Episode 268
A Very Busy Barnaby Edwards
Sunday 24 September 2023
This week, the Doctor chats with Davros, Missy chats with Clara, and the four of us wonder if those chats are fun enough to sustain forty-five minutes of television. All while actually having quite a fun chat ourselves. It’s The Witch’s Familiar.
Notes and links
Quite a few mentions are made of the 60-minute LP of Genesis of the Daleks. This was released in 1979, more than 10 years before the first VHS release, so for much of our childhood it was the only Doctor Who story we could actually own (apart from the novelisations). Naturally, we basically know it off by heart.
The convention in Sydney that Nathan talks about took place in November 2015. In fact, it was where we all met Steven B for the first time. Here’s an account of the event published at the time in The Guardian.
The last time Moffat wrote for both the Daleks and the Master, the Master was played by Jonathan Pryce, and it was a story that also featured sewers full of faeces. That story was The Curse of Fatal Death, which we’ve linked to many times before and which you should all re-watch immediately.
Richard sees thematic parallels between this story and the 1961 film Judgement at Nuremberg, featuring Judy Garland, obviously, a lot of very accomplished actors and mad-uncle-of-the-podcast William Shatner. He also draws a parallel between the conversations here between the Doctor and Davros and the ones between Patrick McGoohan and Leo McKern in the final episodes of The Prisoner.
Sir Ken Adam (1921–2016) was the designer on many of the early James Bond films, from Dr. No in 1962 to Moonraker in 1979. He’s particularly famous for his sets’ modernist design and angled ceilings.
Picks of the week
Simon
Simon recommends a quiet and thoughtful science fiction film After Yang (2021), in which a family has to come to terms with the death of their AI assistant Yang. Here’s the review from The Guardian.
Todd
Todd recommends the Australian competitive reality TV show Hunted, in which 24 people are dropped in Melbourne and have to avoid being captured by various former police officers and cybersecurity experts. Here’s a review from the Sydney Morning Herald.
Richard
Richard urges us to watch (or re-watch) the last two episodes of The Prisoner — Once Upon a Time and Fall Out, both of which star Leo McKern as Number Two.
Nathan
Nathan recommends the second series of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which is available to stream on Paramount+. He makes particular mention (a) of the musical episode and (b) of our podcast Untitled Star Trek Project, which has already covered three episodes of the series.
Follow us
Nathan is on the-Dalek-sewer-formerly-known-as-Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, Richard is @RichardLStone,and Simon is @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
We’re also on Facebook and Mastodon, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll trick you into sitting in this comfortable chair over here.
And more
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November. Stay tuned for more details: there’s only a few weeks to go now.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Stay tuned for news about the release of our coverage of Series C: the wheels are in motion.
There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we are horrified by all the heterosexual romance on display in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Price.