Hello, Delister, and welcome back to Flight of Entirety, the only
Doctor Who podcast that was sure there were 6 bullets in the
cylinder of this revolver just a minute ago.
I'm Nathan.
I'm Brendan.
I'm Todd.
I'm Maxwell Well, it seems like we've spent 3 months running
around Utah with helicopters flying overhead, so I guess it's time
to settle down, get a grip, and resolve every single mystery that
we introduced last week.
It's one small step for a man and one giant leap in the history of
arc-based storytelling.
It's day of the moon.
Do you know, I was born in between when last week's episode was
set and when this week's episode is set.
Oh wow.
So the moon landing happened in a world that I existed in. and I
was actually born between the broadcast of the 2nd last episode of
Star Trek and the final episode Turnabout Intruder, which is one
of the worst pieces of television, I think, ever to air in the
history of the world.
So there you go.
But this isn't.
No, this is really great.
This is not, and rather charmingly, the moon landing actually
happened while Spearhead from Space was being filmed.
Ooh, on location.
On the moon?
On the moon. that's right Yeah, John Pertwin, his moon boot and
his dinner suit.
But the reason we know that is Carol and John has told us that she
and John Pertwee bonded because in the pub everyone was staying at
during filming for Spearheadrum space.
John Pertwee was sitting in the TV room by himself, watching the
moon landing, lamenting about how the rest of the casting crew
were Philistines for not watching this moment in history.
So Carrie John went and joined it.
Which is a very doctorary thing to do, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
He took the part very seriously.
But also it's the effing moon.
Come on people.
Everyone else is just drinking a piping.
Like, yeah, yeah, we see it every night, whatever.
Yeah.
I think it does mean that John Pertwee and Carolyn John killed a
whole bunch of silence in their time then after that.
Oh, totally.
Yeah.
Yeah, Carol and John hit them with her pipe.
That's it.
Dear, I can imagine myself as a 4 month old, you know, like biting
their ankles or something like that.
So how do we think the cliffhanger resolves itself?
Well, it's typical Stephen Moffatt, in that, the cliffhanger is
not resolved to begin with.
We start a completely different point in the story.
Three months later, we've got Amy in the valley of the gods in
Utah, and, you know, with lots of little markings on her and she
gets shot by Canton.
And then um, rivers in New York and America's occupied and so she
decides to throw herself off the 50th floor of the whatever
building that is.
They never say what it is.
And then Rory is in the Glen Canyon Dam, and so he's got so many
markings and he also gets shot by Canton.
And then he turns up at where is it?
Is it Area 51 with the doctor with a lot of um, uh, with a beard.
And, you know, thank goodness that he's the one doing the shooting
because otherwise, you know, Amy and Rory would possibly be dead
having to hold their breath for a very long time in those body
bags.
Okay, I'm so sorry.
I love that that scene had so much tension and so much confusion
and 0 no, Canton has betrayed them.
But I still, from a narrative standpoint, don't understand why
that all happened.
And I get that he was playing a part and he was on their side all
the time, but I don't understand why that needed to happen because
Nixon is clearly not compromised by the silence.
He's totally down with everything that the doctor and Amy and Rory
and River want to do.
So I was trying to figure out what was going on there that they
needed to be so deceptive about.
And the only thing I could think of was that it was the FBI that
was compromised because like Nixon said that he didn't trust them
but we also still never see a scene where the silence put the
whammy on someone and be like, this is the subliminal message.
So it was very unclear why that was happening, and I still don't
really understand if the silence were involved in that at all.
I mean, clearly they were to some degree, but, you know, it just
doesn't make sense because, like, the person at the top, Nixon is
you know, obviously not calling the shots here.
So what's going on?
I think it's what we said last week and it is just that is
something that Moffatt doesn't want you to push too hard against
because it is a really, really spectacular and upsetting scene.
Um, and confusing is exactly right.
But he doesn't let us stay confused for very long.
I mean, by the time the opening credits come in, that's all
resolved.
So we aren't required to wait for a long time or hold that
question in our heads for particularly long.
And we also aren't allowed to be too upset for too long, I think.
I think it does go back to the fact that, you know, it's cinematic
we're reinforcing we're in America, we've got those locations, it
all looks great.
Even the whole, um, the doctor in the, in the cell, the way in
which that whole cell builds itself and then, you know, they're up
out of their body bags. river goes diving into the swimming pool
you know, you know, there's a bit of a fun there.
It's all to, you know, to get us back into the story.
Yes, there's been a time jump with obvious plot points happening
which we haven't filled in yet, and now we're going to fill them
in.
Yeah.
So our flashback comes in in that section.
And what I find interesting is Moffat has said that he loves
cliffhangers, that cliffhanger resolutions are very often sort of
prosaic and dull. you know, in the 80s we criticised.
You know, the cliffhanger's great.
The doctor's forced to his knees and someone raised an axe above
his head and what's the resolution?
Another person wanders in and says, no, stop.
You know, the Clitanger resolution is often less interesting.
So Moffatt, and he said this recently in an interview with
Thumbjock 2 magazine about writing, is the reason there's so many
time jumps in his work, is he's like, just cut to the interesting
bits and make the dull bit a 2 line explanation of what's happened
in the meantime.
He's like, this isn't theatre.
You can do that.
And that's what he does here.
And then, yep, in the flashback, he gives us the prosaic
cliffhanger explanation of Amy Shot went a bit wide and everyone
ran back to the TARDIS.
It's like, Now, if that had happened in the 1st scene of the
episode, you go, oh, I'm glad they're all safe, but instead you
get this dynamic opening, which, as you say, Max, when you sort of
scrutinised the narrative is like, uh, really?
Okay.
But it is visually interesting.
And again, friend of the podcast, Matt H, when I was watching it
with him, he's like, I love that Rory has clearly had the worst
time of it because he is the most capable person aboard the TARD.
So he's seen the most amount of silence.
He is the most dishevelled and he is the last to get caught.
That's so funny that you mentioned the wide shot because if you
actually look at the astronaut suit later on, and maybe this was
still there in the 1st episode, you'll see the book where the
bullet hit the suit, but didn't penetrate it because it has the
crack around it.
So I think she actually did hit the shell of the suit.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
But then she doesn't have the visor up, does she?
No, she has the helmet on.
Okay, whatever.
I'm not gonna think about it too much.
So she got the inner visor.
Yeah.
I think that what happens is the child is so small that its head
is low in the visor and so the bit that she hits would have gone
through an adult's head, but it misses because it's a child and
the child is very small in this sort of massively oversized suit.
I also just had a disturbing realisation that if the whole idea is
that the silence have compromised the FBI, but Nixon is the free
agent here.
That means we're on Nixon's side against the FBI, with how gross
of a thought is that?
compared to real events because now we're siding with Nick's son
being like, oh, no, he was totally valid.
See, there were aliens.
Oh, Chris.
This episode is much, much less Lydia than the last one.
So the last episode, despite the sort of weird time travel
shenanigans we have with the 2 doctors, really just sort of goes
from, you know, the picnic to the cafe to the TARDIS, to the Oval
Office, to the warehouse.
Whereas this has a few things going on and it absolutely goes
backwards and forwards kind of all the time.
And so we leave the opening credits and we're going into, is it
Greystark Hall?
Grey Star Orphanage?
Is that right?
And again, I think that that's foregrounded because that's a
massively more interesting and atmospheric moment in the story
than what we flash back to, which is us standing in the TARDIS
telling everyone what we learned last week and what the nano
recorders do.
You know, what's so interesting about that?
See, it is that, 1st of all, there's no building in America called
Grey Star Hall.
It's entirely too British.
Especially in Florida.
Weird.
Second.
I remember on my 2nd watch.
I forgetting that character, the creepy caretakers, that like
weird kind of moonlight and magnolia is like southern drawl he
has.
I forgot that what his name was.
And when the door opened, I was like, oh, it's like a Rainsford
character from Dracula.
And he's like, my name's Rainfrew.
I'm like, oh, I see what you're doing there, Moffin.
Very well done.
It just reminds me of Angels episode. like you've got a creepy
house with, you know, darkness and writing on the wall.
He's sort of ripping off a bit of his own writing in that aspect
um, And then that's into come with, you know, the whole um, leto
recorder stuff explanation that's going to be pivotal.
And of course, Amy's not told Rory that she's pregnant.
The nano recorders, I think, are brilliant.
I think that they are really interesting.
And Moffat has long had an obsession with telephones, including
the pivotal kind of series 2 cliffhanger of press gang, which is
just 2 characters staring at a telephone to see what's going to
happen.
And a lot of his stuff is around, you know, phone messages and
stuff like that.
I met him.
Todd, you remember, at that day event where we met Stephen Moffat
and I actually asked him how you're doing a telephone joke in a
World War 2 story, and of course, he has the TARDIS telephone ring
and someone call on that.
We had the telephone calls last week.
It's all mysterious telephone calls from a little girl to the
president.
So these, this is like a phone answering machine.
You know, and it even has the little LED light flashing to show
you that you've got a message.
And I think it is incredibly effective.
And we see a trick here, that is a feature of those scenes in the
orphanage, which is that we see things from the character's point
of view.
So when they see the silence and then forget them, we don't see
that, what we see is, you know, the scene on either side of that
that seems uninterrupted, so suddenly the character will have an
extra mark on their face, or suddenly the character's thing will
be flashing because they've encountered the silence, but we're not
allowed to see it.
And it's a similar trick to what is done with the weeping angels
which is not only do the characters never see the move, but we
count as an observer.
So we don't see them move either.
And so it's a sort of standard directorial trick with the silence
which I think is incredibly effective because we get to feel what
it's like to not know that we've encountered them.
I think it's brilliant.
I just love that.
It's so creepy and it sort of just shocks you knowing that it's
just happened.
And then, you know, even in the TARDIS, with the creature in the
TARDIS. like you know?
Oh my god.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I had kind of forgotten that scene to some degree, even though I
actually watched it earlier this year.
So, you know, what sort of year it's been.
The fact that Canton's nano recording is flashing when he's in the
TARDIS.
And you think, wait, there's a silence in here?
Like, what's happening?
And Heath just thinks it's a mistake.
Like he just says, no, no, no, like I didn't receive a message.
And of course, he did.
It's so well done.
It sets that directorial trick up for us as well.
It gives us a little training wheels version of it where it's
explained and so then he can go on to do it for all of those
scenes in the orphanage.
I think my challenge to my disbelief.
And all of this was the fact that we, um, as an audience had to
accept the fact that we could get a clear 40 K holographic image
from a 2011 flip phone. you just wouldn't believe the machine
learning chip at the time. has.
It's really something.
You're talking about the flashing hand. like, you know, with Amy
investigating, you know, with all the stuff on her face and when
she looks up at that pod of the silence on the roof, it's just
jump scanning, just creepy and I love the visuals.
It's got a real time in the Rani kind of feel to it, doesn't it?
Well, what?
Todd is grimacing.
Well, you know, the tetraps hanging through the ceiling in time of
the rowdy, although, you know, the chittering that they do and the
fact that they're all like bunched up together against one another
like we observed last week, like it makes them really, it makes
them really animalistic and kind of massively, massively off
putting.
I think those scenes are as scary as anything that he's ever
done.
Much like time in the Rani, there was a physical cluster maquette
model of the silence for a visual reference for Karen Gillan to
look up at and ended up at the Doctor Who exhibition in London.
And when I was teaching in the UK, I took a group of students to
the Doctor Who exhibition and rather than pay for a guided tour
you know, I just used me because I can identify everything there.
So when we got to that silence hang from the roof, I turned around
and I said, now, you guys remember these ones, they're the silence
they're from last year's season, and the special thing about those
is when you look away, you can't remember them.
And I turn back to the group.
And then I turn back to the model and I said, now, these are the
silence from last year's season and the thing about them.
And how did that go down?
They actually loved it.
So one of the interesting things about it is that that seeing the
silence and then turning away from them and saying the thing that
you were saying before, like the actual forgetting the science is
even though it's horrifying sometimes, it's completely played for
laughs at other times, I think.
That's really terribly clever.
With all this spookiness.
We intercut with the lecture theatre, which reminds me of the
Castle Theatre, actually, um, from the 1960s, um, at City
University, with river and Rory, the background, and Nixon, and I
love Rivers look, and Rory's look.
Oh, the Mad Men is FedEx.
The fashion design is fantastic.
Oh, yes.
What about the scene leading up to that where Amy rings the doctor
and the doctor takes the call and then we discover that he's in
the, you know, command module of the Apollo 11, which is just so
fantastic.
And even though there's just a bit leftover thing, which is such a
sort of dad joke.
I mean, it's such a, you know, it's the observation that everyone
makes when they're assembling IKEA furniture or repairing Bessie.
You know, there's always one bit left over.
It's a little bit of a limp joke, but it works so incredibly
well.
And that amazing CG pullout shot where we just move out away from
the rocket and we see Kennedy Space Centre.
It's so incredibly great.
That's so brilliant.
And then Matt, in the lecture theatre, trying to bite through the
handcuffs.
Why is he doing that?
This might be a good time to talk about how this episode was
originally gonna pay off the Easter Island gag.
Yes.
I've been wondering about that So the doctor was going to keep the
beard for much longer into the episode.
So in the previously mentioned scene where he's explaining the
nano recorder, after he finished his explanation, River was going
to pull out a bowl of hot water and a straight razor and a towel
and say, and now, darling, and he's like, no, I'm keeping a
beard.
Beards are cool.
So he was going to have the beard when he was up in the lunar
module and then when he's trying to bite through the handcuffs and
then when he gets back into the Tartars, River was not going to
uncuff him in order to then shave his beard off. a little bit
kinky.
And then like, and then later on when he was talking to Nixon, he
was going to be constantly distracted by the fact that she's done
it wrong.
My chin looks enormous.
I was actually going to herald the return of the BBC press on
Beard because it is really bad.
Yes, it is.
I think I think later on for the wedding of River song, he is
allowed to grow his own, but this is very obviously a BBC press on
state of decay beard.
Yes.
So 18 minutes in.
A woman with an eye patch opens a sliding window and says she's
just dreaming.
So another mystery is set up.
Yes.
Is she credited in this episode?
So this is eye patch lady whose name we will discover a bit
later?
Yeah, she is just credited as eye patch lady.
Yeah.
And that will obviously pay off later.
And I think we're going to be reminded of it throughout the 1st
half of the season.
It does happen again next week, I think.
Yeah, and look, Amy's investigating a child's room and we see
pictures of, ultimately see a picture of Amy with the baby and um
and an astronaut enters from behind.
I think this is utterly terrifying, this scene, like absolutely
incredibly frightening.
And again, it's one of those moments where I think Karen's acting
is slightly too good for the program.
Because, no, the reason that I say that, I think we probably say
this about Caves of Andrazani, one of the reasons that what
happens to Perry in Caves of Andrazani is so upsetting is because
Nicola is doing too good a job.
She's not doing kind of light entertainment scared acting.
She's doing proper drama scared acting.
And I think that's happening here.
And it certainly happened last week when the doctor was shot.
But she is so convincingly terrified in this that she really
really properly sells it.
And it was a fairly terrifying scene already, I think.
It's so much like lost in that kind of just Moffatt is hitting us
again and again with just weird turns, weird questions.
We're just WTF moments.
Like, when she picks up the picture of her holding the baby, you're
just like, what is going on?
And then, of course, eye patch lady.
Yeah, so that means at this point we know that the little girl is
the child that she's pregnant with.
Um, and she says she's not pregnant.
Has she already told the doctor that she's not pregnant anymore?
Yeah, she's like, oh, it was a mistake.
We must know that because it's 3 months, you know, and she's still
running around adventuring and stuff rather than taking it
slightly easy.
I don't know, but um, so something odd is going on there.
And I wonder whether it's a sort of moffity cheat to get the
pregnancy into episode one because, you know, we needed to be
pregnant going on and we'll find out at the end of the episode
that is a sort of shrading as pregnancy.
But it is like absolutely confusing and terrifying, I think.
And the thing for me is on 1st viewing, I definitely recall that
when she screams and the scene ends.
I thought, well, and you know, then when we got to later on in the
season, I'm like, 0 my God, that's the moment she's abducted, but
it can't be because she's already seen Madame Cavarian open the
hatch.
And this is another example, I think, of Stephen Moffatt wanting
the audience to make up their own mind.
There is no definitive moment of when she's taken because the next
possible, obvious moment you think of is, oh, you know, river
discovers those burn marks outside Amy's house in the Pandora
opens, but it can't be then because we also discovered that Amy
the real Amy had to be aboard the TARDIS between the Big Bang and
a Christmas carol.
I think it's the 3 month interval where they're on the run that
they took her.
Fair enough.
Yeah that makes sense.
I think it does make sense because she's on a planet infested by
silence.
And so you have to think that they have abducted her and taken her
to Madame Cavarian.
But at no point is that even addressed, is it?
Like, I suppose it's not super important when it happened.
It just happened.
And it puts me in mind of the Doctor magazine comic ground zero
which friends of the podcast, Josh Snares, has just done a
fantastic motion comic of on YouTube.
Because in the lead up to that, there were these stories with past
doctors where at some point in the story, a companion would be
taken, but then returned at the end and you didn't know what that
was about.
And it turned out they were all in this big arc story at the end.
And yeah, it sort of reminded me a bit of that.
But yeah, here, you know, you see her get taken and locked up in
the silence ship.
But in a way, it sort of, it sort of wrongfoots us for when we
find out later in the season.
Oh, no, no, no.
She was taken ages ago.
It's the usual Moffat thing of, no, I already told you this
happened.
Yeah, yeah.
I think it's very disturbing when you actually actually find Amy's
recording device that's out of her.
Like, how do you get that out?
You know, and Amy's crying on the other end and wonderful moment
with Arthur, you know, and Rory, so resolute that, you know, um
that Amy knows that he's coming for her.
I think all of that is just beautiful.
Although it's so horribly undercut almost immediately when it's
clear that she's calling for the doctor.
Um, and like Rory tries to say face a bit by saying, I'm going to
lead the doctor, you know, I'm going to lead you to her, but he is
kind of embarrassed, I think, and humiliated by that.
I actually find the weird resurrection of the love triangle
between the doctor, Amy and Rory, a bit off putting here.
I hated it so much in this.
We said last year that from Amy's choice onwards in series five.
There's no question at all that Amy loves Rory and cares for him
more than she cares about the doctor.
Like, I think that that's made absolutely clear.
And all of the sort of attempts to have sex with him at the end of
Time of Angels, you know, is a blip.
All of that is thrown away because their love is made absolutely
definite.
And I think there's a really, really kind of heartbreaking
juxtaposition of Amy calling for the doctor and Rory hearing her
speak and assuming that she's referring to the doctor and the
doctor sitting with Rory and asking him about his time as the lone
centurion, where the incredible loyalty of Rory is emphas at a
time where we can't tell whether Amy feels the same way.
And I mean, it is resolved by kind of Rory being told not to be so
silly, you know, and she sort of earned that, I think.
I think she has sort of earned that.
But it does seem like a bit of a cheat.
I'm not quite sure why why we're doing that.
It's a beautiful conversation between the doctor and Rory. written
that down here in my notes.
But I mean, even later in the episode where again, Roy says, I
wasn't sure who you were talking about and they kiss.
I think there are some beats in this, again with the Rory, Amy
doctor relationship, Nathan, which I agree with you, which don't
sit well with me.
Hmm, I thought we were over it.
It's just Amy being like, you stupid face, and like, how could you
think that?
Amy, to me, is just like gaslight, girl boss ginger.
She's so like toxic sometimes.
And I get that she has like a really screwed up childhood and
whatever.
But like, I'm on her side until she does something so, like, rude.
And I'm like, Amy, slow your roll.
Like, stop like whipping this man.
See, I think that Stephen Moffatt likes being treated like that by
women and that's why...
He's a dirty little piggy.
Yeah, yeah.
And to be fair, both the doctor and Rory do have stupid faces.
So there is that too.
It's a built in ambiguity.
They're what I like to call a weird hob.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
But even at the end, you know, when the doctor's talking to Amy
about, you know, why shouldn't tell Rory she was pregnant and he's
got the listening device, you know, to listen to that and then
they sort of resolve it.
It's, I just kind of go, to be needed?
I think that's made okay, though, by the fact that Amy makes it
clear that she knew all along that Rory was listening, that she
wasn't speaking behind his back at all.
She knew that he was listening in and then she calls him in to say
all right, come on, I'm going to take that off you if you're going
to use it to spy on me.
So it does seem much worse than it actually ends up being, I
think.
Yeah, I find it a cheap joke and I kind of think, you know, like
to be really needed.
Like, just adds to that little bit in this episode where I think
personally, I don't like this episode as much as last week.
Like if last week I gave a 9 out of 10 here, I think it's an 8 and
there's just some little things in here that, and even with the
resolution of the season and what's to come, retrospectively, I
look back on it and think it's, the shine takes off just a little
for me anyway.
Yeah, yeah.
It's fair.
As we're talking about relationships, I'd also like to mention
something from the end, which is the reveal that the reason that
Canton left or was kicked out of the FBI is that he is in a
relationship with a man whom he wants to marry.
And I think this highlights that Stephen Moffat does at this stage
have a little bit of a problem in writing for queer characters.
And if we look back at coupling, which was, you know, his other
big success before this.
Like, I know he had press gang and joking apart, which were very
popular, coupling is what sort of catapulted him into the
spotlight.
There's one explicitly gay character throughout the whole thing.
And Stephen Moffat, 1st of all, has Jane constantly trying to
seduce him as a comedy thing, but also he's like, how can I make a
gay character interesting?
I'll make him a huge fan of Margaret Thatcher.
Yeah, yeah.
What?
Yeah, yeah.
How is that a choice?
And you know, also, how do I define him as gay?
I'll have him say, when I was born, I turned around and said, don't
turn me back in that big scary cave, you know?
And it's just, it's straight writers writing for gay characters
sort of cheat book.
And here, um, obviously, we can't rewrite history to have same-sex
marriage be legal in 1969.
But the fact that it is a Canton sexuality is a punchline.
It still makes me chuckle in a dark way, but I'm kind of like one
of the things that Moffat was criticised for in series 5 is it's
like there's no queer rep in the show.
And Moffatt even spoke about that in an interview.
He was like, you know what?
It didn't occur to me and that is a problem and I'm going to
address it.
And the characters here dresses it with in this season. 1st of all
there's Canton.
And 2nd of all, there's the couple in, um, a good man goes to
war.
And also Jenny and Vastra and how their relationship is sort of
treated.
It kind of like, oh, Stephen, you're trying.
Yeah, I can see that you're trying.
Although the line, this is my, this is my lizard wife from the
dawn of time.
It was pretty great.
Yes, that is a great life.
Yeah, Jenny and Bastor's relationship gets better as it goes along
absolutely.
I have to say though, that he is genuinely trying.
I do think he's trying.
And I do think that making a character that is integral to the
plot, who gets to be part of the main team, and who is really good
and really competent and terribly likably played by Mark Shepard
and then revealing that he's gay at the end.
You know, like, I think there's something to be said for that.
That's okay.
And I do think it gives like the punchline, which is Nixon pulls a
face because he's gay.
And remember, Nixon is a horrible person.
And he's got all of those prosthetics and he does pull this sort
of hilarious Google-eyed, rubber face kind of eye-rolling thing at
the very end.
I also like tend to think that's funny.
I actually think that we overestimate how good Doctor Who is at
queer representation generally.
And even in the RTD era, there isn't all that much of it. everyone
assumes there is, but there actually isn't really.
Yeah, yeah, it's got a gay sensibility.
It's got an absolute gay sensibility for sure.
And so I've, you know, I think we feel included in that for that
very reason, you know, in a real way it's made for us on all sorts
of levels.
But the explicit queer representation is pretty rare.
And I don't think Doctor Who has ever really got that right.
I think, you know, there's Praxius, which I think is a really
really good example of that actually going well.
But I can't think of many others.
I'd make an argument for Bill.
Oh, yeah.
Because I know that's later days, but I will say when it came to
that romance or whatever that was, even though there wasn't a lot
of development there, I did like the queering of those characters
and I thought it very romantic in a very kind of two-dimensional
way that I, you know, I could see myself, I guess, as a lesbian
being like, this is really cute.
I love it.
My problem with Bill was the fact that she was a black woman who
was subjected to a lot of violence and trauma, that other pretty
white Jenna Coleman's, God bless them, were not subjugated to too
much throughout the series.
And I think that just really bothered me, especially her getting
shot.
That was a really big thing.
But I did like the queering of Bill and Heather slash alien goop
lady.
I thought that was cute.
Gwyneth Paltrow.
I have to say that one of the things that Moffat does is torture
his regular characters, and I think that part of the problem is
that there's a sort of I'm colourblind approach to what Moffat
does or what happens to black characters in Moffat's era, which is
not good enough.
Do you know what I mean?
Which is it's a problem.
Yeah, it's more like, I'd be okay if that was universal, but there
are certain things I think you should avoid with people of colour
in terms of violence, in the context of fiction, and one of those
things is anything too close to the real world or that's a
pervasive problem.
And just, you know, shooting the shooting a black character.
I think maybe that maybe resonates with me more as an American
who's just like one of the gross ills of our society is just how
many black people get shot on a daily basis by the police in
America.
But seeing that to Bill.
That was the 1st thing I thought of.
And it was really upsetting.
It just like the whole wide shot with the whole other stomach.
I was like, this is not okay.
But that's later days.
Let's talk about, let's talk about Day of the Moon.
It's very interesting because, like, throughout the whole episode
Stephen leads you on a path to think that Canton's just going out
with a black woman, not a man, and that just seems, that just
seems to be thrown in at the end that, oh, no, it's not a woman
it's actually a man.
So he says he wants to get married and that's why he got kicked
out of the FBI and then someone, Amy perhaps says it's not a crime
is it?
And he says, yes, it is.
And so that's a hint, okay?
beforehand.
And then, of course, and and you know, like our default is to
assume that characters are heterosexual, that's what people do.
They just assume that unless told otherwise characters are
heterosexual.
I get asked questions by people on the phone about my wife. from
time to time.
And so there's a hint that he's queer, you know, before the show
ends.
And I love the fact that Nixon guesses wrong, but doesn't guess
wrong.
Guesses that the problem is that he wants to marry someone black
and then talks about I'm a bit more liberal than you know, people
give me credit for.
You know, like it's actually sort of quite a good moment and then
suddenly, no, that's a bridge too far in 1969.
So I think it's a well constructed gag and, you know, like I'm
prepared to give it a pass.
And I think I'm prepared to see Stephen Moffatt actually growing
and responding to criticism in that area, I think.
He won't get it right for a while though.
Speaking of, like, Canton, I think it's really great that he gets
to film the silence for what becomes such a pivotal moment in this
particular episode with the landing on the moon and the using of
that footage, but the fact that the silence has been here and
influence humans for 1000s of years, is quite, um, I don't know
it's sort of like I sat there going, 1st time through going, oh
really?
Like, you know, suddenly you're reinventing the wheel by putting
them into the history of the show, but it's actually, again, it's
a very Stephen Moffatt thing to do, and it's, it's rather
brilliant, I think, in retrospect.
I would have been more okay with that if the payoff, because we
don't really know who the silence are until the end of or the
middle of this season.
And for me, that almost felt like sort of a, maybe something that
was in the original draft that didn't get edited out because we
ultimately find out that they're a religious order whose whole
like, you know, modus operada is trying to kill the doctor to
prevent him from, you know, reigniting the time war, and I won't
get too much into that because it's coming up later on.
But that really undercut the silence for me as a terrifying
villain.
So yeah, for who they built them up to be, it did not pay off.
I thought they were going to be some real, like kind of like love
crafting, super sinister.
Maybe we wouldn't really fully comprehend their motives.
Like, what they represented as these really terrifying, bizarre.
Like, again, love crafty and villains, in my eyes, was not what it
ended up being, which I can see why the stylist would want to
invest that much time on the back end of the planet's history to
screw with the doctor, but it just the payoff wasn't there for me
in regards to them.
It undercut them as villains.
But you see, I don't care a bad man.
Which is fine.
What I think is super, super interesting and fantastic is, again
Moffat rewriting the history of the show.
I mean, I don't know how the silence kind of influenced human
evolution unless it was like on Scaroff and the Fendal's day off
you know what I mean?
Or Azal, frankly.
Like all of the other monsters that have influenced human
evolution.
And so what he does is he rewrites human history, it's not the
silence doing it.
It's Moffat rewrites human history and inserts these terrifying
monsters into it so that they're around all the time.
They're like the Vasht Narada.
They're on your planet and they will get you when you're not
looking and they're responsible for all of the scary things that
happen.
I think later, in time of the doctor, when we discover that
they're a scary religious order or whatever, that that is just
essentially Moffat going, here's a hilarious gag about this thing
that I never got round to resolving and don't really care about.
And so my feeling is that the silence as a religious order is a
joke.
Do you know what I mean?
And I don't think it affects the way that we end up kind of
feeling about them here.
And the story needs them to be.
As you said last week, Maxwell.
This kind of terrifying presence.
They're always there.
They're always in the background.
They're the source of our paranoia.
They're the source of the paranoia in the US in 1969.
But Moffat always tries to make his monsters a threat to you, the
audience, which is why he's not interested in sort of lizard
people invading the home counties or anything like that.
The monster always has to be under your bed, whether it's a face
spider or an angel or the bastard or the silence.
That's what he tries to do.
And so, and and also, for the purposes of the resolution, he needs
to make them absolutely terrifying and omnipresent and utterly
utterly evil so that it's all right to shoot them in the face when
you encounter them.
They really capitalise on America's propensity for violence in the
end, don't they?
Did you forget where you were?
Bang, bang.
But there's more of them in America.
So hence the more gun violence, I think.
They're concentrated in America.
So you all have guns so that you can shoot the silence whenever
you see them. such a grim fight.
I think I'm with Maxwell on this, in that, I think for these 2
partters, like they're built up to be these scary things and we've
been waiting for them to arrive, but I actually do think what
happens down the track with the religious order and how they're
sort of subordinate to other things makes them less scarier later
on, which for me does influence my feelings about them now.
But it doesn't stop the fact that I think the whole use of the
moon landing and you should kill us all on site, like the whole
use of that editing of that sequence and as that happens, is
nothing short of, I think, wonderful television.
Yes, absolutely.
Oh, and using the footage from NASA command, where, of course, you
know, those cameras were on these poor, tired workers, and so
they're blinking and whatever, and they use the footage of them
kind of blinking as the kind of like, oh, we've got a subliminal
message now.
Using that real footage in that context was so clever.
And God bless the archivist who had to just wait for like a shift
through hours of footage of like Houston or whatever, waiting for
some poor, tired guy who's probably been chain smoking all day and
drinking liquid lunches to just like blink or like, you know, just
kind of do this for a 2nd just to get that clip.
Like, come on, that's great.
Use real history. beautiful.
Having worked on an archive documentary series last year, it is
exactly that.
It is trawling through newsreels to find just the right emotion on
Hitler's face to support the voiceover.
With the you should kill us all on site.
And the retrospect of knowing, you know, what the silence are.
I look at that line now and I think, is that the silence gloating
or is that the silence ashamed?
Because we find out that they are a splinter group.
Of the church?
They're not the church itself.
They are a splinter group. and is this the silence saying, yeah
you should kill us all on site.
Ha, ha, ha.
Or is it someone saying, please kill us.
We, you know, we are being used.
It's, it's ambiguous and look, I think there is more in the text
to support them being villainous than that reading I just gave, but
it is layered and built upon because the other thing I sort of
look at is, why else would the silence say that?
Like, okay, it could be gloating and we think it may have enjoyed
killing Joy last week and it may enjoy what it's doing, or does
its voice just sound scary?
So anything it says is scary.
Or did Marfa just need that line?
Yeah, it's like sometimes people in Moffat scripts say things that
you need to move the plot forward like when the doctor says, no
one says saved, you say safe.
It's like, no, no, lots of people say saved in the context of 20
people saved.
Steve, I'm going to go with you.
Okay.
But that's tenuous.
But yeah, it's it is an amazing moment of triumph.
But it also brings to me the thing that makes me slightly
uncomfortable about this season, which is the doctor waltzes in
and does his usual thing of saying, right, I'm giving you a chance
to get off this planet before I enact my plan.
But then when he enacts the plan.
He says I was never going to give you a chance to escape.
It really shocked me in 2011 when I saw that because I'm like, well
no hold on.
As ranty and toothy as David Tennant ever got, it was always, I'm
giving you a chance.
You know, he even walked up to Dalek Khan at the end of the
evolution of the Daleks and said, look, let's just work together
with the last 2 survivors.
You know, he said that to a dalek, but now...
The doctor is merciless.
And it's, I don't think it's a mistake.
I think it's a conscious choice and I think it's an interesting
dramatic choice, but it makes me feel uncomfortable as a long-term
viewer.
I really like it.
I have to say.
I like the fact that Moffat's doctors are a problem, that they're
not sort of unambiguously good guys.
And, you know, the doctor's refusal to have a gun himself, but his
admission that he finds River with a gun actually kind of hot
which, fair enough, she absolutely is like incredible.
But, but also the fact that he has constructed these aliens to be
the sort of thing that it's right for you to kill.
And why is it right to kill them because they are oppressing us?
We are in their thrall.
They are controlling all of humanity, and it's right to rise up
against them and overthrow them.
And remember, in Planet of the Oud, how excited I was by the Oud
you know, killing all of those people, including the lovely girl
from marketing.
It's the same here.
I'm absolutely on board. with all of us killing the silence.
They deserve it and it's right to do so.
Including River in that sequence where she's just, you know, firing
left, right and centre round the, you know.
So good.
It is very liberating.
It's very cathartic.
After 2 episodes of feeling completely powerless under these
beings, which says such a testament to the writing and the
depiction and everything.
And then just the N word, we just kick their asses.
Oh, it's so such a great release.
And it's setting up another mystery.
Like it is, or it's setting up another piece of the puzzle because
that only happens.
Like she admits that she can probably kill 8 or 9 of them before
you know, they overpower her or whatever.
But she's lying.
And after the doctor and Amy go into the TARDIS.
And Rory comes out for some reason to kind of tell it to get
inside or something like that.
But the doctor doesn't see this.
And it's the river is in fact a highly trained assassin thing.
And she tells Rory not to tell the doctor about it.
So it's another part of the puzzle.
It's another indication that she is the person in the astronaut
suit that's been trained to assassinate, you know.
Something I wanted to point out about this scene is the doctor
does when he sees the inside of the silent spaceship say, this is
very Aikman Road.
So he does link it and say, oh, I wonder how that got there.
And there is a fan theory that this silence ship ends up on the
top of Craig's house.
Yeah. after this episode.
So there is a silence somewhere who takes it and tries to escape
and Crashlands in 2010.
It's interesting that they're bringing that character back for the
forthcoming season, is what I've read.
Just interested to see if they do anything more with him.
Um, I sense that we're coming sort of to a close here.
Uh, but I just want to say, I would love to see another episode
with the silence in the same way that uh, time of the angels was
to blink.
I would love to see an equivalent for this two-parter that
elevates them more because we haven't really seen them since the
um, you know, aside from one or 2 gags, we've seen, you know, after
the the ending of this season, we don't really see them again.
And, you know, now that theoretically they're no longer aligned
with the church, what are they like on their own as a species, what
are their motives?
You know, because, you know, in many ways, we saw their potential
to be so scary and omnipresent and mess with human history for
1000s of 1000 years, but that was what they were kind of a
subordinate, or, you know, they had a cause that was connected to
some other humans who just had a grudge against the doctor.
I love to see how terrifying they are when they have their own
agenda.
So the doctor obviously returns River to her cell, and they have
some very interesting words.
I mean, she kisses him and says, like, you're acting like we've
never done that before, and, you know, there's a 1st time for
everything in a last.
Stephen's dialogue is always just so infuriating me fun like, you
know, he doesn't tell you anything, but he tells you everything.
I think too, is the different reactions to that.
The doctor is like a bit, like he sort of likes it, but is a bit
confused and a little bit silly, like his reaction is a sort of
comedy Matt Smith reaction.
And it's a real moment of heartbreak for River.
Like it's it's amazingly well played by her because she's already
explained the implications of this in the last episode.
So this is the last time that River gets to kiss the doctor
goodbye, that she now knows that she's reaching the endpoint of
her relationship with him.
And I think that's, that is amazingly well played.
And there is something, you know, Moffat.
Mistreets his character so poorly that sometimes it's hard to.
It's hard to empathise with them.
Like, why aren't they punching the doctor in the face more often?
And he's so clever and so self-consciously clever, but sometimes
he's able to just create, despite that context, these incredibly
emotional scenes.
And I think that's a really great one.
Alex Kingston is amazing. and um, yeah.
Involvement in this era of the show cannot be underestimated. in
the least.
Yeah, yeah.
No, she's a huge, huge important part of it and a superb part of
it.
But also this scene, of course, is yet another thing for this
season is that people know there's going to be some sort of answer
coming soon.
You know, we've got eye patch lady now, we've got this.
And then, you know, in a moment, we're going to have, Is Amy
pregnant, what's going on with that, you know?
Um, this 2 parter is just setting up all these questions, which
you know, Stephen is now putting front and centre visually in
dialogue, um, to make sure that fans and new people stay invested
in the whole season.
In fact, he's repeating a trope from last year, isn't he?
Remember that he takes Amy on board, not just because she's lovely
or whatever, but because there's the crack in her wall that he
wants to investigate.
And we see him in the 11th hour, when she says, why are you
inviting me on board, he says, oh, I'm lonely, but he's looking at
that screen, which has a picture of the crack on it.
And I think he later admits that to her.
And here, we're having a conversation.
He's looking at a picture on the screen and there's her quantum
pregnancy kind of happening.
And he chooses not to tell her about it.
And again, there's something really kind of upsetting about that
choice.
It seems like a bad choice and it makes the doctor seem like a bad
person.
And I think...
But it kind of is sometimes.
Yeah.
Oh, I think it's deliberate.
I think it's absolutely deliberate.
Yeah.
Yeah, I like when the doctor gets a little bit sinister and like
we're not always on their side.
I think we're also reminded too, that they're keeping a secret
from him in that scene as well.
And so that's another thing, yet another thing.
So the pregnancy.
Madame Cavarian, you know, Rivers an assassin, all of these things
that are still left completely up in the air at the end of this.
And your brain is trying to sort of come up with answers to these
things and is on an overload.
Like, I mean, I'm thinking, how can Amy be pregnant and not
pregnant, you know?
And that's just in my head constantly and reinforced in upcoming
episodes as well?
And and so, you know, we've got all of that going on.
And then it cuts to a scene.
On the street with with the little girl.
So are we in New York 6 months later or something like that?
Yep.
Manhattan.
We near the Chrysler Building.
Right, right.
And, and again, that's very short, and it is like kind of
upsetting, and I think we'll come back to this later in the season
when more of the arc has been filled in for us.
Um, but the little girl uh, says she's dying and then
regenerates.
And again, we've been introduced to regeneration last episode.
My brain was just going on overload.
I was just stunned that this little girl was regenerating.
Oh my goodness, there's another timeline.
Is it Ramana?
Is it the Rani?
Who is it?
I thought it might be like the doctor's kid in some capacity.
Um, I never thought it was going to be who it ends up being.
The thing is, is that dialogue in the TARDIS where the doctor and
Amy are discussing the pregnancy and she says that she didn't want
to tell Rory in case the baby had a time head and guess what?
It has a tight head.
On the topic of casting, Sidney Wade is playing the young girl.
Sidney Wade and Alex Kingston had just been seen on BBC One in the
show Marchlands playing mother and daughter.
The girl is British.
Yes.
That's so interesting they decide.
Well, I guess maybe that was to throw them off the track by giving
her an American accent, and I guess it makes sense because she was
raised in America, but that was an interesting choice.
And I think I think also giving her an American accent is a way to
distance her.
Yeah.
Throwing up from anyone we know because, you know, no one in the
regular cast of the show has an American accent, so she can't be
related to them is how your brain automatically works.
Yeah, yeah, but I don't know if that casting was deliberate.
The book I read it in just states it as a matter of fact.
I think Alex may have suggested that.
That's entirely possible, you know?
So Alex was informed of the season art.
She was told this is where we're going.
Matt Smith wasn't.
But Matt, Karen, and Arthur knew that Alex knew and were
constantly bugging her on set and she wouldn't tell them. for
her.
Because Spoilers.
Moffat's whole rationale is, from River's perspective, this is the
last story of the season.
She's been through all of it already.
So of course she's going to know everything.
That still does my head in.
Every time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Look, look, yeah, I remember I was the same as you, Todd.
I was, ah, it's Romani, it's Susa.
Chancellor of Flavia.
I'm the one with the time head.
Well, it's episode 2 of the season, but weirdly enough, it's also
part 2 of a two-part story, and that can only mean picks of the
week.
Todd.
I'm going to go for a Netflix series.
There's only one season of this.
It's called AJ and the Queen.
RuPaul.
Um, who we all know and love stars in it.
Um, The young girl in it is extremely annoying, but he's he's
great and uh, It's very heartwarming. 10 episodes, go and watch
it.
AJ and the Queen.
I thought you were going to tell us to watch, you know, the deadly
assassin or something.
Yeah.
It's a much better choice.
Yes.
Brandon?
I am going to choose something from Big Finish.
I have recently relistened to, which is the Blake 7 Crossfire
miniseries.
It is the final appearance of the late Jacqueline Pierce in the
range.
It is one of the early appearances of Yasmin Bannerman as Dana, and
we own her.
She was Jade in the end of the world, and it also brings in Hugh
Fraser as the previous president of the Federation and has a
fabulous civil war plot arc set in between the last 2 episodes of
series C.
So that is Blake 7 crossfire.
Well, you've done an audio and a TV show, so I guess I'll
recommend a video game.
Shin Magami Tensei Nocturne has just been rereleased in HD on the
Switch and other platforms, and it's basically like Pokemon for
adults because it's, instead of Pokemon, it's creatures and gods
and goddesses from mythology, like from all over the world.
And it takes place in a post-apocalyptic environment.
It's very tough.
It's very challenging, but just aesthetically, and narratively
it's really rich, and they are coming out with a sequel on the
Switch this November, the 5th iteration of Shinagami Tensei.
So it's a good, which is, I think, going to be a pretty big game, a
pretty big release.
So this would be a good time to cut your teeth if you're a gamer
and you like RPGs and you like a bit of a challenge.
Good, good setting, pretty spooky, definitely check it out.
All right.
Well, I'm going to recommend going outside.
It's a new thing that I've been sort of doing lately going for
very, very long walks with the dogs by the water and basically
enjoying the fresh air and it is literally a thing that I haven't
remembered to do for a very long time.
And as a result of very circumstances, it's a thing that I'm still
able to do, and I can absolutely recommend it to all of you out
there at home.
And while you're on your walk, if you see a little girl with
glowing hands.
Don't worry, she'll be fine.
Just fine.
Well, dear listener, that's all we have time for this week.
We'll be back next week for a jolly old roggering from Henry Avery
in the Curse of the Black Spot.
In the meantime, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts
and you can keep up with us at flights or 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 InterTara.
Maxwell, where can people find you online?
You can find me at Relic, the Lost Treasure podcast, which is a
podcast I do on, as the title would imply, Lost Treasures and
Artefacts.
You could just Google, relic the Lost Treasure podcast.
You'll come up with Stitcher links, Apple podcasts, whatever
they're calling it these days.
They seem to change it every 5 minutes, Spotify.
Um, I also do streaming when we're not in a pandemic.
Um, at uh, Twitch slash Treasurehunter Maxwell and just follow me
on Twitter.
I like to talk to people and that's atlaw treasure pod.
Until next time, remember that if the doctor asks you to tape all
the conversations you have in your office, it's probably best to
stop doing that sometime soon after the end of the episode.
Thank you very much for listening and good night.
Good night.
See you soon Cheers.
That was Flight Through Entirety, starring Todd Beelby, Nathan
Bottomley, Maxwell, Coviello, and Brendan Jones.
Theme arrangement by Cameron Lamb.
This episode, Gaslight Girl Boss Ginger was recorded on the 1st of
August 2021 and released on the 19th of September.
Now that you've listened to this episode, head on over to
maximumpowerpodcast.com and subscribe to the new Blake 7 podcast
featuring many of the hosts and guests from FDE and now available
in all good podcatchers everywhere.
Doing it now. doing it now.
Doing it now.
Okay, I'm clearly audible.
All good?
Yep.
Okay, I'm going into do not disturb mode.
Not on my phone just generally.
Um, okay.
So let's start with the, let's start with the um, the plug.
From the end of for the end of episode 216.
So, Maxwell, where can people find you?