Hello, dear Lister, and welcome back to Flight Through Entirety
the only Doctor Who podcast whose words can burn stars and raise
up empires and topple gods.
Hello, sweetie.
I'm Nathan.
I'm James.
I'm Peter.
And I'm Simon.
Well, it's Matt Smith's 1st day on the job, and he's already
dealing with the Anglican Church, his mother-in-law, Mrs. Doctor
from the Future, and being chased upstairs by a bunch of angry
statues.
Let's see how he gets on as we discuss the time of angels.
So, it turns out this is the first thing that Matt Smith ever
shoots.
How do you think he does, Simon?
I think he does absolutely spectacularly, I have to say, there's
an absolute beauty in his performance, particularly compared to
the previous doctor in my humble view.
I was so relieved when I started seeing his performance.
There's a lightness of touch.
He dances around the set.
His feet are sometimes barely touching the ground.
He has the ability to rattle off loads of dialogue that change
subject in the middle of sentences, and yet it all makes sense.
He's just absolutely spectacular.
And if this is, I did not know this was actually the 1st thing
that was shot.
And so unlike some of the other doctors that, you know, shoot out
of order at the beginning.
I think he gets it right from the get go.
It's amazing, isn't it?
Because they've clearly recorded this first. and then what does he
do between this and the 11th hour?
There's another block, which is the Beast Below and Victory of the
Daleks.
So they do what they do with Peter Davidson and get him to shoot a
few episodes before he does his, you know, 1st episode, but he
just nails it instantly.
By the time he recorded Time of Angels, he had watched every
episode of the new series up to that date.
Plus 2 of the Cybermen.
And it's a bit of a tomb of the side men informed performance in a
way because what Troughton does is he delivers his lines kind of
very thoughtfully he very rarely gets angry.
He does steal the scenes sometimes, but he's also happy to kind of
downplay things and it is a really refreshing change.
And I just think the way that, You know, here, he is, he's doing
something that his doctor hasn't done before, sort of
chronologically, which is, um, he's confronted almost immediately
by River Song.
And Riversong does this thing, I think, which is heaps like the
1st Romana, in that she's more competent than him, and she's in
charge.
And so he gets to be resentful, you know, and on the back foot.
And he plays it so well because he's alternately amused by her and
irritated by her in this sort of childish way.
Yes, but the irritation never gets too much, does it?
It's never childish.
He is a little bit childish, though, a little bit petulant.
Remember the blue boringers?
like she switches on the stabilisers so that the camera stops
shaking?
There's wonderful moment in the TARDIS there, where he sits down
having got a bit irritated and just breaks into a smile.
Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of.
I think he's quite lucky to have had Alex Kingston in his 1st
story and in fact, in the 1st scenes that he shoots, because they
were the ones on the beach, um, with Amy and River, because I
think she brings out that slightly naughty schoolboy in the
performance.
And I think that informs his performance for the rest of his run
and it was perfect, really.
Because he does have a sort of posh schoolboy accent, doesn't he?
He's terribly young and a little bit posh.
And so he does sound like that and because he's ridiculously
young.
He sort of looks like that as well.
Well, Simon said about a lightness of touch, I think, is right
because he does overplay some scenes in the best possible way.
And then he underplays often the very next line.
And so it's an idiosyncratic performance, but that's not a bad
thing.
It's perfectly judged.
Yes, it's idiosyncratic, but not forced.
It feels like, I mean, there's obviously a lot of thought and
effort and planning that's gone into it.
And yet it just feels like it spontaneously happens and that is, I
think, the sign of a very good actor.
I put it this way, the other day, where he looks like he's
thinking about what to say very frequently and you can see him as
an actor, not only thinking about what to do with the line, but it
just seems like he's coming up with these words rather than just
reciting them.
Yes.
And that's one of the things that they, they try and teach you in
acting school is, is to think about what the character is thinking
as they're about to say the line so that it's not, the character's
not thinking.
I've got this line to say in a millisecond.
They're thinking, oh, I'm frightened.
What are we going to do?
And then the line comes out as a result of that emotion.
And so you're right.
Yeah, I think, you know, David Tennant's performance is very
presentational, you know, he is interested in conveying something
to an audience and that's a sort of slightly old-fashioned in a
sort of rather British way of acting.
Do you think that's because his stage actor, whereas Matt Smith
isn't so much.
That's possible because that sort of subtlety is not quite as
suited for the stage as it is for the screen.
That's absolutely a possibility.
But I also think that Tennant was sort of brought up on Doctor Who
and that was kind of the style of acting sort of generally.
Well, that's why acting has changed so much in the last 4 decades
is because you've lost that background of actors being theatre
trained.
And so they don't come on to television and give a performance.
They're more trained in the nuances of working with the camera.
Yeah.
I think it's more than that.
I agree with that, that idea that it is a different style of
acting that that tenant's doing versus what Smith's doing.
But I hate to say it.
I just think that tenant's not as good as an actor.
It's not because he's going for a different way of acting.
It's just because I think he can't inhabit the character or Tom or
some of the other many of the other doctors that we've had.
The tenant performance feels like a performance.
I think that's why I don't like it.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's an in-story reason for it feeling
like a performance because both of Russell's doctors, and I may
have said this before.
Both of Russell's doctors are a lot like Russell in that they are
externally very jolly and everything's brilliant or marvellous or
wonderful, but there's a real kind of darkness and cynicism deep
underneath.
And we've seen the doctor drop that mask occasionally.
So the tenant doctor is a performance.
Smith's doctor is more like Moffat in that he's the smartest
person in the room.
He's sort of funny and silly.
He's a man child.
Surrounded by strong women.
Yeah, and especially awkward.
Yeah, socially awkward and a bit of a bastard as well.
And so the performances is much realer, I think.
We talked about River Song, and I have a feeling that she is a
sort of controversial character, that she has a fairly mixed
reception among Doctor Who fans?
I wasn't aware of that.
Um, I think she's a very popular part of the canon.
There might be a fairly minority romp who don't like her, but I
think that's because she's quite a flamboyant character.
And so if you're very gun to use to use your vernacular, Nathan.
You might not appreciate what she brings to the series.
And I think Moffat might have seen Alex Kingston's performance in
Silence Library and been informed by that because she is written
quite differently in Time of Angels from how she is in the Library
2 partter.
So things like hello, sweetie, which is the message that the
doctor gets on the psychic paper in silence in the library now
here hardens into the 1st thing that she always says.
And later this season, she will also send the hello sweetie
message to the doctor in a sort of weird archeological way.
And there's an effort to make her glamorous and fabulous.
So, you know, her very 1st entrance with that long dress and the
impossibly skyscraper heels and everything.
I mean, she's made to be iconic now.
There's that wonderful shot of her using the gun as a sort of
oxyacetylene torch to carve the thing into the home box, and it's
just a shot of the corner of her fabulous sunglasses with the
sparks reflected in them.
Yeah, no, she's it's spectacular.
I mean, I'm not aware of anyone who, you know, a group that
actively doesn't, doesn't like her or doesn't like the character.
Maybe it's because it's kind of like, is this supposed to have
been Bernice Summerfield, but not.
Is that anything to do with it?
Well, there may be that, but I do think that she is different from
Bernice.
Bernice is a lot more kind of down to earth and stuff, whereas she
is sort of ridiculously flamboyant.
And I think that opening, seeing that fabulous heist scene, which
eventually ends up, you know, that it's a very moffity thing to
tell the story out of order or to have 2 time streams and a switch
between them.
But I do think it's absolutely marvellous.
That she's so confident that all she needs to do is leave the
doctor a message at some point in his time stream.
He'll come and rescue her.
And it's it's so tremendous.
And there's even a point where the doctor says something like, you
know, I'm not going to be there to just turn up every...
Yeah, it's sweet that you think that.
But you are.
It's wonderful.
Yeah, it's because I love that.
I think the teaser on this episode is one of the best ever in its
cleverness and just kind of like, you know, a little vignette all
by itself, which you can enjoy.
But I interviewed Jamie Matheson, who wrote oxygen and various
other episodes.
And he said that Moffat, who is always examining his past work and
kind of things like that. um, specifically referenced this scene
with River song floating out into space when he said to Jamie, look
I want to make space dangerous skin.
I dont want any more scenes like that.
But I mean, I don't know.
You know, Moffat's always kind of 2nd guessing himself and going
back and deciding that the things that he's done in the past for a
mistake and we'll see more of that next week. then he'll redo than
the next year.
But I mean, the amount of fun in that scene is just unbelievably
great.
And it's the perfect place for it.
But going back to the whole structure of that cold open sequence.
It's so reminiscent of that Paul Cornell New Adventures sort of
era where the doctor has already planted all these things, not
sorry, we'll plant them in his future so that they're there for
him in the past.
It starts with Battlefield and it's a great reminder of that.
That's what I was thinking when I was watching that episode was
it's basically the new Adventures 7th doctor.
And the great thing is that she is in many ways better at being
the doctor than the doctor, which is so much fun.
What's that, Romana?
Yeah, yeah, well, that's exactly it.
I love the joke and I've heard people complain about this joke as
well.
That the reason the TARDIS makes the wheeze and groaning noise
which Matt Smith does a brilliant imitation of while looking
slightly embarrassed about doing it, is because he leaves the
brakes on and she manages to materialise without it.
Moffatt later claimed that she was just pulling his leg.
Well, isn't that an exact reference back to the pirate planet
where Romana does exactly the same thing and lands the Tartars
perfectly without a bump?
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
That's right.
It's wonderful.
I mean, you know, uh, the master's hardest does that as well.
So I'm not sure that Joker's Canon.
But I mean, basically, I am completely on board with throwing out
as much continuity as we need to throw out in order to have a
really funny line like that.
But don't you think it's also plausible that the master would be
making the same mistakes about buying the status that the doctor
does?
He was a man, after all.
So let's talk about the structure of the story, because I do think
it's actually surprisingly straightforward for a Moffat script.
Yes, but I think that's why it's successful because the plot is
relatively straightforward, but it's got all of these layers
sitting on top of that simplicity.
And I think that's why you have a successful episode.
Yeah, so you've just got basically a chase.
You know, we discover...
Yeah, well, we're heading up to the Byzantium because we think
that there's an angel in there or whatever.
Lord of the Rings, really.
Yeah, yeah.
And we've got a character party, some of whom get sort of picked
off one by one.
So it is super, super straightforward, but it's exactly what you
said.
There's enough going on as well at the same time that it still
seems sort of smart and interesting.
And narratively, it moves from sort of set piece to set piece or
what we were talking about the other day, vignette to vignette.
And they're all just strung together into this wonderfully
cohesive hole.
If I can add two, it's the things that are added are all relevant
to what they're doing.
It's not like there have been 3 other random things that have been
thrown into the episode just to make it more exciting and fill it
with incident and stuff.
It's all, it's all built from that base and that's...
It all drives the plot forward and it's all relevant to either the
characters relationships with each other with rivers, bits and
pieces gradually becoming more known as to who she is and so on.
Or, you know, bits to do with the Byzantium and so on.
It all builds from that.
It's all got to do with time, hasn't it?
And I mean that, as in how much work you can get done in a
specific period, because I would say that for this 2 parter
Stephen Mothat had the most time he's ever had to write a script
and put it together, and it shows, there's nothing missing
everything links together, It's perfectly structured.
And so, um, you know, if you've got the time, he can deliver the
goods 100%.
This is the 1st script he writes for his season, isn't it?
Yes.
Yeah.
So this is the sort of thing that we got in in series one where
everyone was sort of bringing the idea that they'd had kind of
slowly simmering for...
And and, you know, like we just end up with some really incredible
things.
And so here, because the announcement is made quite early that
Moffat's taking over, he has a whole season, I think, that
operates a lot like series one in that we're trying something
new.
We don't know whether it will work.
We make sure that we bring our A game.
And this, you know, is such a departure from the early season 2
parties.
We've already talked about how Moffatt adopts Russell's structure
for the season, you know, with the opening on Earth, past, future
early season 2 parter, late season 2 parter, 2 part finale, all of
that is all there.
But compare this to all of the previous early 2 partters, which
tended to be lighter, that often featured a returning monster, that
sometimes had a sort of Sarah Jane vibe.
This episode feels like should be a sort of episode 7 or eight.
Yeah, or like the 9 and 10, you know, like...
Yes, it's the impossible planet slot rather than the, you know
rise of the Sidemen slot.
Especially because of the amount of continuing plot arc that is in
that 2nd episode, but we'll get to that next week.
It's basically the 2 parter where they turn the lights off.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So the that late season 2 part is always a bit darker.
Human nature and...
And Moffatt wrote 2 of those.
You know, like Moffat wrote the empty child and silence in the
library, you know, and this, I think, is a lot like that.
It does feature a very popular monster returning, obviously.
But it is reflective of his slightly more serious, slightly more
sombre, slightly darker iteration of the show.
You get that right from the 11th hour.
Yes, there are funny bits.
It's light.
It's got its moments, but there's, there's something about it
where it's all just, the silliness level is just dialled down just
enough, I think, and except that I go back and look at the notes
that I wrote when I was watching this, and basically I'm just
copying down all the most hilarious lines from the dialogue
because he's a sitcom writer, and it's often really laugh out loud
funny.
It is, but it's not the lines themselves.
It's how they're delivered.
And I think they're actually funnier in something like this, those
funny lines, then they are in the Rustically Davies era, because
in the RTD era, it's all overplayed.
Whereas here they're just thrown away.
All those fabulously funny lines, that river and the doctor are
saying to each other, they just disappear in a fraction of a
second.
And that's what makes them so brilliant.
I think, though, that Moffatt is willing to sacrifice a bit of
realism in order to come up with just a really superb, funny sort
of sitcom line.
And I think that I'm absolutely on board with that as a sort of
priority.
I agree with both of you, actually, because I think it's actually
quite silly in places.
But the silliness is limited to the doctor.
And so it's the Hinchcliffe template where the situations around
are quite serious and threatening, but the doctor barrels his way
through it being quite silly sometimes.
Okay, so let me move to a topic where I contradict you. which is
that line verger, how we're doing with those explosives.
So you have the army, but they're the Anglican church for some
reason.
What do you think is happening there?
It's just a choice to do something interesting and make it kind of
work and consistent.
But also it's a joke character, if you want to put it that way
played extremely straight.
Yes, exactly.
But do you think that's also commentary on the power and corrupt
nature of religion over time?
I think it probably has its origins there.
I think Russell is much more obviously opposed to religion. and
there's things like it being listed among the weapons that are
forbidden on platform one and the adherence of the repeated meme
which meant something quite different in 2005 than it would now.
But there is that moment where they talk about applands, the 2
headed applands getting into relationships and how the church
outlawed it or looked down on it.
And, you know, you have the doctor say, oh, typical church and
Father Octavian gets kind of offended and huffy about it.
And I think we get more of that later next year because this
church will be back and we'll continue to be a feature of the
Moffat era.
But then you get that fabulous line about the divorces being
really messy.
I just saw it as a sort of a reference to the fact that, you know
back in the Middle Ages. popes and churches and bishops and things
had standing armies in the same way that lords and counts and
whatnot did in kings.
I thought it was just a sort of a, oh, it all comes around again
and, you know, like the 2nd Roman Empire.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Or the crusades.
But it does make it more interesting.
Like, you could have just had army people.
And there's even a sort of wonderful visual moment where one of
the soldiers turns.
He's sort of half looking at the camera and he looks exactly like
Dwayne Hicks does in the dropship in aliens.
Like, it cannot not be a direct visual reference to that.
Well, it's interesting you say that because when Moffatt was
writing this, his idea for this story was aliens to alien this to
blink.
Yeah, because the other thing that he does is what aliens does
which is we actually learn more interesting new things about the
angels.
And it moves it into a different genre.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So they are functionally a lot like the Marines and aliens, aren't
they?
But I think making them the church is a Doctor Who thing to do.
Like it's a mashup and it gives us those sort of hilarious lines
about verges and explosives.
It's interesting because that's oft quoted what Moffat says about
Blink being alien and this 2 part of being aliens, but it's also
the Empire Strikes Back versus Star Wars, because it takes that
sort of wonderful source material, and it deepens it and darkens
it and kind of adds mythology to it.
I think the most interesting thing he does is he makes the angels
even more kind of metaphysical.
So they were always impossible, weren't they?
They were, and they were designed to fit into a particular plot.
So blink is a puzzle box, and it requires the angels to have
certain characteristics just to get the plot to work.
And in particular, it's the, you know, they send you back in time
and feed off your time energy and stuff like that.
Here, he's got a completely different plot, and he needs to get
them to do different things, but we still learn more things about
them, and I think the idea, The idea of the angels is, I think
that they turn up in a television program and it's when you view
them that they're powerless and when you stop looking at them, they
can possibly attack you.
And given that we engage with television by watching images.
It's telling that in blink, the angels don't move when they're
observed by characters in the show, but they also don't move when
we're watching them as well. so we never see them move at all.
And so having an angel on television come out of the television
and threaten Amy because the angel on your TV screen is also an
angel because the image of an angel is in itself an angel.
But isn't that also that typical sort of wonderful Moffatt thing
of getting at the things that frighten you as a child.
You know, a small child will think that the person on the
television screen can see them as much as you can see the person
on the television and it harks back to that.
But the other wonderful thing is I love the effect, they have this
low def video effect on it, and that, I think, makes it all the
more creepy.
Yeah.
And the way that she deals with it by waiting until the picture
drops out and pausing the video.
It's very retro.
It's like us going back to a VHS in the 80s or something.
Yeah.
And it's a great scene for Karen because I think you were pointing
out the other day, Nathan, when we were talking about it, it gives
Amy a chance to be properly clever to get out of it by herself.
She doesn't need rescuing by the doctor and river.
And the way that it's shot is really important for Amy, because
you have all of those big close-ups on the smooth round angel face
matched by big close-ups on Amy's wide-eyed face.
And so there's kind of a resonance there.
Yeah, yeah.
I also think too, it's quite clever that we're intercutting
between that scene and the doctor reading the book that doesn't
have any pictures in it because a picture of an angel is itself an
angel.
So he discovers what she's experiencing at the same time.
And even though he runs to the dropship or wherever they are and
sort of tries to help her out, she's the one who comes up with the
way of solving it.
And again, this is Karen's 1st day and she is incredible.
I love her.
She is brilliant.
You know, I think she's such a good companion.
She's an actress, but she's also such a good companion.
The way, you know, she has that teasing of the doctor.
Just, just, it goes back to the way Sarah Jane would tease Tom or
Tegan would tease, tease the Davidson doctor.
It's just got they just got the relationship right.
But if I can just catch it on the book and the way the doctor's
reading the book and discovering it as we're discovering it
through Amy.
I mean, that is a classic way of building tension in that way.
You know just words ahead of what the characters on the screen are
saying.
You know, you already caught up.
You're ahead of them.
And that's what creates this wonderful moment of tension because
you've got the 2 scenes going on in parallel and it just builds up
beautifully.
The other thing that's sort of super interesting is the reveal
that the statues that they've been walking beside of all the time
are actually literally all angels.
It's not one angel, but it's an entire maze full of angels.
And again, you realise that practically at the same time as the
characters, oh, no, they've only got one head.
Yeah, yeah.
In fact, I think it's cleverer than that because the doctor
realises it and River realises it immediately and both of them or
River at least says, how can we not have seen that?
And it's possible that on 1st watch.
You haven't picked up on it either.
Because all the Appland dialogue about the Applands having 2 heads
is played for comedy because it's as silly as anything and it's
all about them snogging and stuff like that.
You just think, oh, well, this is sort of wonderful, silly
throwaway Doctor Who dialogue.
But, of course, it becomes an absolute clue.
And then the moment you find it out, then you think, 0 my god, how
did we not realise that as well?
And he'll do this next week where the doctor realises something
and River realises it before the doctor actually articulates it.
And it's one of the things that Moffatt is capable of that not
every Doctor Who writer is capable of, which is making the
characters properly smart because you need a smart person to write
smart people.
And so often the doctor is blustering or charismatic or whatever
and solves things that way.
But more properly makes the doctor smart again, I think.
But also in the old series, often writers would make the mistake
of having the doctor explain to the characters around them.
And so therefore the characters around them were stupid.
Whereas what Moffat does is make the characters around the doctor
smart, and so they interact with him on the same level.
And he just pushes it that little further, it says, and that means
or whatever.
He gets them to reach the conclusion.
Yep.
And that becomes now suddenly properly scary.
Like that changes the nature of everything we've seen up to that
point, which is we're just, you know, walking among statues of the
dead.
Now it turns out there's a whole army.
And I think that's the point at which the doctor realises that the
crash of the Byzantium isn't an accident, that the angel has sent
it there so he can rescue all of the other angels.
Isn't it great too, that you see all this written on his face?
Like there are those moments where he's he's looking, not at the
camera, but sort of vaguely towards the camera and everyone else
is behind him and you can see his his eyes dart and he's sort of
thinking and you can you can see the thought process going and
working it out.
It's very Sherlock, admittedly, that sort of thing.
Yeah, yeah.
And of course, Sweet Little Bob, the actor who plays Bob, went
into Hollyoaks after this, obviously liked being surrounded by
inanimate objects.
He is so pretty.
He is very pretty, yes.
The loveliest eyes.
I mean, he must have been cast for his voice because his voice is
so innocent.
Well, I mean, he's only on screen for like one scene.
And it's that it's Moffatt sort of riffing, I think, on army of
ghosts where, you know, a character goes and gets taken over by
Cyberman and then calls another character and says, here, come and
look at this interesting thing.
What is it?
I'm not going to tell you.
Just come and look at it.
And it happens twice.
It happens 3 times.
That's right.
And it's another Moffat thing.
And I think that I'm still at the point where I'm happy for Moffat
to do his things again.
And this is a dead person who is still in some sense conscious and
is speaking.
And so that's another thing that's never been done before with the
angels because they're voiceless, but they're given the voice of
Bob, and that works because A, it's terrifying.
You know, he's been torn to pieces and his brain's being used.
Lovely, innocent young man. being used by these evil creatures.
And the way that Angel Bob describes his dad.
Yeah, yeah. is just horrific.
So he's at both at the same time.
He is the dead bob, but he's also the angel.
It's just the angel Bob has the dying Bob's memories.
It ripped out my cerebral cortex or something.
Yeah, yeah.
But it just means that that angel now has a voice, but it's not a
sort of scary, you know, Gabriel Wolf voice.
He keeps calling the doctor, sir.
He's referring to the angel in the 3rd person.
The doctor will trick him next week into saying the words comfy
chairs.
You know, like, it's fun.
It's still terrifying.
It doesn't make the angels any less terrifying, but it's much more
fun.
You should have been so for a reasonable comfort.
It should have.
When the doctor says about stripping his cerebral cortex.
It sounds like de veining a prawn.
Yeah, throw another bulb on the Barbie.
I think Moffat missed a trick.
He should have been a radio writer as well, because so many of his
rightly tricks are to do with voice and things like that.
And we'll see it again in world and often time and the doctor
falls, where that whole scene is built around the fact that the
patients aren't being treated for pain.
They're just having the volume turned down.
Yeah, yeah.
And he's so good at that kind of thing.
If I can just touch on what you're saying about, you know, the
Angel Bob thing, it's so fun.
Okay, yeah, he gets to say comfy sofa and all that business.
But it's not fun.
It's very dark I mean, I know that it allows.
See, this is what I'm trying to say.
It allows for these witty lines to be thrown away here and there
like the word sofa, but it's actually a very dark creepy thing.
And I thought to being silly in a serious situation.
Exactly.
And I think that's worth underscoring.
Do you think that's why the humour works so well in these stories
is because of that juxtaposition between the lightness of the
humour and the darkness, the story.
Yeah, 100%, but it's because the humour isn't the central thing
the humour is the layer.
It's the, it's the garnish.
Thank you.
You know what I mean?
And I think it's when the humour becomes what it's about.
That's when it's been...
I mean, you can do that from time to time because it's fine.
You know, you still want to do love and monsters or whatever, but
it can't always be like that.
And I just think that it's got that creepiness.
But at the same time, you need the humour to dull the creepiness
because otherwise, oh, actually, that's really, really good.
As a relief, as a relief. as a relief.
You need a humourous relief.
And that's why I think the balance is right.
And that's why I think Moffat, by and large, gets the balance
right.
But of course, he also just can't help himself.
He's just a clever funny writer.
So he's going to throw in jokes.
Do we like the whole concept of the angels now having a voice?
Yes.
I think so.
I think it's necessary for just purposes of exposition so that we
know what the angels want and what they're doing.
We do lose something because what's interesting about the angels
in blink is that they're implacable and completely
incomprehensible.
You know, they're from the dawn of time.
They're in some senses sort of an elemental force.
They're described as having evolved and stuff, but, you know, how
can that possibly have happened?
So it does take something away by giving them a voice.
We know what they want.
But because what they want is so terrible, you know, like they
laugh at one point next week, they are doing things just for fun.
Like they're doing evil things. where they explain that Bob died
in fear and pain.
The angels were very keen for you to know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it actually allows them because they're manipulating the doctor
there, aren't they?
They're trying to get him angry is what's said.
And so giving us an insight into their thought processes, yes, we
do lose something there.
But what we gain, I think, is absolutely worth it.
Yeah, I agree.
I think it's needed for, you know, a 2 part plot to work.
Otherwise, it had become a bit flat, but at the same time, I
there's a part of me that wants to see what might it have looked
like had there been no angel Bob, because that also makes it very
mysterious and you never quite know and unfathomable.
Exactly.
And it's one of those things the more you get to find out about
something, the more known they are.
And therefore, sort of the more normal they are, the more boring
they are.
There is something that I think is lost following all this that
they've introduced since Blink.
It's the Borg effect, isn't it?
Yes, exactly.
Oh, queen.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
I mean, it opens up storytelling, but, you know, people...
Well, exactly.
Yeah.
And before that, of course, you get Patrick Stewart playing
Locutus, fulfilling the same function.
But it opens up the storytelling, but in many ways, the Borg were
never as popular as they were in their 1st appearance or 2 when
they didn't have that.
Yeah, but, but, I mean, the Borg are a little bit boring in their
1st appearance, except, well, look, they're amazing, but they
don't react to you when you wander around their spaceship in a way
they're not a threat.
Basically just to rip off of the cyberman.
Yeah.
Yeah, but also that's Deanna Troy as well.
But it is sort of like when the crinoid and seeds of doom suddenly
talks to them when they're in the house.
You know, it's kind of like, where the hell did that come from?
And then it never happens again.
I guess, though, that we do gain new things.
And I do think the idea that the very sight of an angel is a
threat.
And we start to see, you know, Amy, Amy does a little bit of a
sort of Barbara in Planet of Giants thing where she kind of
downplays.
She's got something in her eye, but we're sort of downplaying it
and she rubs her eye and all this sand comes out and stuff.
I am just dying.
And so suddenly, not looking at an angel is deadly, but looking at
an angel is deadly.
Deadly swear. beautifully a beautiful edition.
It's really good.
And because angels are, they're iconic, you know, we think of them
as associated with sort of gravestones and stuff, that's why
they're called the weeping angels and things.
You know, they are an image.
And so having them be an image in the show, I think, is sort of is
terrifically good.
Oh my goodness, Karen plays those scenes well.
Oh, good.
That scene at the end where her hand is stone.
And, you know, we do the no leave me scene, you know, which the
doctor just subverts wonderfully by just biting her.
And he kept biting her hand for real.
In the takes.
Yeah, in the takes.
Can I just also, though, go back to the angels, the changing of
the angels because, of course, you have to, and that's, it opens
the plot up and blah, blah, blah.
I wonder whether I necessarily wanted us to have the thing that
the angels, you know, wanted Angel Bob to die in fear and terror
and pain and all the rest of it.
I don't want them to have that motivation.
I just want them to be sucking people back in time and I want them
to be evil.
You want them to be implacable.
Exactly.
And I think they were, in some respects, it's more interesting
when they're just implacable, but they have an evil effect rather
than their motivation is evil, if that makes sense.
I think it's, I agree with you.
I think it's slightly lampshaded in the writing by the fact that
these are not the same angels, and so you have a species which has
different motivations and worse examples of the species than
others.
Like the gunna dalek.
And the implication is that these angels, what have been dormant
for a very long time.
So they might be an earlier evolutionary part of it.
Well, they just got bored and they want to create some mischief.
Yes, exactly.
Or did they did they eat all the app plans and then starve?
You know what they say?
An app land a day.
Well, the athletic this time, the doctor came.
Well, we know that they died out and we didn't know why, and the
doctor does say, ah, now we know why.
So we do know that the angels have wiped out the app plans and we
know that there's 6000000000 people in word peril on this planet.
Somewhat unnecessarily who are going to be killed.
And so, look, I don't mind that so much.
What Moffatt does to monsters is he changes them so that he can
tell the story that he wants to tell?
He does it.
But he does it, I think, more than anyone else.
You know, suddenly the cybermen can fly.
Suddenly a dalek can be a person with an eye stalk sticking out of
their head.
You know, like all of those things. all the most successful
examples.
I love that.
But we will.
It's a thing that we'll talk about more because it's the theme of
this series.
It's that Moffat is all about storytelling.
And one of the things that stops this from being super
straightforward.
And there's more of that next week than this week is the fact that
people have partial knowledge that people forget things, that
people lie to one another.
All of that stuff is here.
And that's that's Moffatt fighting against a coherent external
version of reality because his Doctor Who is all about telling
stories.
And that will obviously reach a massive peak in the finale, but
and more of it next week, I think.
Speaking of partial knowledge and people lying.
You upset me.
We do find out quite a bit about River Song.
Yes.
So it's funny.
It's funny that Karen immediately identifies that it's the
doctor's wife.
And the doctor...
The doctor says, yes. straight away, but turns out he's saying yes
about something else.
Yes, that's that's just beautiful dialogue.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then she needles him like repeatedly throughout the next
two...
All the answers are in plain sight because when Amy says to very
early on, she says to River and the Tartars, are you his wife?
River Song says you're very clever.
I'm not saying yes.
Of course she is saying yes.
I think my favourite line, though, in all of that sort of sequence
is it's a long story and I don't know most of it.
Yeah, yeah.
Again, you know, that stuff about partial knowledge, you know, the
doctor and river both have sort of massive scary ignorances of
what goes on in their relationship and even the nature of it.
It's really sort of something.
But I, I like that about Moffat, that's one of the things that I
actually like is we know that they're married and the moment that
we hear that she's killed someone even more so next week.
It's very clear that she's killed the doctor.
And he follows through on that in series 6.
And it's a little bit like series 8 where Missy is probably the
master and it turns out to nobody's surprised that she's actually
the master.
And in a way, the actual revelation isn't the interesting thing
the being teased is the interesting thing.
That's a thing that people complain about with Moffat, that things
don't always pay off or things that he teasers don't always
properly get addressed, but again, it's stories and who cares?
Is that what people complain about with Moffin?
Sometimes.
I mean, I still don't know who why the Tardis blows up in the
finale.
But it doesn't really matter.
Yeah.
Well, that's it.
There's lots of things that happen in Doctor Who that you don't
know why.
Yeah, exactly.
I agree.
I absolutely agree.
And also, he does he does wrap everything up in time of the
doctor.
Yeah.
But with a few, he makes a stab at it Well, but again, he's kind
of toying with this.
It's like, it's like the beginning of the 3rd series of Sherlock.
Basically, the idea is any resolution of this cliffhanger is in
some way going to be dumb.
So let's just kind of lean into it.
Moffatt's always clever and he's always writing to a high level.
I think the thing that changes is the audience response to it.
So if you like what he's doing and where he's gone with it, you'll
say isn't Moffat clever, if you don't, she'll say, well, he's
being too clever.
And also he's doing his shtick.
Yeah.
I remember there was that event at Fox Studios or in the Horton
Pavilion, where Moffat came out with Capaldi and it was towards
the end of the run, I think.
And an audience member actually said to his face, I mean, you know
in a room of a 1000 people that, oh, you're just going to come up
with some Moffat thing to, you know, get out of whatever.
And he called them on it as he should.
But isn't that, so is that what, is it what they're talking about
the fact that there's kind of like something that's just magicked
up out of nowhere because that's actually not how I see his
writing.
Or is it just the timey whiminess that some people find OTT?
That person mentors an insult that...
No, no, that means the insult. was terrible.
It goes back to what I was saying.
I think if you like what he's doing, then you will sing his
praises.
If you don't, you'll say he's being too clever and he's doing his
shtick.
And so it's a purely subjective response to a 100% cleverness all
the time.
I do actually later in the run think that there are episodes where
he's doing the thing that he's done before and maybe not as well.
And I do think that he does have a tendency to go back to a few
sort of favourite tropes.
But I do like the cleverness of his writing.
And I actually really like the aggressive refusal to build up a
coherent world. like an active rejection of the universe.
And I think you've put your finger on one of the reasons why when
this season started, I responded so differently to the program.
I just recently heard your RTD era retrospective.
And many of you were talking about how comfortable and safe and
cosy the Russ Sitty Davies era felt.
And I think you, Nathan, would talk about how, you know, there was
a family in a home and you got you got a sense of A world.
Yeah.
Well, I think for me, the existence of that world, that kind of
world in Doctor Who was what made me feel uncomfortable about it.
Whereas now we reject the concept of those worlds.
Yes, there are still real places and there's still some sense of
ongoing continuity.
But, you know, you go from, you know, an English village in the
1st episode to a totally imaginary and ridiculous idea of, you
know, the English or English and Welsh population, whatever it is
on a spaceship in the nondescriptly distant future.
It doesn't matter that you have to be able to work out how that
fits within arc in space and all this other stuff. you know what I
mean?
It's just because of a function.
Yeah, but my point is that there's not this sense of we're all in
this continuous universe.
There's no manual on the shelf where they've written the history
of the universe from go to woe, and everything's got to fit within
this world.
There is, you know, didn't Lance Park and right?
But you know what I mean?
But it is a flavour.
It changes the flavour of the show.
I think that's one of the brilliant things and one of the things I
love so much about Moffatt's version of the show is that although
the universe isn't coherent.
He gives reasons for why it isn't as well, constantly is giving
reasons for why continuity doesn't work, but it's so expansive and
imaginative and...
There are no boundaries.
There are no boundaries, exactly.
I mean, I love, I love the ITD era, because it uses his skills as
a TV writer to do something to a show that can literally be
anything and to find a way sure of circumscribing it, but of
enabling a group of characters that you grow to love.
And it's super important for Russell.
It's something that he's supremely skilled at.
Think of years and years and it's a sin, you know, both of those
you end up with a group of characters whom you really like.
And the ongoing impact of that is that it enriches the show.
And bringing it back into a sort of TV environment that didn't
really know about Doctor Who.
I think it was kind of the right approach, but when we go away
from it, we can always go back and watch that, if that's what we
want.
When we move away from it.
I've spent a lot of time thinking, you know, wishing there was a
mum. in the Moffett era.
And I do think Amy's mum who gets one scene in the finale.
Isn't it River song?
No.
Isn't she the mum in the era?
Well, I guess so.
I guess she probably is.
But she's a little sexier.
She's a MILF.
How dare you say that about Kimmel?
I actually think Amy's mum is really funny in that one scene.
She gets some pretty funny lines.
But it is fun to leave that.
And then to do something sort of...
Yeah, really ambitious and interesting.
And a friend of the podcast, Eric, from the writer's room.
The last episode of his that I heard was talking about the 1st 2
episodes of series one.
And he talked about how great the universe that Russell creates is
but says that by the end he was finding it a bit stifling.
You know, I've observed before that Russell makes the same season
4 times in a very real sense.
There's a lot of variety.
Do you know what I mean?
We go to the far future in the past and we have comedy episodes
and dark episodes and horror episodes and stuff.
Doctor Who can still do a lot of things, but it is kind of nice to
see it set free from that a bit.
But it's like, it's a formula that works.
That formula works, you said earlier, earlier in this recording
that Moffatt uses that basic formula.
Yeah.
And and continues to do it until series 9.
Yeah, that's a formula of just in Safari is how you structure the
production of the season.
That's not formula in terms of how the episodes are written
particularly.
I don't know about that.
Yeah, no, I think it's very much kind of in the Ross Lera and
Moffat follows that in series five.
You have those 1st couple of episodes which sort of run the gamut
of where Doctor Who goes, then you have the big fun 2 parter.
You have some character stuff in the middle, the darker 2 part.
That's not just a function of production.
No, but it's still, um, okay, yes, I get what you're saying, but
I'm talking about production in terms of, well, how you do
episodes about A, B, and C and how you kind of scatter them
throughout the season.
Kind of like you might, you know, Barrelettes might have done in
the early 70s.
Separating Mark of the Ranian time lash.
For example.
But it's still, it's still the bandwidth is open.
And I'm not saying it was the wrong decision.
I totally get why they brought it back the way they did in all
power to him.
I think it's, you know, did a spectacular job, but it was just
there's a certain saminess that you get in the RTD era, which is
as you say, is necessary and important for all this host of
reasons.
Great, fine, wonderful.
Thank God that's over, was my response.
Well, it's Doctor Who, isn't it?
I mean, Doctor Who, there is no right approach or wrong approach.
And so Russell's version stands right alongside Stevens version
and they're both legitimate ways of doing Doctor Who.
It's a little bit like going from the Letts era to the Hinchcliffe
era.
Exactly.
Yeah.
You know, the Let's era is cosy, is set in a coherent world.
There are lots of characters.
Perhaps they're not quite as well drawn as the ones in the RTD
era.
Oh, I don't know about that.
Corporal Bell.
Then we get the Hinge Cliffera, and suddenly all that falls away
and the universe is now bigger.
I think the mistake Doctor Who makes when it makes it is being the
same for too long.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
Let's finish off by talking about the cliffhanger.
I think that this has to be very high up in the, you know, hit
parade of all-time great cliffhangers in Doctor Who history.
It's superb.
And it builds perfectly.
From about the 3 minute mark out.
You know that it's building to a cliffhanger.
You can feel it on screen.
And it uses that, um, the style of dialogue that you were, I think
you were talking about earlier, Simon, um, that Matt Smith is just
talking a 1000000 miles an hour and he, he's basically saying
don't, don't you cross me, you know, like you've made a huge
mistake.
It fantastic.
It's basically all world word peril.
Yeah.
But it's him going into that cliffhanger with power, not having
the power taken away from him.
It inverts the traditional cliffhanger of I'm being menaced.
He's been menaced and now he's taking back control.
That's right.
And the tension rises with the doctor's simmering anger.
That's why you know it's building a cliffhanger.
Little cartoon Graham Norton comes along and ruins it all.
Do you know, I was at an Olympiad, a fan Olympiad in Britain, and
we all watched this episode on the Saturday night after it.
And I think it was Gary Gillett who said that when the little
cartoon Graham Norton came on over the doctor's final speech.
He'd never heard such a rumbling roar of resentment from a crowd
of people.
Graham Norton just can't stop interrupting Doctor Who, can he?
It's a thing.
Oh, this was just because he was on next one.
That's right.
And so it's a little animated dancing.
They started a few minutes early before the credits. started about
20 seconds earlier.
It should have come up over the end credits and like someone made
a mistake and it pops up over Matt Smith's mouth.
His incredible hero speech.
Like, this is his Aristea.
This is absolutely brilliant.
You see, there's a reason why I waited for the ABC transmission.
I don't think I ever saw that.
Maybe I had mysterious access to a mysterious copy.
BBC. 3 repeats or something.
And people wonder why broadcast television is dying. sure someone
just mentioned it to you.
That's right.
I think that the closest parallel to this is the end of Bad Wolf
where the doctor announces to Rose that he's coming to rescue
her.
And so this isn't us in peril.
This isn't us discovering a new thing about the plot.
This is the doctor declaring his mission to solve the problem.
Mission statement for the next episode.
Yeah, yeah, but it also functions just this early on in his 4th
episode as a very clear kind of mission statement for the doctor
as a whole.
I mean, unquestionably, it's a great cliffhanger just because it's
not sort of die, doctor die.
But I have not really... trying to think of a really good
cliffhanger in the in the modern era when there have been them and
I don't think this is one of them, I confess.
I think it's really great.
I think it's the, it's the, it's a cliffhanger doing something
different.
My, my previous uh, favourite cliffhanger is uh, Happiness Patrol
episode two, uh, which is OD doesn't, doesn't look like Daphne S
went down too well now, does it?
Because that is some mysterious impending peril and the doctor
thinking about it.
And that's an accidental cliffhanger.
And then the zoom in on Ace, like, she's next.
Yeah, yeah.
And she's sort of trapped in a poster, so she can't actually do
anything.
When are we doing the happiness patrol?
We should have done that at some point. at some point.
It's like the cliffhanger is a sensible spot to stop the episode
now and so we can continue the story later rather than it being a
completely, you know, invented moment of peril so that you can
stop the episode and continue next week.
There's a moment of peril, though, because there's no way out.
They're surrounded by angels that are coming to get them.
You know, the soldiers are sort of desperately looking at them to
prevent them from coming.
There's nowhere for them to go.
And so it is, yes, in peril.
But what Moffatt knows is that we know that the doctor's going to
get out of the peril.
And so he gives the doctor a speech, and then an action, and the
action is super compelling as well, because it's the doctor
shooting a gun at something, and then we cut to something that's
completely incomprehensible.
Do you know what I mean?
It's the gravity globe maybe blowing up, but we don't really know
what's happening.
And it allows that classic Moffat. device where he flips the
entire story on its head in the next episode.
That's right.
Moffat uses cliffhanger as a pivot in the story.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, that's quite common, I think, in the modern year of the show
the 1st episode focusses on the one thing the 2nd episode focusses
on the next.
Oh, it's Moffat that really introduces that.
Russell does it to an extent in Bad Wolf, but that's more
thematically kind of tied together.
I think Moffat does it in the library 2 parter and then thinks
that worked.
That's a good one.
I mean, he sets it in a completely different place and possibly
even later.
That's right.
The thing about the peril, which I agree with.
But the thing that softens it in that beautiful way is when he
asks River, do you trust me and she just says, always.
And it's so, yes, it's such a warm feeling.
Yeah, yeah.
But I mean, we trust the doctor.
We know he's going to get out of the peril.
So having him declare that he's going to do that. doesn't blunt it
in any way.
It just gives him a massive hero moment.
Yeah, I mean, I suppose when I'm talking about the, there's a lack
of that, the full peril is that there isn't like, you know, the
army standing, you know, centimetres away from them with guns at
the heads where it's any resolution's just going to be dumb.
Yeah.
That's what I meant.
You know, Moffat loves the arc in space.
And I think he spends a fair proportion of this season looking to
give the doctor an indomitable moment, and this is one of them.
And then he repeats a similar kind of speech.
He goes, oh, wow, Matt Smith can do these kind of speeches.
So he gives him a speech in his 1st story that's kind of similar
in the sort of statement of who I am, what my what my purpose is
then and then at the end of the season you get another one as well
right.
The Pandora opens a bit.
Stonehenge.
Yeah.
Well, then, listen, that's all we have time for this week.
We'll be back next week for another meeting of the Adam and Matt
Smith Appreciation Society, with this story's exciting conclusion
flesh and stone.
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, FlightthroughEntirety
com, where you'll find links to our other podcasts, Bondfinger and
Jody into Terror.
Until next time, may you find a nice app plan to settle down with
someday soon.
I'm sure you'll both make a lovely throuple.
Thank you very much for listening and good night.
Ta-ta.
Good night.
See you soon.
That was Flight 3 Entirety, starring Nathan Bottomley, Peter
Griffith, Simon Moore and James Selwood, theme arrangement by
Cameron Lamb.
This episode, implacable and completely incomprehensible, was
recorded on the 6th of February 2021 and released on the 4th of
April.
So any alien monsters listening, the list of things you should
never put into a trap also includes a clearly visible door, a
control mode to the entire spaceship, the key, a massive gun, an
interplanetary missile, an army of robot mummies, and that creepy
stage hand who won't stop fondling your buttocks.
So, let's talk about the structure of the episode as a whole
because I actually think it's surprisingly straightforward for a
Moffat story.
Oh yes.
I think, oh, well, sorry, did I trade on that?
Did I trade on that?
No, no, no, no.
Because I can say, no, I'm about to say something. can you do that
again?
Simon, was your, Oh yes, a quote from the Silurians.
Oh yes.
Oh, yes, yes.
Because I said, yes, I said, yes, the top V, sorry.
No, that's right.
I wasn't going to go.
I was waiting to throw it for someone to...
So let's talk about the structure of the story because I do think
it...