Hello, dear Lisa, and welcome back to Flight Through Entirety, the
only Doctor Who podcast, doing an array of our usual tropes from
2021 to 2024, but just a year or 2 early.
I'm Nathan.
I'm Peter.
I'm Johnny.
And I'm Picasso's Nicked, weeping woman for this one.
Well, it's been a whole week, but somehow it seems like no time
has passed at all.
On the upside, that Dr. Moon seems nice and we have a very
handsome and attentive new husband.
In fact, it doesn't even occur to us to worry about what's
happening to the doctor in the forest of the dead.
So, we had a cliffhanger last week that we were all pretty on
board with.
How do we feel about the resolution of the cliffhanger this week?
Can I say I was confused by the squareness gun?
For years, they went off for years, but while I was going on, I
was thinking, that's Jack's gun.
Why does she have Jack's gun?
I thought, maybe she's Jack.
But it is the 51st century.
Yes.
Well, I think the implication is that she's been on the Tartars
and found it kind of hanging around in a storage roundle or
something.
Does the doctor steal that off Jack in the episode or not in the
doctor dances, I think?
he pocket it?
I think he pockets it and she finds it.
Oh, okay.
Isn't it foolish of River not being able to know that you can
reverse the settings and close up those gaps so the astronaut
maybe can't.
It is a great effect, isn't it?
And particularly this time where the hole is kind of on an angle.
So, and I was just imagining all of the set people, all of the
carpenters and stuff, soaring holes in the walls and stuff like
that. hating mock.
Is that because River Song shoots from the hip?
I was so pleased to see that the TARDIS teleport that we actually
see right back in an unearthly child, those 4 horizontal roundels
behind the monitor that you also have in the Pertwear era.
It works perfectly well, and Susan could have easily been rescued
at any point.
He could have sold so many problems, really.
At any point.
It's always been working, tells us everything.
So we don't really pick up on what's going on in the library, kind
of straight away, do we?
It's a little while in or did I dream that?
There's a little bit of sort of running around with nothing
happening, but it's mainly focussed on Donna.
But we get to Donna by having the girl watching television.
And now the girl's been watching cartoons all last episode with a
little cameo from David Tennant, I think, on the screen.
But now she's watching TV that's, you know, either the world
around her or the library.
And so we see Donna appear in an ambulance and turn up at this
sort of sanatorium or something.
Isn't that interesting as well, because Rose puts in an appearance
on various screens this year.
But not this episode.
Not this episode.
And it's a Judaeo-Christian ambulance.
It is, yeah.
So I think you have to, you have to be careful of the, um, the
girl watching Doctor Who and then deciding to switch to another
channel while Doctor Who Wild Doctor Who is on.
But luckily, only if it was Brock Rogers.
But luckily, it's a soap opera and it's starring Catherine Tate.
It's okay.
It's all right.
And I love that 1st section. of this episode.
And I think that the jump cuts from section to section of Donna's
experience work really, really nicely.
And it's clear what's going on, but it's also slightly
unsettling.
I think the kind of in universe explanation for it, which becomes
clear throughout the episode is that the computer's not
functioning properly.
And so it can only create a sort of TV like simulatrum of the real
world.
And so it doesn't bother filling in the bits between scenes, which
we don't see because we're watching it on television.
But Donna's aware that those things don't seem to have happened or
don't seem to have made it to screen and she sort of remembers
them.
So it's another shortcut, like all the kids being the same.
Yeah, yeah, it just saves memory.
It's a special edition DVD where we cut out all the running down
corridors, isn't it?
That's right Apparently it came to Moffatt during the writing of
it. that it wasn't initially the thing, that he wanted to tell a
story about Donna.
He didn't want to cut back to the library during that story, partly
because Donna's story is meant to be taking place over a number of
years.
And so he's aware that he has to cut directly from scene to scene
in Donna's life.
And then having her comment on that fact means that she's in an
artificial world because it's a world that obeys the rules that TV
obeys. that it doesn't show you everything.
It just shows you the salient thing.
And it's interesting that Moffat is the one to do this because he
is the writer and lead to the showrunner, most likely to subvert
narrative and to not show things in the rice order and to jumble
up what you're seeing on screen.
Yeah.
And what does it tell us about Donna?
It kind of implies that what Donna wants is the quiet life, the
husband, the house with 2 kids.
And actually what she told us at the beginning of this series was
she wants to run away and have adventures with the doctor.
And so it's interesting and it's sort of saying that, Donna
there's this duality to Donna, but in fact, she's saying one thing
on the surface, but actually what she truly desires is something
else.
But every child, every teenage child that needs to escape their
bobdignac mother will, you know, underneath just want clemency and
safety.
That's what Donna's mother says, isn't it?
You just want to meet a man.
Yeah, yeah. 1st of all, you've got to make that escape.
And we've got this recurring image of Donna as a bride.
So here and in the future, she's constantly in that white dress
too.
Well, she's not constantly.
She occasionally in it to remind us about what's important to
her.
Yeah.
You know, the other point about that is that River and the doctor
husband and wife, and Donna has been saying all season, don't
mistake me and the doctor for being a couple in a kind of the lady
doff protest too much kind of way.
And so it's interesting, but the moment she's kind of out of the
library and out of consciousness, she imagines herself getting
married.
And I don't know that it's entirely her because Lee is, it becomes
clear, a real person who's living in this same fake world with
some sort of agency and stuff like that.
So, you know, it's not just a reality that Dr. Moon has made up
for her.
He does introduce the 2 of them, but it is like a proper
relationship, I think, as far as she's concerned.
I had never thought of that before, that you've got a husband and
wife in the real world and now Donna is married in the other
world.
I think the fact that they keep getting mistaken for a couple is
obviously prefiguring the Dr. Donna thing at the end, like making
it clear that they are in some way really, really closely
related.
And a jolly spin that we've unpacked the last 3 seasons and we
don't need to do that again.
Exactly.
Two companions who generally were in love with the doctor and
would have married him if they could.
And finally, a companion who is not in love with him and would
never want to marry him keeping on being mistaken as his other
half.
Yeah.
No, I think what River provides is the wife and the companion now
Donna, later, Amy, provides the girlfriend.
And so there is this really, there's this triangle, but Moffatt
loves a love triangle.
But it's also sexualising the doctor.
And Moffatt's the key voice in sexualising the doctor since, the
girl in the fireplace.
And to give him a wife and then to have a kind of slight tension
between 2 female characters.
All right, not very constructed in the kind of modern sense that
we'd like, but it is that he sees the doctor as a sexual being.
And he wants he kind of wants to remind us of that every so
often.
I think that is something Moffatt leans into, but I do think it's
something that Russell Starr.
Like, I think that Russell does start sexualising the doctor as a
deliberate choice because he's a leading man because he's an adult
and because he wants to tell drama about human beings.
And in a way, Russell's doctor is more confidently sexy than
Moffatt's doctor, I think. sometimes.
And certainly that reaches its apotheosis in Matt Smith, who is so
totally clueless about all of that sort of stuff.
Yeah, do you think this is a reflection of the 2 showrunners where
Russell is very confident in kind of his personality and sexuality
whereas Motha is less confident in kind of putting himself forward
like that and so does it through the character of the doctor, who's
nevertheless still quite bumbling?
Yeah, well, I think he's critiquing his own kind of masculinity, as
we said last week.
And so he has doctors who are unsure and incompetent.
In series eight, he has Danny and Clara and Danny suddenly become
sort of silly and 2nd guessing and finds it difficult to ask Clara
out, even though he is in all sorts of other respects, a very sort
of competent and confident person.
And I think that that's how Moffat writes romantic comedy and the
relationship between the doctor and river, not here, but once they
actually know one another becomes a kind of screwball comedy of
the type, that Moffat is incredibly good at rising.
And of course, this season, series four, um, the doctor and
Donna's relationship is a screwball comedy, that's how it's set up
in Runaway Bride and then partners in crime.
And to have a screwball comedy, you've got to have that freson
between the characters.
Carol Lombard and Clark Gable.
No, it's truly, and she was called... tragic early death, but they
were having an offscreen affair and it's the same with it isn't
the same with Tracy and Hepburn, but the tension is still there
you might say.
But yes, all true great screwballs, again, Catherine Hepburn in
Philadelphia story with Jimmy Stewart and, of course, Archie
Leach.
He's superb.
Absolutely superb.
There's another triangle.
Yes, you're right.
The reason this season works is because it's all about antecedents
and proper stable filmic literary antecedents.
I think that Donna's relationship with the doctor is properly
complex in the way that a true relationship is full of
contradictions and full of looking below the surface to see what's
really there.
And she starts this season saying, I'm not interested in a
romantic relationship with you.
And yet by she quickly becomes the person who can say the things
to the doctor, but no one else can say it.
Martha couldn't say that Donna couldn't say, and we have that
beautiful scene at the end where she says, you know, are you all
right?
you know, because actually I'm all right too.
And it's saying something completely different.
And earlier in the season, doesn't she say something like, I don't
know what, who else you've been travelling with, but this
doesn't...
Yeah, that's right.
And but this doesn't fly with me.
So we've got on one hand saying, I don't want anything more from
you.
But on the one hand, a much deeper relationship with the doctor
than we've seen with the other two.
And so that's what I mean by kind of properly complex.
I like that.
I like it.
You're going with this, Johnny, because it's exactly the same way
that screwball comedy developed through the 40s and 50s into the
buddy movie and how the Hawks was progenitor of that.
So he mostly made films about men who were great blokes and the
only women's comedy he ever made was a need to lose gentlemen
prefer blondes, Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, which has some of
the most iconic scenes.
But he said, on I only make body movies, this just happens to be
about 2 fellows that are being played by women.
And it's the same thing we have here.
This works because it's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid.
Do you see Hepburn and Tracy in this?
Because they were they kind of signalled up front as being the
inspiration.
But it was also that was interesting because they were both queer
identifying if only in private and outed in their later lives with
a lot of complex stuff going on between them.
And I do believe that she was in love with him.
She certainly Hepburn certainly protested that she was, but there
were a lot of layers to all these relationships.
But absolutely.
That was also a fraternity because you could argue in the same, in
the same vein that the reason the Avengers, in the 60s work, just
because he played the woman and she played the man.
And it's so nice as well that Donna's particular subplot in this
episode leans into her age.
Yeah.
He couldn't have played this subplot with Rose.
It would have been a bit silly and a bit weird, whereas the fact
that Donna is approaching middle age, means that you can play
those kind of aspiring to a family kind of plots with her.
I think she does the mother thing just spectacularly well.
When she turns up at the playground and sends the kids off and the
thing that she says to them is now don't fight.
I just thought that was so perfect.
There was just a little moment of real realism in that, which I
thought was terrific.
And cutting to the end of the episode when she realises that the
children have vanished.
That is such a portrayal of real anguish.
Oh that is chilling. is chilling.
I think that's nearly unwatchable, actually.
And, you know, like I don't have children, so there's a limit to
my ability to kind of empathise with that, but I think it is
horrible.
Oh, yeah, I think from my personal, everyone, every parent has had
that experience of looking behind them and can't see the kids and
you don't know where they are just for an instant and it's, it's
it's really nicely played in the editing and the music and that
terrible wail of anguish that Catherine Tatal is out in that
state.
And she relates herself.
She keeps looking from one bed to the other, touching one bed to
the other. like she can't stop.
I think that here's another Moffat trope that we're spotting for
the 1st time and we see it again in world enough in time, where
the companion is put into a situation that apparently seems to
last for years and years and years, and they're just kind of
tortured.
And I don't like it.
Like I dislike it a great deal.
And I think like you travel with a doctor because you like him and
because you're having fun.
And so doing that to the companions, I think makes them less
real.
We talked about the Hingecliffe era and pushing Sarah downstairs
and blinding her and hypnotising her and all of those things she
complains about in hand of fear.
And we just kind of felt, or I remember us saying that the amount
of kind of torment that she's put through makes her a less real
person.
Now, I don't think that happens to Donna here, but I think it's a
mistake to be quite that cruel to a companion.
Amy, Amy's baby dissolving into a pile of sick in her arm.
Yes, similarly, similarly, um, a similarly questionable moment, I
suppose.
I suppose the difference with, the difference is the Donna, Donna's
story here gets reversed, whereas Bill's does not.
And even Amy's in the girl who waited. is kind of fixed in it.
So she's put through 30 years of tormenting.
Yeah, yeah.
That's similarly reversed in a kind of science fictiony way at the
end.
So I think it, to me, it comes back to something you were saying
before about what's Moffatt's attitude to death and what is the
what is the virtue in showing death to be reversible or in this
case showing anguish or torment to be reversible.
That, to me, is what he does all the time, is put characters
through a great deal, a great deal of anguish, and then flicks a
bit of a switch and puts them back.
So Merrick, isn't it?
Do you think there's a sense here of it being a net positive for
Donna?
even though she's left with great anguish over having not having
her children and her husband with her anymore.
She's been given a life that's so far eluded her and she has full
memories of that life.
Except that it is fake.
It is really fake.
The children are not real and they even acknowledge that.
So up to the point where Miss Evangelista reveals.
Yeah.
And because that isn't really 7 years, it is just a little while
but all of the bits are being left out, you know, like she isn't
in the way that Bill genuinely is stuck in that hospital for all
that time, she isn't.
But she's still, I don't know.
I still think it is sort of going a little bit far.
And it does give her, it does give her a grand love affair, which
I really like, you know.
And I'm sort of glad that it doesn't get picked up later.
Like I'm happy that we don't see Lee again necessarily.
But that bit where she says goodbye to him and I'll find you.
And then there's that moment where he goes to call for her, but he
can't because of his stutter.
And that's classic press gang, isn't it?
Remember Classic Morphin.
Remember, Kenny has the Irish girlfriend who's a wrong number each
time and they just keep missing one another and they never catch
up just out of sheer silly coincidence and it's that again.
I also like in that scene how the teleport only carries 3 people
at a time, which is very much the arc in space, which is what
Muppet loves.
I always look at that and thinking you didn't think to build a
teleport with more than 3 pads on it.
I would have loved it if Lee had been intercepted by the time
lords and sent back to the beginning of Skara.
Oh, do we need?
Thought experiment.
Can you imagine this kind of, well, I call it a subplot?
But really it's the main plot of Forest of the Dead being given to
a companion in the classic series.
Can you imagine Barbara in this kind of plot?
Very much so.
She could really, like, imagine having that kind of other life for
a companion. before that Donna is, you know, is noted as being
close to Sarah Jane, but I feel she's closest to Barbara.
Absolutely It's what occurred to me all throughout watching it.
I just kept having a vision of Barbara popping into my head and
thinking, imagine if we had an episode with Barbara doing this
kind of story.
Space Museum 3.
There are moments in the Crusades too, where she has.
Yeah, well, that's what I was thinking.
Crusades. where she plays a maternal role.
You know, Donna loses her children.
Barbara gets to unravel a cardigan.
The thing's clearly an ocean.
When we're talking about the truth of companions and the truth of
interiority of characters.
And I do like that the doctor is always left out by Moffatt.
We don't get interiority until later, and I don't really enjoy it
when we do.
I would rather the doctor simply be the cypher of who we wanted to
be when we grew up and that was always slightly misty.
That was also sort of fiction mist, wasn't it?
We never really got what that was.
It's just a little spritzer of that.
But Donna is us.
And I really do love that those moments in the playground that you
alluded to, Peter, that you pointed to are always with Miss
Evangelister, who is now Picasso's weeping woman.
So the black veil, it's no coincidence that she has the same
arrangement of the face.
It's a coincidence that Picasso's portrait was about a woman who
had lost a child in childbirth, or there are many stories and
narratives about it, and he painted at least 3 versions because
the bloke was up for cash, you know, and it was stolen.
It was strong and famously some years ago.
So it was certainly in the news around at the time.
But the sensitivity and the gentleness and the the porosity of his
of his feminine protagonists and also the way that the narrative
will seep through them and are not always, not always safely.
I'm absolutely convinced that the evangelistic character is a nod
to the Me Too movement.
And even though this was written, what, 20067, that was already a
time when we were getting news.
It was out there.
And Moffatt under, this is the thing that I find so frustrating
about his writing.
He really does understand women, and yet he will project them or
put them onto this really Apollonian concept of the Athenian
warrior, this remote princess of callous, humourous indifference.
And I was like, just really, come on.
But again, that's your proclivity and that's also a part of how
you write and one of the aspects that you adore about women.
But when she says, I really have an emotional moment when this
character says this behind the veil.
And he uses it again with his Silurian character, Vastra, further
on.
So this is this is something he's quite cogent with.
I have the 2 things you need to see absolute truth.
I am brilliant and I am unloved.
Now, every child as a fan, every teen fan person had that absolute
perspicacity when they realised they were the only ones in the
room who got it and all the other kids were into sport or whatever
else or playing in the playground, but we were the ones with our
heads buried in a Terence Dix.
And, um, yeah, I could talk about Louis C.K. or Joe Biden even, or
you know, Jan um, Gonumeschi or Weinstein, of course, Jean-Claude
Arnaud, who was famously touching up a Scandalwegian princess, and
the reason the Nobel Prize was delayed for 4 years because of what
he was up to right at the time that this was being written.
It's definitely feeling to me it's about the fragility of
travelling or becoming a part of that which you've always aspired
to.
So for Donna, it's, I'm finally in the escape clause.
And finally in that library that is now the living truth.
And be careful what you wish for because you'll just come back to
what you've missed out on.
And for her, as you were saying, Johnny, it's about a family.
For Miss Evangelista, it's about, yeah, when she says, I'm his
practical everything, what are the words that she uses, and here's
some.
Anyway, when she describes her role with Steve Pemberton.
It's true to me.
She says, I'm his personal everything.
And his personal everything.
I don't think there's any doubt as to what that means. at all.
And we conveil it and say, oh, no, no, that's not the case.
Come on.
We know what Moffat is like and we know where he goes with these
things.
And he goes pretty dark. if you choose to have a look for it.
The one thing that's coming out of this is that he gets what it is
to be to be a child and to be and to be in a point of fragility
and that's why I have real problems with what's going to come up
in the next few years.
But in this story, I feel he gets it absolutely right, and that's
why I love it.
Bravo Richard.
Oh okay.
Do you think Cal is like that as well?
So Cal is in a world that's been created to kind of keep her happy
and she has a fake father.
And then during the course of the episode, She switches her father
off inadvertently.
And I think she starts to come to a realisation that, um, her
world's not real.
And it's a suspicion that she has.
Remember when Miss Evangelista says or goes to say to Donna that
this world is fake, it's VR?
She's watching it on television and screaming out, no, no, no
don't, you mustn't tell her.
And so what happens to Cal is that that world that we see her in
that domestic world that we see her in just falls away, and that's
the point at which she goes to destroy the computer.
That's when she puts it on self-destruct because she suddenly
realised that it's not real.
I think Kel's story is one of the innocence of childhood cannot
last.
You know, there's going to, you can't protect children from
forever and there's a point at which everything's going to become
very real.
But then at the end of the story, something interesting happens.
In that, at the very end of the story, Donna's 2 children return.
And she's now with them.
And there's 3 beds in that bedroom.
And River Song has seemingly taken the role of the parents.
And so what seems to have been happening for Cal, is that she was
in control of this world.
She had undue responsibility for this world for someone so young
and in her revised version of it, her improved version of it.
She's kind of, given the parental role to somebody else, to, so
but she, her innocence of that childhood can be maintained a
little longer.
So when Mr. Lux describes the world that was created to house Cal
a world where she could travel anywhere where she had all of the
world's books, all of that, it's still described as being partial
or incomplete.
It's not a world that is in any way satisfying.
And she's surrounded by people who aren't actually real.
And then she suddenly got these, you know, 4000 people in there
and, you know, the whole thing is breaking down.
And that's the reason why the world that's created is, you know
not satisfying.
Of course, that's not the role of a child.
The child's not meant to be rescuing people from certain things.
Yeah.
So that's the broken bit.
Like, yeah, in the story, it says the world's incomplete.
But I suppose in the narrative, it's that girl's behaving in a way
she shouldn't have to behave.
Right.
And so what we get at the end is a world with some other people in
it that Cal is now.
And that's something the doctor gives her.
Like a Cal is now living with the crew, you know, with other Dave
and Proper Dave and Anita and Miss Evangelista and River.
And so she has people to look after her.
So it's a proper world now because it's peopled in a way that it
wasn't originally.
It's peopled with family too, which is this recurring motif in
Moffatt's work.
And the ending does confuse me, I must admit, because I'm not
entirely sure why we have to leave River and her crew in the cyber
world.
Everyone else gets, I don't know, reconstituted from the flesh
banks or something.
You know, there's something.
And it doesn't, it's not entirely clear to me unless I've missed
something.
What the difference is.
Like if everyone else can be turned.
Because they were uploaded at their point of death, whereas
everyone else was teleported in.
Yeah, but it's a kind of science fiction conceit, isn't it?
You know, it's a kind of slight, you know, it's not really very
substantial.
And so maybe the, maybe what you're saying, I guess I'm thinking
about this as you say it.
Maybe the doctors made a deliberate decision to people that world
for Cal.
And though, I think, I think too, there is something about death.
You know, the doctor cheats death, but he doesn't cheat it
completely.
And so those people are dead and they can't come back.
And Donna wasn't dead.
Like her physical essence still existed.
Miss Evangelist sort of says that.
And so she can be reconstituted at any time.
But the others are dead.
And so, you know, like the doctor still cheats.
And there is that, like, we may as well talk about it now, that
incredible final scene where Moffat kind of anticipates Day of the
Doctor, with the Sonic Screwdriver.
The idea that in all of the time that the doctors had a
relationship with River, he's known that she will die here.
And so he's had 100s of years to work out how to save her.
And so the episode ends.
Like the episode actually properly ends with the doctor and Donna
you know, they put the diary down.
They put the Sonic screwdriver down and they walk away and that's
the end of the episode.
And then suddenly you get the doctor doing this incredible heroic
thing and actually becoming the doctor that River remembers.
You know, Movin's doctor starts here, I think.
And it's in that scene.
And it's that thing that we talked about last week where Moffatt
will have something hiding in plain sight and then suddenly you'll
realise the significance of it.
Suddenly the screwdriver means something different.
It originally meant that he had a close relationship with River.
But now it means that he's worked out how to save River.
And River's voiceover and the doctor's heroic run and he dives
down the thing and all of that.
It's so incredible and it's that that gives him the confidence to
you know, open the Tartar store with a, with a click of his
fingers and then wander off to new adventures.
It's incredible.
I think it's absolutely incredible.
And I do think that it would rob it if he just saved her, you know
and she's alive again.
You know, he saves her.
She's saved, but they're all still dead.
That ending is magnificent.
And I think, again, it's the 2 it's 2 people that we mentioned
before.
It's Eros Lennon Murray Gold as well here.
And that beautiful shot where we zoom in on the book and the
screwdriver.
And you're right.
It's like we're comfortably waiting for the episode to end.
We know it's about time for the episode the end.
This is all the signals are that way.
The doctor runs back into shot out of focus and it restarts.
It's lovely.
It's really good Murray's great, this episode.
All of the music in the, or a lot of the music in the virtual
reality thing, the notes are reversed, the sound of the notes is
reversed.
So you hear the attack after the note is played and it's really
just sort of adds to that sort of slightly off putting thing.
And it also uses the original doctor's theme in a really big way
because this episode is so much about the doctor becoming
something even greater.
Is there a theme for Donner in there that's then used, with that
kind of that note, which goes, like that, and it's reused very
heavily and turn left and journey's end, and it's almost like her
motif.
Yeah, I don't know what that is.
Or it's like a trick that gold discovers for this episode and then
kind of reuses.
But I think it's appearing for the 1st time here and it is it is
trying to make the music more off-putting.
It's the library music with the chimes, you know, the little bells
which is supposed to denote childhood in a way, made weird.
There's some nice electric guitar in there.
It sort of segues out of one of those Donner world sequences into
the doctor and river and them running away from the Vashta
Narada.
It's electric guitar string.
It's beautiful.
In fact, whenever the little girl is watching that on television
the music is cheesier than it is on our television version of it.
It's like it's Murray doing television music for those particular
scenes.
It's great.
Richard, that line you were talking about earlier about to seek
absolute truth, you have to be brilliant and unloved.
Does that mean that the happiness patrol seeks absolute truth?
It's another one that really hits all the marks.
So yeah, maybe.
You can't call anyone pretty.
You can't accuse them of prettiness in that story.
That scene, which Moffat writes on the park bench about pretty and
unloved.
It has 2 brilliant lines of dialogue.
There's that.
And there's also Donna's classic.
I'm not real, but I've been dieting.
I'm just opposite ends of the spot and are both brilliant.
That's a proper character moment in one line of diet, isn't it?
Yeah, I was just wondering who she's saying that line too.
Because the world is Donna's, right?
So Donna's maybe Lee, they're the only real people in it.
Who exactly in that world has found her to be brilliant and
unloved.
Well, but don't you think that there are 4000 other people that we
just don't see, like all of those people that have been saved by
Cal living similar types of lives?
I don't I don't know.
Maybe that's right.
Maybe they are all living kind of similar lives and she flits
between each of them.
I had the idea that they were, as he says, stuck in the email.
Like that they were kind of in some loop and that actually the
world we saw was the only world, which was being actualised.
But I don't really know.
I thought we might be getting a little bit more of, oh, mind
dropper or some other stories where, you know, there's definitely
one that's doing Kurt Russell escaping from New York every year.
I think the storyline about a character being in a VR world is a
difficult one to get right.
And so Moffat will try it again in extremis, I think.
And I think it's much better here, where it's not the focus of the
full episode.
It's a kind of detour during the story into this.
And for some reason it feels like much more, um, I don't know why
but it feels much more fundamental to Donna that if this world is
real.
Like if Miss Evangelista says, look, this whole thing is wrong
can't you see it?
If you pay attention for 5 minutes, you'll see none of this adds
up.
For some reason, that seems much more important to Donna, um, than
in extremists.
Because I think the risk with those stories is that you get to the
end of them and they say, oh, it was all VR and you think, well
why did you put me through 45 minutes of that?
Like, that does hasn't occurred to be very consequential.
So Moffat will go on to demonstrate that he has a real kind of
boomer understanding of what computers are.
And I was actually surprised by what a good job he did this time
when he uses all his computer terminology.
But I think the reason that this virtual world is successful is
that it's television.
And so he knows a lot about television and that's a virtual world
that he's been in the habit of creating for sort of ages and
ages.
Actually, watching it, watching it again, talking about Boomer's
understanding of technology, watching the kid watch television is
a really weird thing because actually kids that won't watch
television anymore.
And so you watch, she's watching it on this big cathro television
she shouldn't really be doing that anyway.
And then the telephone is a rotary telephone.
So she really has created the kind of retro world for herself to
live in.
Although I'm also confused about how far in the future this year
51st century.
Oh, the 51st century.
So, yeah, so you really can't be her natural habitat, that it's a
historical artefact.
She has decided to live in.
Yeah.
No, well, I think that that Moffatt sets that virtual reality a
few years before even 2008 because it's childhood memories of
watching TV. you know.
And it gives him the chance to do that.
Like that incredible scene where Cal has activated the self
destruct and the world's going to be destroyed and the doctor is
trying to attract her attention and all of her robot toys are
going crazy around her and stuff, I think is properly scary and
stuff.
And so I think that that the world, that VR world is set in the
past for our benefit rather than... sure.
I fear it's going to date badly.
Like if this is the Barbara Wright version of it, you know, made
in 1965.
We're watching a small child watch on this tiny little 405 screen
and wondering why they've chosen that particular version of the
world to live.
Yeah, but I think, I mean, all Doctor Who dates badly.
And so the advantage of being up to date is that it's at least up
to date to the people it's 1st broadcast too.
So we start, I think we start to get a clear idea this episode of
the relationship between River and the Doctor.
And I think we get a better idea of what the doctor is from it as
well.
And this is a scene that I've mentioned actually for ages, like in
previous episodes where we've been talking about David Tennant
where it becomes clear that the tenant doctor performance is just
a mask.
Well, the doctor is the least real thing in any episode of
Doctor.
And Moffatt may be one of the 1st people to identify that or to
name check it.
So he, when he, when she's, when I think she calls him later on
the unnamed god, doesn't she?
And, you know, we've got a lot of old text references, not just
biblical, but, you know, even going back to uh.
Yeah, yeah, there's these, he's not meant to be.
He's a palmsist.
He's constantly rewritten both by the actor and by the performance
codes that are brought to each season.
No, he's not real.
He's just our punt up the river Styx.
He's not.
It's a lovely moment, and what I really get from it is, of course
how flawed the doctor is, but you can see it on Tenant's face.
And then how instantly he has to go, I just have to park this for
a little while because I've got more important things that are
happening right at this moment to me.
But the way that he parks it is by going straight into the tenant
doctor performance, you know, by saying silly things, talking
about hairdryers, you know, like all of that sort of stuff.
Like instantly he goes back into the shtick that we've been
irritated by kind of on and off for the last few years.
Me as well, I think.
But that moment.
And it makes it clear, I think, that they're married.
And at the end, when the doctor's chained up and is unable to
rescue River, he says, you know, he makes it clear that that was
his name.
Like he's an explicit Anita asks about it.
You know, and the doctor refuses to answer.
And we will find out later.
See, I think there is wriggle room there.
I think it is, I think that Moffatt's smart enough to leave enough
kind of space in it in case things don't pan out the way he thinks
it's going to pan out.
But it is it is very, It is very much implied that that's the
answer, yeah.
I also think that the other thing is that when the doctor says
that saving all these people is his job and her reply is what you
mean I'm not allowed to have a career now.
You know, like that's a married couple thing.
And in fact, doesn't Mr. Lux call them on it?
Doesn't Mr. Lux say all these people are going to die and you 2
are standing there squabbling like an old married couple?
And you kind of go, wow.
That, what they are.
Yeah.
And that's where the wriggle room is because they both look at
each other guiltily instead of River song going, yep, you've
guessed it.
Right, let's move on.
You know, so there, I mean, I think that Moffatt's always got one
eye on leaving all his options open.
I think I think that's probably true.
But I also think, too, that once it becomes a matter of
speculation, and it will, you know, when she turns up again next
season, what's the nature of the relationship between the doctor
and river, that once that becomes a question, the only possible
satisfying answer is that they're married.
And it's a little bit like missy in series 8, who is missy?
Is there a possible answer to that question apart from the one
that Moffatt comes up with?
one that wouldn't have just been absurd or uninteresting or
whatever?
And so I think they're very clearly playing it as husband and
wife.
And I'm glad that that was the eventual, you know, that they're
not sort of spores or she's somewhere between the...
Yeah, yeah.
Any sort of science fiction explanation would have been so dumb.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a lovely well-done moment.
But it does bring to the foreground the annoying thing of what is
the doctor's name.
Why do we care?
It's the start of Moffat placing the doctor at the heart of the
program and stories about the doctor being important, except that
the doctor's at the heart of the program and the name of the
program brings up the question, what is the doctor's name?
That's right, but there's a reason that we haven't addressed this
so far in that we're not interested.
They're central mysteries of the program, which don't need to be
talked about.
But they can't be resolved.
That's the other thing.
There can't be an answer.
Is it Gordon?
I think it's Gordon.
This is a lot older than Doctor Who.
Are you touching Nathan when you say touching Nathan?
No, he's not older than the Doctor Who.
We just on Bondfinger, Johnny, you should come along for one of
those.
They're heaps of fun.
That would remind me to watch a bonfoy weekend.
No, we just do trashy 60s spy fine now.
But we did an episode of The Prisoner.
And of course, the whole McGuffin of that is why did you resign?
He won't answer.
They all know why he resigned.
It's the most obvious thing.
But there is that little point of, will you give away the defence
of your persona?
Will you drop your mask, Dr. Tennant?
Will you reveal your truth?
Will you just show us who you are?
No.
That is the reason that I go on because you don't know my history
because you will not touch me.
You see me every day.
I'm in the intimacy of this idiot box, this idiot's lantern in
your house, but no, you will not touch me.
I remain inviolator.
My boundaries are secure, as should yours be.
And I think you can see that in the latest series with Jodie
Whittaker is that, you know, we don't get enough of that kind of
distance.
We don't get enough of the doctor saying, here is the space
between you and me.
She started to do it a bit this year.
She has.
But I think you can extend that question about the, it's the so
what question.
So she knows the doctor's name.
So what?
What does that matter?
I think also you can extend it to her being his wife.
It's kind of, so what?
Well, lots of people have spouses.
What is actually interesting or dramatic about that scenario?
It's playing against the same thing that Nathan was talking about
there with, you know, the program is called Doctor Who.
It's about the doctor.
The reason that that's important is that the doctor has never had
a wife over 30 something seasons.
And so why does he have one now?
So it's playing against the expectations of the program.
That's why it's important.
But I struggle to think about what is actually, yep, sure.
So it's the absence of it, which has made it interesting up until
this point.
But once we've got it, what sort of, what stories does that open
up?
What is it that's any really any difference to any of the other
relationships he's had throughout?
How many years is it?
I forget which point. how many years it is at this point?
But I think that what's interesting is the number of stories that
it doesn't close down, that Moffat actually will go on.
Like Moffat gives the doctor a wife here for the 1st time.
Something so unthinkable that in the 1980s, there was that fake
out.
Caves are Andrazani number one, the doctor's wife.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, there was a story that John Nathan Turner was thinking
of having a story called The Doctor's Wife, and it was a ruse he
was trying to discover, who was leaking stuff from the production
office or whatever.
Little known fact.
That episode would have had Krow Timon as his wife.
So absolutely unthinkable.
Moffat does it and the show still carries on.
And what it does open up is the sort of things that we see in that
river song arc.
I think that that scene where the doctor, where the doctor is
forced to sit there and watch while she sacrifices her life and he
has to sit there opposite that smoking chair for ages and ages
afterwards.
And then he has a relationship with his woman and he knows exactly
how she's going to die and he's doing that while he doesn't know
her yet.
All of that's in his future.
And I think that that's something that the show has never done to
the doctor.
The show very rarely properly gives the doctor something
interesting to have feelings about.
And here I think it really, really does it properly.
And because I am a dedicated and professional podcaster, I watched
the Husbands of River Song last night, and it's so resonant.
Like the end of it is, you know, the end of that story is so
good.
And for a similar reason, I think.
So are you saying that the relationship about the husband and wife
relationship gives it added meaning that if it was Donna's death
that he was seeing preemptively and knew that he had to have a
whole season of Doctor Who with her before watching her die, you
wouldn't have the same emotional resonance.
And I don't think you can do that with a regular character as well
with a companion.
I think that her distance, river's distance from the program, her
role as a sort of occasional guest star makes that possible as
well.
As our new brigadier.
Yeah, well, and I love those characters too.
I love when there are semi-regular cast members.
I think Doctor Who can be very lonely.
If it's just 2 people travelling around the world, none of whom
have any friends.
You know, I think that having a semi-regular, she lifts every show
that she's in, I think.
And, you know, Matt Smith's 1st show, the 1st one that he shoots
is that one with River, the time of Angels.
And I think it's so great and she absolutely lifts it.
It gives him more interesting things to do.
And he'll do that over and over again.
He will make things that we might think are breaking changes to
the program.
He'll bring back galafre.
He'll show us the doctor as a small child.
All of these things that, you know, he'll we'll actually see the
moment where the doctor and Susan get in the TARDIS at some point
over the next few years.
All of those things, he does, and it doesn't change what sort of
stories we can tell.
It doesn't break the program.
It's sort of audacious and interesting, but it, you know, it lets
us still do silly nonsense as well.
Moffat's longevity as a showrunner means that he can return to
those things.
He can sort of pepper those things through, but he can return to
it again and again.
So, for instance, you have the river story being told over the
course of 3 doctors and then ending up in the husband's river song
and talk about the name of the doctor.
He will return to that, of course, in the Matt Smith era in a big
way.
It will be part of the lead up to the 50th anniversary.
But then he'll return to it in the very final scene that he writes
for Doctor Who, which is Peter Paldi's regeneration, where
virtually the last thing he says is, you mustn't tell anyone your
name, except maybe children, they can hear it.
I think I think I'm paraphrasing that, but something along those
lines.
And it's the fact that he is the showrunner for so long, that
makes those things part of the fabric of the show, I think.
All right, so it's time for picks of the week.
So let's start with Johnny.
Well, I have a very...
I have a very quick and efficient pic of the week.
I think that people should go to Wikipedia and remind themselves
of the plot of the Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenega.
I don't think you should read the book.
I remember reading it years ago and I thought it was really
uninteresting and cliched and not my thing at all.
But Moffatt's in production or pre-production, I think, for his
version of it.
And he's made, and I think now is a good time just to remind
yourself about what happens in it.
Spoiler alert you might know already.
True.
Peter?
I have 3 very quick pics of the week.
I think you should go and watch Tomb of the Cybermen to see the
original iteration of Miss Deluxe in Kaftan.
Some might say a more entertaining performance, but you know, I
think you should also go and watch relics from Star Trek Next
Generation to see maybe the original iteration of someone being
caught in a transporter buffer and living a life.
But I also think that as we were talking last week about 2 very
clever writers and their relationship, Stephen Moffatt and Russell
T. Davies.
I think read some of the novelisations that they did of the new
series, which came out a year or 2 back because at the time they
did a press tour, short-lived press tour, and it was just a joy
watching the 2 of them together in the same room, bouncing off
each other, and clearly just having the greatest of professional
respect for each other's work.
My pick of the week doesn't have that much to do with this
although it kind of does.
I really like what Naomi Klein's just written on Trump.
And it does kind of reflect when we were talking about how an
isolated child can behave in their own world.
I think you know where I'm going with that, but she is also a
really good writer on the misappropriation of power, both taken
away from women and the misuse of power when you have it.
And maybe that's maybe that's a bit broad for this story, but it
triggered those thoughts in me, so maybe other people did as
well.
Now, I really like what she's written.
You can just look it up online and, you know, just read a blog on
it.
You don't have to buy the book.
I just found it quite interesting.
And there were parallels in this story for me on how it feels to
be a child and be alone and that can produce both greatness and
empathy and it can also produce the political situation we're in
right now.
And Richard does, in fact, turn into, like, this episode of
meditation on death because I'd be on board with that.
Well, that is death walks with us at every moment of life.
I think the Moffat's pretty clear on that as well.
Maybe he's saying turn the TV off and go and play in the park.
But then you'll also find out that you take your TV with you.
It's in your head all the time.
So mine does have something to do with this story.
TARDAS A Rutatorum by L. Sandafart, was obviously a years-long
project covering all of Doctor Who up until the end of the Matt
Smith era.
And because of the way that the River song story was told.
She mixed up the order of the River Song episode.
So they would appear out of sequence chronologically as she was
going through the rest of the program.
And so the very, very last Tartar Arudatorium entry was the
silence in the Library Forest of the Dead review, not a review
essay, and not an essay.
It's exactly 100,000 words long.
And to give you some idea, Pride and Prejudice is 122,000 words
long.
So it's novel length and it tells the entire story of Doctor Who
as she's discovered it through her travel through all of that
entire era of Doctor Who, the 50 years of it, that she covers in
that 1st run.
It's really incredible.
It's well worth a read.
And if you don't have time to read all of Tatasu Rudatorum and
maybe you don't.
You may have time to read that.
It's really an extraordinary piece of work.
Well, there, listener, that was more emotionally draining than one
of our normal episodes, so next week, we're planning to go on
holiday.
Not Florana, not Okinos, not Appalapochia, not Zine 4, and not
Orphan 55.
Instead, we'll be taking a lovely trip to a diamond planet called
Midnight.
We'll see you there.
In the meantime, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts
and you can keep up with us at Flightthrough Entirety on Facebook
at FTE Podcast on Twitter, and on our website, Flightthrough
Entirety.com, where you'll find links to our other podcasts
Bondfinger, and Jody into Terra.
Where can people find you, Johnny?
Find me on Twitter at Johnny Spandrel and go and read my blog at
RandomHooness.com.
Brilliant.
So until next time, sweet dreams, everyone.
Thank you very much for listening and good night.
Good night.
Good then.
That was Flight through Entirety, starring Nathan Bottomley, Peter
Griffith, Johnny Spandrel, and Richard Stone.
Theme arrangement by Cameron Lamb, Strings Performance by Jane
Orberg.
This episode, our new brigadier.
It was recorded on the 23rd of February 2020 and released on the
10th of May.
And from all of us, congratulations to Father of the podcast
Brendan, and his new husband, Rod, on their wedding last Friday.
After all, love in all its forms is the most powerful weapon we
have, because love is a form of hope, and like hope, love abides
in the face of everything.
A 1000 words.
Wow.
Certainly better than Pride and Prejudice.
Oh, yeah.
No zombies.
Shall I just go and strangle a dog?
No, I think that was okay.
Lived a full life.
People said the same about Dodo.
She was just strangle her.
She lived, you know, a full life for 19 episodes.
I suddenly realised this week that Dodo and Ace are the same
character.
Where'd you get that?
I like it, but very much.
Oh, they're there.
They're cockney orphans.
They're straight kids.
Both called Dorothea.
I've called Dorothy.
Oh, no, so...
I wonder if that was deliberate.
Go away.
Nuh-uh.
No.
I mean I really want that to be true.
But I'm not seeing it.
I'm remembering Sophie Eldred's essay, well, piece she wrote for
Fanderson when no one had ever heard of him, and the show was
forgotten, even the fans weren't watching it.
But she was a member of Fanderson.
It's, I'm mean, sharing it. great.
Nothing up in your class being on Kelly.
Your Sophie Aldrin impersonation is uncanny.
Well, you saw that DVD, which is going to run much more up a
middle class.
Yeah, she does that.
Actually, she does actually say it on one of the fucking Indians.
I've sort of hated her forever because...
Oh, she's a shallow, silly girl.
But she, although therefore, a lot of fun to play with.
Yeah, she, she, um, it was, that's why the Carmos stories are
great because they are just fans making it for themselves.
But I wouldn't be surprised Carl would probably be dark and evil
enough to do it.
Let me let me can we just go through this incredibly quickly
before the dog barks again. because she hasn't been fed and it's 4
and that's why she's barking.
She won't stop.
Yeah, it's nearly five.
Okay.