They come in the shadows and they come in the skeleton spacesuit
things.
And the skeletons in the spacesuits, they're a terrific image.
They look fantastic.
And yet there's something kind of contrived about them because it
means that the crew have to keep putting their helmets back on and
keep finding reasons to put their helmets back on and dimming
them.
So there's you know, there's a bit of hand waving about, well
maybe it'll make it harder for them to digest you.
But so it's a little bit, I find, and also once they're in the
spacesuits.
I'm not sure what they can actually do to you.
Like at one stage, one of them pushes hard down on David Tennant's
shoulders.
But it's not like we ever see anyone come to their end at the
hands of the bastionarata in that.
Yeah, why are they running in terror from them in that form?
Yeah, that's right.
But very slowly running from them in that form.
Aren't there scenes where the spacesuit is standing there and
these shadows are emanating out of it?
Yeah, so we could have just had the shadows.
We don't actually need the spacesuits for that bit.
But it feels so it feels so churlish to even say that because
they're such great monsters.
They look fantastic and they're terrific, but they are a little
bit of window dressing, I think.
Do you think that they are a little bit kind of playing on the
ambassadors of death iconography as well.
They are terrifyingly space suited things without even the gimmick
of a skeleton. all they have to do is touch you.
I think they're amazingly effective and they have to be kind of
high up on Moffatt's list of memories of Doctor Who.
Well, he'll return to this as well, won't he?
The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon, where he again uses
it as a thing of otherness. something in a spacesuit, be it a
little girl, or be it something rising from a leak.
It goes back a long way.
We have men in diving suits in 30s and 40s universal things.
We have, gosh, what else?
All of the SF tropes, tropes, tropes, tropes of...
Well, there's the mask.
There's the horror behind the mask and the notion that the full
skin hides who we are both ways.
We can hide it from ourselves inside it and others cannot see who
we are.
I think it's lucky, though, the Bastianarada have a particular...
They have a particular preference for supporting characters.
Yeah, that's that's that.
That was kind of, that's the usual thing of backing off when they
know he's name.
Just eat him.
He's right there.
I think you'll find that all Doctor Who monsters have that
particular predilection.
But fair enough, in a universe reason for that, because the
regulars are smart enough to keep away from them and stay out of
the shadows and do as the doctor says.
If I was one of the crew, though, I'd keep my helmet off at all
times.
I'd say this is clearly the way to not get it.
Just leave my helmet off.
Thanks very much.
Does this go to a death comes to time?
I'm sorry, I had to raise it at some and the bloody shenanigans of
this lovely podcast, but is there something about the knowledge of
the word or the truth of the word, which is quite cabalistic?
And we go back to writers like Jorge Louis Borkes, which is, you
know, the world is actually built on words.
It's an okay thing to bring up since this is a story about words.
Well, there is that big library, you know, like that's clearly
where that comes from, a library that's the size of the world
that's absolutely vast.
If you want power over the doctor.
You need only speak one word.
If you want to raise the golem from a mountainous effigy of clay
to wreak havoc against your oppressors.
You write this secret cabalistic name of God on a bit of paper and
pop it in its mouth.
I'm talking about the goal.
I'm not, not, um, in a suit.
We go back to Shakespeare code and the power of words in Doctor
Who universe.
They, you know, words are responsible for creating worlds.
And in the doctor universe, it's words and mathematics, they are
the universe, aren't they?
They're the building blocks.
Well, the higher the higher thinkers amongst us, you know, the
folk that are actually working down at the synchrotron, like our
friend Jason, a fan of the podcast.
Hello, will say the same thing, that mathematics are the building
blocks of the universe, and words are simply symbols of the same
thing.
Oh, it gets deep on this, doesn't it, Johnny?
I just wanted to talk about, you know, little things eating
people.
Swarms of things.
You've got dogs.
It is that sort of perfect thing where it is designed to scare the
hell out of small children.
It does it well, doesn't it?
And it creates a playground game where you're all standing around
in the playground, not trying to cross one another's shadows, not
letting the shadows touch.
You know, your shadow is infected with this thing.
All of that is perfect.
Doesn't Moffat?
Well, actually, I think writers that worked with Mothat in late
season said his starting point was always, what's the playground
game?
Yeah, right.
Right.
Well, this absolutely has it.
And those shadows things, there's that one fabulous moment.
One thing that Moffat does is there'll be something in plain sight
and then you'll realise that its presence is terrifying.
And so there's one of them next week, just a brief one.
But this week, it's, you know, they're in the room in the library
which has a hole in the roof or a sort of cupola made of glass or
something, and there's a giant shadow on the floor, and then the
doctor suddenly says, but what's casting it?
You know, like he just takes ordinary things like shadows or motes
of dust in a sunbeam and turns them in.
Isn't it great?
Superb.
And just saying they're everywhere.
We have them on earth.
You know, you could be eaten by the vastinarada.
And it's not quite as on the nose as the sort of fabulous montage
of various sort of statues and stuff about the place at the end of
Blink.
But I think for a kid, it's even more terrifying.
I think these monsters are among the best that Doctor Who's ever
done just conceptually.
Am I misremembering that in that very 1st wide shot where they
come back into the library and the TARDIS is there that you are
seeing the dust in the line?
Yeah, yeah.
Can we talk about the production too?
because the locations.
We slammed the doctor's daughter 2 weeks ago.
Like we slammed that for the poor quality of the production, but
here the locations are absolutely incredible.
The CGI city looks great.
Murray Gold is just killing it this week.
Yeah, he does a, he does a great job.
And I think it's on the, it's on the death of one of the Dave's.
I'm sure there's a bit of space adventure in that music.
I'm sure if you hear it, you can go to dum, dum, dum, dum.
I think, yeah.
It is a beaut. it does look beautiful this episode and I think
everyone's really playing at the top of their game for this one.
Didn't Mothat miss a trick for the 50th anniversary bring him back
the day of the doctor?
No, all right.
Eros Lynn does a wonderful job.
He's a terrific director.
It's absolutely terrific.
And he understands what goes on the screen.
He understands the power of of large images to which he lingers on
like those shots in the library to create the atmosphere of the
story.
I think he's also a flourishy kind of director too.
You know, so he'll he'll do kind of tilted angles.
There's lots of colour in his shots all the time.
It's not, he's not an understated kind of director.
And yet he's great at pace.
He's great at action.
He's really, I think, kind of one of the unsung.
Heroes of the 1st 4 years of the program.
Like he's, does he do more episodes than anyone else?
I don't know.
It doesn't, but actually, if you look at his progress, he starts
off just doing everyday episodes, and then as he goes on
throughout Russell's era, he starts to do the big episodes, so he
does Christmas, they does big 2 parter, and then he ends up doing
David Tennant's swan song.
So he comes back for all of the important beats.
And let's not forget that after that terrible 1st the experience
of the 1st production block in Christopher Eccleston's year, he
came on board for episode 2 and 3 and he righted the ship.
He made everything rise.
So we get so few cliffhangers these days, and so they can't merely
be, you know, someone walking in saying kill him or anything like
that.
This one, I just think, is an incredible whole series of events.
He was the doctor all the time.
You know, we've got we've got Donna screaming in the TARDIS and
disappearing.
One of the best screams in New Hood.
Yeah.
Chilling.
Yeah, yeah. we don't know what's happening.
We literally have no idea what's happening.
And a clever choice of visual effect. to make it look like she's
being dissolved.
So you might think the Bastinarata have her.
Like she hasn't, she doesn't just teleport away.
She kind of gets eaten away by that visual effect and it's a nice
sleight of hand, I think.
And then I think in retrospect, it looks like a TV image, kind of
kind of flickering out a little bit.
So there's something computer-y about it, which, you know, is what
happens.
And we get Dr. Moon speech about the real world not being real.
We get, you know, proper Dave menacing them.
And then we get Donna and Donna on the node, like on that statue
thing.
And again, you know how we're talking about death before?
You know, like, there's a bank of dead flesh that produces those.
So the fact that she appears on that thing means that she's dead
you know, as far as we're concerned.
And then just that one moment just before the closing credits go
in where she blinks.
Like, check it out, the next time, at the very end, she delivers
her Dona Noble has been saved line and then just blinks very
slowly.
There's a pause that's not there in any other kind of shot of her
saying that.
Yeah, I will say that, you know, because I sort of came to this
pre-spoiled in a way by the 1st few minutes of it, which is very
apt, I suppose, in a spoiler-ish.
It's constantly warning about spoilers.
Her lines towards the end of that episode are Donna Noble has been
saved.
Donna Noble was going, okay, I'm going, yeah, I know.
I know you keep telling me this and I know it already.
So it is kind of, but it is where I agree about the cliffhanger is
that the sequence of events leading up to it is masterful.
Like it is absolutely played with the right beats at the right
time.
Yeah, you don't have that many cliffhangers, and, you know, that
very, very 1st cliffhanger, the new series of Doctor Who over does
which is just everyone in every plot subplot gets attacked by
Slovene all at once.
I mean, that's great, and it does mean that we've got more people
in peril than we might have had otherwise.
And Jackie in peril, obviously, which makes it sort of extra
effective.
Not too many shots.
Yeah, I haven't worked out how to build to a climax in a
cliffhanger.
But here there's different things.
There's peril, there's Donna's dead, perhaps, there's a complete
kind of upending of the relationship between the framing story and
the main story or whatever.
You know, all of that stuff is happening.
It's conceptual, it's proper terror, and it's, you know, um, a
Moffat catchfrases.
In fact, duelling Moffat catchphrases, in fact.
I think another part of it that works.
And if you're a young child, I think this is effective is the
doctor is absolutely helpless at the moment.
He's standing on a pile of books trying to make the lights work.
You know, like he has no answer.
And the thing is coming towards them.
And, and, as we'll see next week, he still doesn't have an
answer.
So it is kind of, um, I think that would be frightening if you
were a child watching it and your, your confidence in this doctor
may have been shaken over this episode.
Well, they listen to that skeleton in the spacesuit isn't going to
flee itself, so we're all gonna leg it down this corridor in
search of somewhere with some nice, safe fluorescent lighting.
We'll be back next week, we hope, for Forest of the Dead.
In the meantime, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts
and you can keep up with us at Flight 3 Entirety on Facebook, at
FTE podcast on Twitter, and on our website, FlightthroughEntirety
com, where you'll find links to our other podcasts, Bondfinger and
Jody into Terror.
Where can people find you, Johnny?
You can find me on Twitter at Johnny Spandrel, and you can read my
blog at Randomhooness.com.
You can also find him in the Castlands office on Gallifrey.
Snort.
All right.
Until next time, remember, if you want to live, for God's sake
count the shadows.
Message ends.
Thank you very much for listening and good night.
Good night.
You can probably find me on a park bench somewhere, you know, just
you know, send me a text.
That was Flight through Entirety, starring Nathan Bottonley, Peter
Griffiths, Johnny Spandrel, and Richard Stone.
Theme arrangement by Cameron Lamb, Strings Performance by Jane
Orberg.
This episode, no one to blame but himself, was recorded on the
23rd of February 2020 and released on the 3rd of May.
Here at FDE publications were about to release a series of
novelisations of some of our earlier episodes, including FDE and
the giant cake, FDE and the 8 hour recording session, and FDE, and
why the hell won't Nathan shut up about the massacre.
Again, I'm just coming back to this is not a story about science
fiction or Doctor Who.
It's about interpersonal relationships and actually our
relationship with the outside world as individual fans and our
vulnerability in that world.
But I do think that in spite of that, it actually functions on the
level of just a science fiction adventure story incredibly well.
Really superb.
I know we get kind of do say that a lot.
Maybe it's just this era, but I'm really, that's why we love this
show because it is often superb.
No, just, you know, since I'm sitting with Peter, but I haven't
enjoyed a story so much since Dalek's in Manhattan.
Another classic.
After Santar and 2 parts, didn't that look better in retrospect?
But it was funny, we were all, I don't know if you heard that
Johnny.
We were all sitting around last year doing our Daleks in Manhattan
retrospective.
No one looked at me, was you can't, because again, for radio, faces
for radio, everyone looked at me like, I dropped the chine, I said
I love this one.
No, I'm with you.
I'm with you on Daleks in Manhattan.
It's actually, yeah, it's...
But I love New York at that time.
So, yeah.
But again, there's that sense of people coming together and
solving things in that great, you know, pit pip, Dunkirk, you know
never, isn't it a shame we haven't any toilet paper way of
approaching the world. will just manage.
I think it's lucky, though, that...