Episode 270
Scottish Reasons
Sunday 8 October 2023
This week, a bone Vervoid joins in the fun as we travel back in time to Wales in 2015 pretending to be Scotland in 1980 pretending to be somewhere in the Soviet Union. And it’s hard to say which time paradox is the most annoying, the bootstrap one or the predestination one. Thank goodness Frazer Gregory is here to help us sort it all out — it’s Before the Flood.
Notes and links
Like Steven B in our episode on Flatline, Frazer uses the Christopher Nolan film The Prestige (2006) as a way of understanding what Toby Whithouse is doing by setting up the bootstrap paradox at the start of this episode — it’s a magic trick.
Likewise, Frazer compares this story’s unresolved conclusion with the way that the Season 9 episode of The Simpsons Das Bus throws its ending away with a hilarious voiceover from James Earl Jones.
El Sandifer refers to the Fisher King as a Bone Vervoid in her TARDIS Eruditorum essay on this story. Bone Vervoid. Warning: she is considerably less kind to these two episodes than we have been.
Of course, A Long Tradition of Doctor Who Monsters That in Some Way Resemble Human Genitalia is the title of Flight Through Entirety Episode 168, and it refers to Human Dalek Sec in Evolution of the Daleks. It is currently the record-holder as the longest title of any episode of Flight Through Entirety.
We refer to some of Peter Serafinowicz’s earlier work, including his role as the voice of Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace (1999), In 2002, he appeared in Look Around You, a spoof of educational science programmes for schoolchildren. And in 2007, he appeared in his own sketch comedy show on BBC Two, The Peter Serafinowicz Show, which introduced his character Brian Butterfield, who he continues to play on tour this year. The Butterfield Diet Plan is a must see.
Picks of the week
James
Fans of weird time paradoxes will also enjoy Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987), which, through a time paradox of its own, was the inspiration for Adams’s own Doctor Who stories, City of Death (1979) and Shada (1979, but in a nearby parallel universe).
Peter
Fans of weird time paradoxes will also enjoy the Sex in the City sequel TV series And Just Like That.
Nathan
Nathan picks the podcast Strong Songs, where enthusiastic and talented musician Kirk Hamilton analyses the music that he loves, in order to discover what it is that makes it great. Highly recommended.
Frazer
Like Nathan two weeks ago, Frazer recommends that you watch the wonderful new Star Trek series Strange New Worlds, which finished its second series earlier this year.
Follow us
Nathan is on ex-Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood,and Frazer is @FelixFrazer. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on X at @FTEpodcast.
We’re also on Facebook, Mastodon, and Bluesky, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll turn up at your place in the middle of the night with a Fender Stratocaster to explain the paradox of entailment.
And more
Jodie into Terror was our flashcast on every episode of the Whittaker era, recorded just a couple of days after the broadcast of the episode. Bondfinger is our James Bond commentary podcast, which also covers some of our favourite spy-fi TV shows of the sixties and seventies.
Maximum Power is a podcast about Blakes 7, a co-production with the Trap One Podcast. It’s on hiatus right now, but it will be returning with our coverage of Series C some time next month, we think.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watch a credible and highly-regarded episode of The Original Series with a monster in it that makes that hydra thing in Time-Flight look horrifyingly realistic.