Episode 272
John Scott Martin in a Zarbi Suit
Sunday 22 October 2023
It’s been a mere 900 years since last week’s episode, and it’s time to check in with Ashildr to see if she’s still the naive and loving young girl she was back in her Viking village days. Or — like the rest of us — has she simply turned into Peter Capaldi’s Doctor? It’s The Woman Who Lived.
Notes and links
Nathan refers to the Blackadder the Third episode Amy and Amiability in which a young woman played by Miranda Richardson disguises herself as a highwayman called the Shadow, who has a serious problem with squirrels. The first scene of this story is very much written by someone who remembers that episode.
In his massive best seller Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell proposes the theory that it takes 10,000 hours to become really proficient at something. If you want to hear two of our favourite podcasters rip Gladwell’s book apart, they do that in an episode of their podcast If Books Could Kill.
Richard mentions the Sydney Theatre Company’s 2020 production of The Picture of Dorian Gray, directed by Kip Williams and starring Eryn Jean Norvill as the only cast member, playing no less than 26 characters. Williams is bringing that production to London’s West End in 2024, starring Succession’s Sarah Snook.
The Doctor Who production crew gave Maisie Williams and Rufus Hound video cameras so that they could record things that took place during the production. One of Rufus’s videos made it onto the Series 9 blu-ray release; three of them can be found on the BBC’s YouTube channel — here, here, and here. Watch them: they’re adorable.
Picks of the week
Todd
Todd recommends the Torchwood episodes also written by Catherine Tregenna, particularly the sad and beautiful Captain Jack Harkness, as well as Meat and Adam (and Out of Time, a brilliant episode that we didn’t mention).
Simon
Simon wants you watch The Beast (2023) starring Léa Seydoux, who played James Bond’s love interest in the two most recent films. It’s a romance set in three different time periods, 1910, 2014 and 2044. It’s due for release some time early next year.
Richard
Richard has headed into Big Finish territory, particularly those stories starring Rufus Hound as the Monk, particularly The Missy Adventures, whose first three box sets also feature Rufus Hound. He also appears with Tim Treloar and Katy Manning in Volume 4 of The Third Doctor Adventures.
Nathan
Nathan’s back on his Star Trek thing again, and this time it’s Star Trek: Lower Decks Series 4, which is nearing its end as we release this episode. You can also catch our coverage of Lower Decks on Untitled Star Trek Project.
Follow us
Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Richard is @RichardLStone, Todd is @toddbeilby,and Simon is @simonmoore72. 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 forget we ever met you and get cross with you when you turn up on our doorstep with flowers and champagne.
And more
We are launching a new commentary podcast on Space:1999 next weekend, so keep an eye out for more details during the week. (The title is, for now, still a closely-guarded secret.)
A couple of our podcasts are finished or on hiatus right now. 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 back! Our podcast about Blakes 7, co-produced with the Trap One podcast, returns today with a pre-Series C episode based on the Big Finish Blakes 7 story Warship, set between Star One and Aftermath. We’ll be back each week to cover each episode of Series C.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week we watched a surprisingly enjoyable episode of Star Trek: Voyager, which gave Janeway and Chatokay some time to pursue a mostly non-cringeworthy romantic relationship.