Hello, dear listener, and welcome back to Flights or Entirety, the
only Doctor Who podcast made entirely of ghosts and edited and
distributed by more ghosts.
I'm Nathan.
I'm Todd.
I'm Peter, and I'm Tanya Miller's agent excitedly tapping on my
phone that obviously she's got the next role because here she is
as Madame Maxwell.
She's so posh, she's Tanya.
Well, it took us one week to get here, but for the doctor, it's
been 4.5000000 years.
So I guess there's a right to be just a little bit cross.
Still, he's always been universally recognised as a mature and
responsible adult, and so the high council almost certainly have
nothing at all to worry about.
Let's see how it all goes down in hell bent.
This was the biggest mystery of the entire season, because I've
said over and over again, I didn't remember series 9 very well, and
I had no idea what I thought of Hellbent at all.
And while I've gone back and seen heaven sent a lot of times.
I haven't gone back to this one.
And so I've now watched it a few times in preparation for this, and
I have to say, Todd, that I really liked it.
Really, Nathan?
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm not as enamoured.
You think that it goes to pieces after last week?
No, it goes to pieces.
I think.
Well, can I just be honest?
I'm utterly exhausted.
Yes.
I'm utterly exhausted, everyone.
Last time I was here, I was talking about the zygons.
I find the 2nd part of that Saigon 2 parter quite harrowing and
triggering, especially events at the beginning of the episode
which just, with the plane exploding, I find that really tough.
And then we go into sleep no more.
And you have all that camera work, that handheld camera work, which
you know, the older you get when you go to amusement parks and you
go and rides to just go in the one circle and your equilibrium is
gone for the day.
That's how I feel with the 1st 20 minutes of that episode.
And for the rest of the day, I feel quite sick because I'm walking
around, sort of sleep no more gave you motion sickness.
I mean, I don't mind the episode, but I'm saying, yeah, then face
the raven.
Well, let's be honest.
By halfway through, you just sort of know where it's going and the
last 10 minutes are just harrowing in the extreme, especially all
the stuff with Clara.
And then last week is utterly superb.
But I'm just exhausted by the end of it.
I'm just grateful that we're in a diner, we're in a barn and we're
just staying put for a while.
Yeah.
I feel like you've been punching through a diamond wall for the
last few episodes.
Probably, but not to say some of this episodes are extraordinary.
I think this is good.
But we get to a point where Clara comes back into it and I feel
like I've got a hangover again and we're going over stuff, but
we'll talk about that.
Good, but I don't think it's fantastic.
So she has already left about 4 or 5 times at this and has died 3
times.
Storory model of companion.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And so finally getting rid of her is actually a big task.
We were going to say it was a blessing.
I heard relief.
Well, there'll be another year and then I'll be feeling a bit of
relief, I think.
I have to agree with you, Todd.
This is the thing that we identified, particularly in the 1st 2
parter, where all of the characters were people who had been in
Doctor Who before and whom we had known for like a really long
time.
And the Moffat model is kind of the girl who weighted model where
the important elements of the story happen to our regular
characters rather than one off guest characters.
And here, in this 2 parter, I think I counted 2 or 3 one off guest
characters.
Is that quite likeable?
Shall we call him a chancellery guard?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Garston or something?
I can't remember his name, but he's very cool.
There's the little...
He's the Hill Red or the Andred.
Yeah, he is.
Yeah, only more attractive.
And then we have the little boy who the doctor meets at the end of
heaven's sent.
Oh, we have the woman in the barn who has about 3 lines and then
pokes her head in and doesn't have any lines for see.
She's great. didn't mean her.
She's a little bit too minor.
I meant the guy who wakes the doctor up, the American guy in
Nevada who says that Clara told me that you'd be confused or
upset.
Wouldn't have been amazing if that had been the guy from the
Impossible Astronaut 2 parter.
Canton.
That would have been lovely.
See, that old woman, I kind of think, is either Leila or...
Or it's the woman, either that or it's the woman from the
caretaker pilot episode of Voyager, who keeps offering people corn
or something.
Just come and have some pecan pie.
Oh, whatever, corn on the cob.
Well, I wanted it to be Erna Stubbs.
I am going to say that it is a character who's been on the show
before.
I think it's the woman in listen who we overtalk hearing.
I think it's Engen after a particularly good regeneration grow
up.
Yeah, could be too.
Could be.
The listen thing sounds right.
Because you hear he's nursemaid.
Yeah, talking about him joining the army and staff.
On that point, can I say that I actually split my opinion of this
episode between the 2 of you and it's because of this, longtime
listeners and podcasters will know that I have a problem with the
time lords and how they're depicted in modern Doctor Who.
Because Time Lords are essentially boring.
Yes.
In the old series, before Bob Holmes came along, they are just
Deus X Macina.
Bob Holmes hits on a way of making them interesting by pulling
back the cloak or going under the bonnet and seeing that there are
actually a bunch of power players and doddering old men and I
don't know whatever Runsable was.
And it's a mystery to me why Russell and Stephen, who are great
writers, do not return to that model to make Gallifrey and Time
Lords interesting.
So here, even though I like this episode, I think it's pretty good
and pretty entertaining on its own merits, it feels like a missed
opportunity because it should have been something interesting
looking at time lord society and the way that the doctor interacts
with them.
It needed, in invasion of time, that Broussa and Andred, and Rodan
and people like that.
It needed those people, Castellan Kelner.
Whereas we don't get anything like that.
And so the time lords are boring.
I think the time lords have always reflected what the media is
showing the power play to be at the time.
And Bob Holmes was, I would suggest at the time, looking at Robert
Graves actually looking at Dame Derek Jacoby and Sir Sian Phillips
in I Claudius.
And there was a nice little nod to that, because just like the
doctor is always somehow contemporaneous, so are the time lords
whereas now, we've had all of the Blair thing, we've had all of
the Gulf War business, and now we've got the falling apart of
establishments, and there is a lot of toothiness, there's a lot of
hawkishness in, and I'm talking about the British government.
I mean, that's a perfectly valid model as well.
Yeah, and the militarisation and weaponisation of politics is, I
think, what we're seeing here and also that they like a bit of
flash and bang because we have a large television market and this
is what they like, just to be a bit obvious.
But how has that not been made interesting?
How are these characters not that interesting?
You've got great people playing them.
Ken Bones is fantastic and has the most fantastic name ever.
Yeah.
And obviously we will get to Dame Tanya Miller, but how were the
characters not interesting?
How are we not interested in the dynamics between these
characters?
How do they not have their own agendas?
They're just there as dressing for the story of the doctor, which
is kind of the story of Moffatt's Doctor Who.
I mean, you've got Ohela and you've got, who is the most
interesting character?
And she's beautifully played, obviously.
Well, she has to do with glower under a tea tail.
Everyone shakes.
I mean, she is actually the closest to one of those characters.
So I was talking about in Stanford or 2 and that she comes in and
she comments on what's going on rather than being a driving force
in the scene.
Yeah, the most BBC classics of everyone, yeah.
Yes.
I don't even mean that mockingly, if I was looking back at I
Claudius, she's definitely doing the, the eye line to the side of
the camera.
You can imagine her and Castellan spandrel in the corner, sort of
having a drink and commenting on what was going on.
Hissing.
What do you think about Donald Sumter?
his triumphant return to Doctor Who as Rassalon.
I think never marry for looks because he was so hot in the
Wheeland space.
Is that what he was in last?
Yeah, he was in the C double as well, but he's really cute as
Enrico Cassali in Wheeling Space. and we all prune up in the end.
Yeah.
I thought you were comparing him to Timothy Dalton. who apparently
was asked back for this and wasn't available.
Yeah.
I mean, he's he was great.
I did really like him.
And I, I mean, I like that version of the Time Lords in that
suddenly they're actually much worse than the dialects.
They're the worst thing that the doctor has ever faced and it's
what you were saying about Russell's relationship with Tony Blair
you know, who's exciting when Tony Blair comes in and them there's
the Iraq war.
So he kills him, has him fall out of a cupboard.
Yeah, yeah.
Every year he kills. the Prime Minister of Great Britain.
So here you have that model of the Time Lords.
The time lords are evil because they've imprisoned the doctor.
And then you have this sort of amazing thing where we get this
shaggy dog story at the beginning where the doctor just sits there
and eats soup until he manages to overthrow the entire Timelord
government and he yeats Donald Sumter into the sun from the little
top of the sort of Gallifrean city.
I think that is incredible.
I think that whole secret.
I thought of Utah, when the attractive young head of the
chancellery card, without the robes, says put down your weapons
and accompany me to the Capitol, and he puts down the soup spoon
that he's been trying to eat soup with.
And, of course, Robot of Sherwood establishes that a spoon in the
doctor's hand can be a deadly weapon.
So Wester McCoy proof that.
I think it's really interesting we're talking about the timewards
because I was thinking about this earlier and Russell brought back
Wrestleon.
Yeah.
And when all of the end of time happened and that all disappeared
and then we had the day at the doctor, and Moffat concentrated on
the 2nd city, Arcadia, which is where Ken Bones was.
Is that, am I correct or not?
I get the impression that they're actually in the same building
that they are in the main city.
Yeah, because I think Ken Bones in Day of the Doctor says
something about Wrestleon sort of scheming upstairs.
Like he may even use the word upstairs.
But it's definitely happening at the same time but in different
rooms, isn't it?
Yes that's right.
And I just kind of didn't really know what had happened to sort of
wrestle on considering how out of control he was back in the end
of time and with things sort of being rewritten by Stephen.
I just kind of thought, well, has he redeemed himself and gotten
rid of the Daleks and he's no longer in charge, you know?
I didn't expect him to be suddenly back in a new incarnation.
And then sort of been basically dethrown and said, get off my
planet and that's the end of him.
It's just interesting seeing how the timelines are dealt with
here.
I mean, obviously, having Ken Bones back is great with that bit of
continuity and having Oheila in there as well.
But they could be anybody.
I mean, he talks about getting rid of the high council, who we
really don't see much of it.
They're just nameless people.
It's just like both Russell and Stephen don't really want to deal
with anybody else other than perhaps the big name wrestle on and
everybody else is just, it's a problem with the time lords.
That's where I'm trying to go with it.
It's like you've hit your diamond wall again where you're not
really following the story of the time lords.
I don't think Moffatt's interested in the time lords any more than
he's interested in the Daleks.
You shouldn't use them.
Well, but I think what he's using is that kind of weird
iconography of the time lords, you know, making the time lords
weird and mystical in a way that Russell sort of gestures at
whenever he describes the time war, it's something that you can't
picture.
He uses strange language to describe what's going on and stuff.
It's very odd.
Here we have the Matrix being a computer made out of ghosts, you
know, and the just everything sort of at the bottom of the city is
kind of weird and eldritch and mythical.
Like the underclass.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, isn't this what I was saying on the end of time?
Where if you're going to use the time lord?
you have to make them interesting.
What Russell said when he came back is we don't want people in
robes thespian at each other.
And that's exactly what the time lords are. in every Russell story
and every Moffat story where they appeared. to the sliders.
The shifting gallery of retired British thespians.
I really wanted it.
I really wanted Capaldi to take a pot shot at one of those.
Or like Clara to play frogger between...
I also wanted Clara to marry that chancellory guard at the end.
Yeah, that's awesome.
Wow.
I've decided to stay here, doctor.
I like the fact that we're at the barn and everything's coming
back to the barn and we just snowed things down a bit and you get
some beautiful shots like from outside of the landscape and all
that.
And I like that 1st 20 minutes.
I mean, yes, it's maybe it is perfunctory in terms of dealing with
the time wards, but we have finally found Gallifrey, and it
appears that the confession dials are all that you need in order
to get back to your home planet, like this is another confusing
thing for me, like this is mentioned early on, like it's the last
will and testament, but then we get zapped into the last will and
testament via a teleport and then we're in there and we just have
to let ourselves out of it and we're suddenly home. like we've
been searching for Gallifrey.
Am I totally confused or not?
teleported in?
Can you be teleported out?
But why have like Stephen set up this last will and testament, but
then it's not really that?
Can every time, Lord, wherever they are, just do this, then get
home?
Do you know what I mean?
Like, I'm just confused.
I'm sorry.
For heaven sent to work.
The doctor needs to be able to tell how much time has passed just
by looking at the stars.
And so it says that the teleport that's brought him to the
mysterious Clockwork Castle hasn't transported him in time and has
only taken him less than a light year away.
And that's just so that we can have those scenes where the doctor
says nearly a 1000000000 years, more than a 1000000000 years, you
know, and so on.
But that doesn't explain how on the other end of the Asbantium
wall is Galifray, and he's not going to explain that, there is an
explanation for what confession dials are, like they're to give
time lords an opportunity to think through their lives and make
their peace with themselves before they die.
But I think that he's, yeah, I think.
I thought it was the conscious appendices of the Matrix.
I thought that it was in a way an a physical addendum or a key.
I mean, look, you know, it's Stephen Moffatt, so it can be
whatever you want. he's he does play fast and loose with us, I
would say, he's children of time, does.
And I'm really with Todd on this one too.
I'm not sure where Peter is or you are.
I love that I have to think, but I also like to have a result to
that thinking.
I like to be able to see that I have solved a puzzle rather than
just fallen into a swamp of sticky, icy, whatever this is.
You always want to think that you've cracked the code.
They don't want the writer to have been like, it can be whatever
you want.
I don't want that.
I do want the clues Moffat normally does do that, but that is
something that he has left unanswered.
How did we get to gala phrase for me?
coming from. what I'm getting from what Todd's saying.
Yes, that's what I'm saying.
Like, you know, you're left up to yourself to sort of come to a
conclusion that you're satisfied with, but sometimes I do want
more concrete answers than what is given there. which is not to
say that it's a bad thing, but it's, you know, something for me
that's, that just sits with me going, well, yeah, okay, but we've
also got other, you know, who's the hybrid?
Is it, is it half human, half Galifrain, a nod to the TV movie?
Is it 2 people?
Is it half mire, half human?
What is it?
You know?
And so again, you don't get, I don't think, a clear answer on
that.
No, I think we'll get to that.
I think we will get to that because I think it is super
interesting, and that final line, which I always forget the final
line of heaven sent, where it says, the hybrid is me.
Um, and...
And everyone's waiting for Grace 1999. to run in in a ballground.
And this story where he heads off into the TARDIS, that beautiful
TARDIS.
Oh my god.
My favourite of the reboot.
It looks amazing.
And the novels.
At the end of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the
the, the, the, Yes.
Did you have a Debbie Wattling moment?
Look at all these knobs.
No, Todd was walking along saying, who was that terrible woman?
What you're saying is it's part of the cumulative effect of not
quite following along with storage season being bombarded with
things.
The fact that we don't get answers to this is maybe just one step
too far, where at the end you slightly throw up your hands and say
I needed more than that.
You know where he's going with this, don't you?
Stephen Moffat is a literary science fiction fan and he reads a
lot.
Now, in the last around the 5 to 10 years around this story, which
is now, what, 11, 12 years ago.
The con...
We've talked about, I know, we've talked about this before with
Spanish or the Latin style of magic realism in writing.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the, you know, the Nobel Prize winner
Jorge Louis Borges, who pick of the week.
The thing of a concept within a concept, within a concept and
you're left to solve it, basically.
But it's a whole style of speculative fiction.
China Mabel does it, you know, in the city and the city throws a
lot of those.
It's very much the now of this period, way of writing SF.
And he's challenging us and saying, especially this thing with a
hybrid as well.
What do you feel it is, dear reader?
I think as well that Moffatt's instinct isn't just to give you bad
answers because he doesn't think that they're satisfying.
Yes.
See, you know, the beginning of Sherlock, the final series of
Sherlock, where what we get is various reenactments of
possibilities about how Sherlock could have survived, you know
plummeting off the thing.
British detective writing.
I mean, a lot of them do it, yeah.
I think that we land pretty on it's the doctor and Clara.
I tend to think that me is getting it right.
No, I agree with you, like because she talks about Missy putting
them together.
Yeah.
And the hybrid is both of them as opposed to my human, dalek, time
Lord, time Lord, half human, like any of those combinations.
But it's interesting that at the beginning of the episode, the
president wants to know the answer to what is the hybrid.
And the 1st time we've heard about the hybrid is the beginning of
this season because it's suddenly an old time lord myth or
something like that.
So it's all just introduced in this season to be solved in this
season.
It's like saying, well, you're the timeless child.
Yeah.
I think he's taking the piss out of Paul McGain's one and only
trip in the dark.
Oh, definitely.
There is that moment where you're supposed to think that he's half
human.
Doesn't me say to him, how come you spend so much time on earth?
It's cheaper there, dear. are already built.
It's the kind of thing that Ross used to talk about in interviews
where his starting point for something would be that he and Phil
Collinson had a fan discussion.
We were hooting and then he'd just like go off on a tangent like
that. gorgeous So the hybrid thing, I think, is deliberately given
lots of possible meanings, but I do think it resolves into Clara
and the doctor, which is why we have to go to such incredible
lengths to break them up, why they need to be stopped.
Just for the audience's sake.
Which is why me has called me just to add some fun to that.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
She is incredibly good in this episode, I think.
She is much in this episode.
I didn't think she was good in the woman who lived, but I think
she is good here.
She is, and I love her Priscilla Presley hair.
Yeah, it's bad, isn't it?
exactly what it is.
I've been thinking about that because I was going, what hair is
it?
And I kept thinking it's Danny Minogue from Home and Away when she
played Amen, and then I realised, no, that's styled, that's
actually styled on Priscilla Presley's hair.
Like, so that's fair, yeah.
Wow.
Sorry, it's all about the hair.
Have you got it?
Power behind the throne.
But no, she's great here and it's great that, you know, she's...
Yes, I know.
But the character's tying up so much to do with the missy plot, all
these conclusions.
Stephen is concluding we've found Gallifrey.
Clara's going, me's done.
Missy's sort of done in terms of her plot.
Everything is being tied up.
You almost get a sense of like he's ready to leave.
Like, oh, yes, absolutely.
In next in the Christmas special, we're tying up the final loose
end of River Song and then he's going to head over to somebody
new.
I just get that feeling.
Oh, absolutely that.
Was that ever part of the scheme?
Oh, that was the...
I did not know this.
And so heaven sent is him saying, here's what I can do.
And he sets himself a goal of writing a thing with Jessica Poldi
as the only actor and with no timey whiminess.
Everything that happens in heaven sent happens in chronological
order.
Gorgeous organic plotting.
Have we ever had, well, not since deadly assassin?
So I think Blink is like this, but it's sort of slightly
different.
I think Russell's closest analogue would be midnight.
You know, again, because it has formal constraints, it's all set
in one room with a small group of characters.
So he's setting himself a task there.
And Moffins...
So Moffatt is doing this, I think, to show on the way out what
he's capable of doing, and what Rachel Talalay is capable of doing
what Murray can do.
Also, what have I got left that I haven't done so much?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Last hurrah.
I mean, Rachel is amazing.
This is cinematic.
Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But going back to what you're saying also, Nathan.
Like he's also with the whole cloisters thing, we suddenly get
flashes of a Dalek cyberman.
Yeah, weeping angels, yes. all of his...
It's greatest kids.
There should have been a Varden in there if it's people invading
Gallifrey.
That would have been amazing.
Maybe the Scottish Martin.
But why not?
So, you know, this is huge.
This is what he's trying to do and he expects not to come back.
Chibnell's not ready, and so he agrees in order to keep the show
going.
He agrees to do a 10th series.
But he's exhausted.
One of the things, I can't remember whether I said this last week
but El Sandafar thinks that we should think something fairly
obvious about a story where a grey-haired Scotsman keeps doing the
same thing over and over and over again for years and years and
years until he wishes he was dead, you know?
Finally breaks through.
That's right And so it's also Moffat too.
You know, he's definitely his farewell run at the show.
And I do think that the 2 episodes together are exhausting, but
they're also properly epic, I think.
Part of me wishes that, I mean, I know it doesn't work in story
terms, that like the Pandoraca opens in the Big Bang.
It had been the other way round where you'd had the big flashy
Gallifrey stuff 1st and then the confession dial stuff where you
just bring the focus all the way down to just the doctor at the
end would have been quite nice.
I know it doesn't work for the story's telling, but yeah, you'd
have to tell a different story.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Can we talk a little bit about the framing device?
So, we're in Nevada. and the doctor turns up at the same cafe that
he was in in the Impossible Astronaut, although it's on the other
side of the road now, and Clara is there, and he's playing Clara's
theme, that beautiful theme, you know, on the on the electric
guitar, and it's the usual Moffatt thing with those kinds of
framing devices, where at the halfway point we discover something
about how that narrative works, which we didn't know before that
changes the entire thing, or it doesn't happen here, but it has
happened earlier in the season in sleep no more, which is gators
where the framing device, the story interferes with itself.
So the way the story is being told actually affects the story
itself.
So we have Erasmus and in another room, creating this episode
while events in the episode are going on.
Here, I think that when we hear that the doctor plans to wipe
Clara's memory, we realise, I think that, like, Clara can't
recognise the doctor, right?
And I think that we're supposed to think that Clara has lost her
memory of the doctor and that the doctor has come to visit her to
say goodbye.
And we're primed to think that because it's happened in Doctor Who
before.
Yeah.
And then we discover at the end, know that it's the doctor who
can't recognise Clara and because she reversed the Polaris.
Yeah, because she reversed the polarity and he's lost his memory
of her.
And then we reinterpret that entire diner as the TARDIS that we
escaped in.
And presumably, because it was on the other side of the road in
the impossible astronaut, it was Clara's TARDIS in the impossible
astronaut the whole time.
All the time.
You've just blown my mind.
Because I'm just struggling to keep up with you with all of this.
So we have the whole framing device of the diner.
Yep.
Up until when he goes in to get her out of the face the raven.
Does it stop then and just come back at the end?
or am I wrong?
No, no, it does happen quite a bit.
Remember, there's the bit where she says, do all of them turn up
with guns or something and she says, wow, you really do love a
cliffhanger to him, like she interrupts, she interrupts it.
You're a bit aracaneta, right?
They are really great.
And in fact, I think that they affect the way the story is being
told at the beginning because it's a little bit too much that they
look like the Wild West, you know, all of the, are they Shaboogans
who cares?
They are whatever they are, but the people on Gallifrey all look
like they're from the, you know, Wild West in the...
Oh, I noticed him.
Yeah.
But because the story is a shaggy dog story that the doctor's
telling.
He's telling the story about how he turned up on Gallifrey and
they just kept sending people and he kept refusing to speak to
them until finally he manages without saying anything to force
Donald Sumter to get off his planet.
How I wish it hadn't been Donald Sumter if he just had wrestle on
from the 5 doctors in the sky.
The Wizard of Oz.
I know.
So all of that stuff is great.
The, the, the way the framing story affects how we see the story.
We're never seeing the story.
We're hearing Capoldi's version of the story.
Okay.
Sorry, I'm just, I'm just totally, and that is magic confused at
this point in time.
Because does that stop around the extraction chamber time and then
just come back into play at the end or not?
No, no, it keeps going all the way through.
It does keep going all the way through.
But there's a point where we realise that he's lost his memory.
That he's the one who's lost his memory.
Because we're quite late on.
Because when he's in the extraction chamber, he asks for something
to wipe a human's memory, doesn't it?
So Clara.
And we go, ah, that's why Clara can't remember him.
But Clara versus the polarity later on.
It's kind of funny because like in the previous season when she
went to get all of those keys, you think he had the memory patch
you know, something and so sort of reversed a bit, like she gets
the upper hand as opposed to him getting an upper hand in that
case.
We get to that point we're suddenly getting the extraction chamber
and he goes and gets her out of face the raven.
And it's at that point that I begin to go, oh, no, we're going
over all of this dialogue again.
And I'm sort of like really quite exhausted from the 1st time
round. you know, we have to have these conversations.
And not to say that they are brilliant.
I mean, there's some wonderful stuff down in the cloisters with
her and him and she's got tears in her eyes and stuff like that
and and just the whole when she's talking to the time lords and
it's all just a ruse.
That's so good.
Like they're such good, but there's also this...
What did you whisper to him?
They'll be looking at me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It just, I can tell you just one of the things that he said, don't
worry.
But also they'll be looking at me.
Yeah.
As in me.
But, you know, then you're going into the heart and esque tanas
which is just phenomenal, but they keep on having, you know, is
her heart beat back and all that, just, I just find it. not saying
it's not good.
I think it is good.
I found those things a little bit heartbreaking, actually, where
they keep referring to my heartbeat's not back and you just get
this sense of this ominous sense.
It's not going to work out.
It really is a crash, isn't it?
It really is a moment, a beat in the drama in the drum when you
just feel that, ah, this is not the day of sex mechanism.
Yeah, yeah.
She is not redeemed and saved.
This is merely a pause and it's very poignant.
For me, I think it's the same for Todd, maybe, but this is much
darker and sadder than I remembered this episode being at the time
because at the time I was so overwhelmed with all the goings on.
Yeah, yeah.
But I shared with Todd I was also exhausted But I think I think
dealing with all these other questions at the same time.
I've struggled a bit with his episode.
There's moments where I don't remember, like, obviously, as well
because I'm still trying to process everything else.
But I still come back to that moment where she's got tears in her
eyes and she asks him why.
And he said, I had a duty of care and just the inflections in his
voice at that point.
And just, I mean, Peter Capaldi is just phenomenal.
And Jenna Calman, and I just think are just a phenomenal threat
this.
Moffatt describes that scene as the best scene in heaven sent
because what it does is it gets us to go back and reevaluate what
the doctor was doing.
And the doctor says that he knew all along where he was and what
was going on, and that he deliberately waited 4.5000000 years.
He went the long way round in order to end up in Galafray so he
could get to the extraction chamber and so that he could get her
back.
And so all of that's done for her benefit.
And just her response to that is so amazing.
Doesn't she just say something like, like get over it?
You know, like everyone loses people. everyone loses people.
She is uniquely qualified to talk about that in the recent
seasons.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's right.
She herself underwent this sort of incredible loss.
And he just can't get over it.
And he does this thing, this huge operatic thing that we found so
moving and impressive last week and it just turns out to be some
dumb grandiose man pain thing that he did.
And she's horrified at the lengths that he went to and how he
abased and harmed himself so much just to get her back.
We do leave her behind with one heartbeat left.
We leave her behind with Maisie Williams, but in a way, everyone
that the doctor leaves behind will then grow old and die.
It happens to literally everyone.
We all have to face the raven.
Stay tuned for Tales of the TARDS.
Oh, doctor, I've missed you so much. heaps of them are dead
though.
But on screen, then not.
So I think that scene is incredible and I agree with you, Todd.
I think both of them do an incredible job of it.
It's really quite amazing.
There's just so many moments.
Like, you know, when she says that he's stealing a TARDIS and
running away and but her at the end, like saying to me, you know
she's going the long way round.
Yeah, you know.
I do then think about things like, you know, her school and her
family back on earth.
Will they ever see her again on Maretta?
Well, no, I do.
I do think like she could actually keep popping in and saying
she's travelling and that sort of thing until her grandmother
passes away rather than the horrible Perry situation where one day
she's on a boat and then she's a missing person, you know?
So that sort of plays into my mind a little bit.
Like, you know, we're never going to see me and Clara again, even
though they're out there in their flying cafe, you know.
The flying big finish box set.
I mean, there's that...
That final shot where the police box goes in one direction and the
diner goes in the other direction.
The attraction, ridiculousness of Doctor Who. amazing.
But it's also, so I guess we have to follow the police box then.
Well, I'll do that anyway.
But do you know what I mean?
It's like, it is, like, she's him.
The whole thing, she has been being punished for being him, but
her reward is she gets to be him.
Oh, that we'd had a little bit of dialogue saying that she wasn't
me's companion.
Me was her compat.
Oh, I definitely think that's the case though.
That's how it seems to be.
Yeah, she's operating the TARDIS.
I mean she knows what she's doing.
She steals a TARDIS.
She's a complex space-time event.
She goes off to explore the universe.
There's an end.
There will be an end, but, you know, the doctor has an end as well
everyone does.
Now, I love the fact that she says, go afraid they're on a long
way round.
But then also then, those concluding moments where, you know, in
earlier in the episodes, she's talking about his coat and she
liked the velvet one.
And then he goes back into the TARDIS.
And that, just those phenomenal moments with the lights going off
and, you know, run you clever boy on the chalkboard and the new
Sonic and his coat and all that, just you just feel like a
weight's been lifted and we're ready to start.
Yeah, I hate to say it because I've railed against this kind of
thing before, but maybe we don't need the definitive answers that
we were seeking because there's such an emotional payoff season.
Yeah, and emotions don't give you straight linear answers.
And life doesn't give us linear directions either.
I'm getting where you're wanting to go with this.
I mean, the long way around.
Yeah, yeah, you know, just like this podcast.
Thank you.
No, this season, the long way round.
I think, Todd, you got it.
Todd's conversation, this episode has allowed me to come to this
point realising where we, that our expectations.
We're not going to be fulfilled, but we got something maybe more
interesting.
We followed you through it to the realisation.
This season's never.
People don't sort of go and rave about it or talk about it as much
as others that I don't even want to face the raving.
The gift door, the title.
But that's the nature of this season, I think, you know, and I
think it's something that you just can't revisit, like, pop into
episodes.
You've got to really encompass the whole thing, which is an
experience, you know?
Look, I mean, it's heavy and it's hard going.
And last night I watched episodes 11 and 12, one after the other
and I was a bit exhausted by it.
And you do kind of wonder what it had to offer to the general
public?
Yeah, yeah. was thinking that too.
What were the ratings?
Not great.
I can't imagine.
It would be very hard to follow if you, even if as a fan.
I mean, I found myself kind of wanting the adipose back, really, at
some point. because that's the Doctor Who that I really love.
I'm glad the Doctor Who can do this and I'm glad that when a very
talented writer gets hold of it, he does something brilliant and
epic and weird with it and emotional and kind of harrowing.
But I don't want Doctor Who to be like this all the time.
It got over 6 million, like 6 million.
Okay.
Which is like in terms of the season context, like that's, you
know, it's holding between mid-highs to low sixes and it got an
audience appreciation of 82, right?
Which is not bad.
Aliens of London level. which is more than last week, which only
got an AI of 80.
But what do the general public know?
But the statistical noise.
Yeah.
But the audience, the percentage audience is like the mid-20s, like
25, 26%, whereas, and I've talked about this before, we've been
eroding that away slowly, but surely, like, you know, for some
time from the low 30s.
So, yeah.
I mean, I think it probably goes back to the way that the time
lords are presented, maybe the general public is viewing Doctor
Who now through that same prism of when you tune into Doctor Who
you get people in rogues thesping at each other because you
actually do get that in the story for all of its cleverness and
all of its emotional wallop.
And it's incomprehensible outside of its context.
And maybe that's okay for the season finale, but I think if you
tuned into doomsday.
You would have a pretty clear idea what was going on, even if you
hadn't seen the previous episode.
I just want to make clear you're talking about the series 2 finale
Doomsday and not the multimedia platform event Doomsday.
No, I haven't seen that.
That's for other people to enjoy.
In inverted comments.
I think it's interesting that the doctor is willing to punch and
shoot a time law in order to generate, which is which is pretty
extreme, you know, and then to get the surprise of Tanya Miller
suddenly standing up and saying that, you know, it's glad that
she's a woman again, like, and it's extraordinary.
What about that, right?
So Moffat doesn't ever cast a female doctor and I'm kind of a bit
happy about that because I think Moffat is very feminist in all
sorts of ways, but he is probably not the right person to
introduce a female doctor.
We would have had a very gun girl.
You know how he writes for women.
Yeah, it would have been it would have been a Clara.
Yeah.
He's actually already written the female doctor.
That's exactly right.
So he introduces a companion who shows you that a female doctor
works.
He has a companion who has stolen it artist from Gallifrey and is
off to see the universe, who does all the doctorary things all the
way back from flatline, all the way back from death in heaven.
She's been like the doctor and she works, I think, for that
reason.
But that regeneration isn't just a white man regenerating into a
black woman.
It's also a character, Ken Bones character.
It turns out, is his 10th regeneration.
He's number 11.
He has always been a woman before that and now he's turned back
into a woman.
And so it turns out that sometimes people have a series of
regenerations where they're the same sex, the same gender, but
just one time it becomes they gender flip, and that's a thing that
happens.
He gets a gag out of it.
You know, I don't know how you cope with all the ego.
But after the gender flip, they turn into a person of colour.
Well, so that's, yeah, I mean, you know, that's a kind of thing
that is Moffat, making it canonically possible for all of the
people who care about that sort of thing who don't realise that
it's just whoever we're picking to be the doctor becomes the
doctor and you can all shut up.
But yeah, you know, like he makes it canonical.
It a big deal.
She is so young in it. amazing.
I mean, how can you tell if she's young, but she's just so
agelessly ethereally beautiful?
stunningly beautiful always, but I was just struck by how young
she is. where we love her from.
Mostly is years and years.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, she was magnificent in that.
It did strike me as something different.
It did strike me very much as something different.
Just with her presence.
She's been so good.
She was so cheerful.
It was so lovely to see how kind of happy she was to be a woman
again and it was sort of awesome.
The extraction chamber.
Always gets me thinking about, what if other doctors decided to
well, not decided to go there.
Like, we never went, gets back thinking of what...
Imagine Adric meets Clara in a tale of the TARDIS, and Clara
explains that the doctor went to great lengths, you know, waited a
1000000000 years and smashed through a wall.
Taterina extracted new trampoline balance.
Russell has already written this.
It's like Adric.
He didn't even like...
Yeah that's right.
Adrick wouldn't want us to mourn.
He'd want us to go to the Great Exhibition.
The moment just before stylistic Dodo's brain turns to mush.
It was space syphilis.
Oh sorry.
I think that that's beautifully directed.
And I think, you know, there's the sound.
The doctor says that there's a sound.
This is so moffty.
This is he could do these things in his sleep.
There's a sound that you've trained yourself not to hear, but it's
the sound of your heartbeat.
And the thing that sounds weird to you is that you can't hear it.
And the way that's brought across in the direction is just that
very high pitch ringing in your ears that you get in the
extraction chamber.
And also the way the colours separate as well.
It's like a TV effect.
I love that.
Yeah.
The chroma split.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's really good because it just reminds you that we're on TV.
We're just going into a previous episode to bring Clara out.
It's a slightly up-to-date CGI version of the effect and greatest
show in the galaxy when the doctor is going through the tunnel to
the gods.
It's got that same kind of, as you say, Richard, where the chrome
has been split away.
It's really good.
Good old Quantil.
We miss it, don't we?
We do.
I think we can all agree that no matter what you think of this
episode, it is better than Arc of Infinity.
No, that is true.
That's true, despite the presence of the time lords in it.
It's funny.
I'm actually really liking it more than what I came in too.
It's a real-time Todd experience.
Just one point more.
I'll just bump it up from 8 to a nine.
I think it is, like, I think it's properly clever, and I think the
2 of them are properly epic.
I think that it absolutely epitomises the problems that we had
with this season in that it's really introspective and it's all
about our little small cast of characters that we've seen before
and that we've known for a while.
I guess knowing that it's Moffat thinking that he's on his way out
then it becomes a little bit more like journeys end where most of
the characters are, you know, former regulars and stuff.
And so it's forgivable, it's understandable, and it's done a
little bit more deftly than it is, I think, probably in journey's
end.
But, you know, his right to not attempt it the following year, I
think.
Which when we get to it is amazing.
I do think it's one of those Mothat season enders, which always
receive a bit of a backlash, not because they're not very good.
Often they are very good, where it's just not quite what the
audience was expecting.
And so, yeah, people react against that.
And we're challenged in the way that you're challenged when you
read to put your phone away and to not listen to your loving
loving family.
Can television achieve that?
I would like to know, Todd, maybe, you know, were there any BAFTA
nominations for last week's episode?
Because it was really...
I may be entirely wrong on this, but I think it might have been
nominated for a Saturn award.
Is that all?
God, not even a Hugo.
I mean, it's so beautifully shot.
It's, I wanted to talk about Albert Commuse's myth of Sisyphus, but
I've fortunately the audience has been spared that.
We already talked we already talked about Dodo Sisyphus.
Well, that's all the time we have for this week.
We'll be back next week to take one last longing look over the
last 12 weeks in our Series 9 retrospective.
Woo hoo.
I'm tired already.
In the meantime, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts
and you can keep up with us on our website, flight throughentirety
com, where you'll find all our social media links, as well as
links to our other podcasts, including Startling Barbara Bain
Maximum Power, and Untitled Star Trek Project.
Until next time, eat all the pairs you want.
Don't let him bully you.
Thank you very much for listening and good night.
See you soon good night But they're squelchy.
That was Flight Through Entirety, starring Todd Bealby, Nathan
Bottomley, Peter Griffiths, and Richard Stone.
Theme arrangement by Cameron Lamb.
This episode, the shooting gallery of retired British thespians
was recorded on the 12th of November 2023 and released on the 3rd
of December.
So, we've launched our new Doctor Who Flashcast, The Second Great
and Bountiful Human Empire, where we record our half baked
reactions to each new episode of Doctor Who just after it airs.
The Starbeast is out already, and Wild Blue Yonder will be out in
just a day or so.
Check us out at the 2nd great and bountiful Human Empire.com.
Oh, I think Peter looks great in his... my favourite outfit.
My favourite outfit is the long velvet coat.
Yeah.
A nod, both to... and Paul McCann.
I love these kind of petrol blue coat from next season, the one
that he wears in the Lie of Gland.
Is it velvet?
Amazing.
Not the torn one.
The one that looks like Tippy Hedron's pigeons that had a go on.
Don't like that.
It might be a bit to one, actually, yeah.
Don't like that one, but do like, oh, no, it's just gorgeous.
And he's so lean and raw.
He is.
David Bowie of Doctor Who.
He's amazing Only younger looking.
But it's incredible.
Like how in this episode he can be so emotional and yet Scottish.
Yeah, but we've seen a lot of comedy moments throughout the season
he's very, very funny, but here there's less of that.
There's one or two. the odd line.
When he explains the matrix to Clara and she says, so that didn't
hurt, did it?
He said a tiny bit.
And I felt that too.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because it all had that moment.
Interestingly, have to go down to a physical matrix.
Yeah, yeah.
Yes.
But it's a dream.
Of course.
I wasn't sure if that wasn't a part of a dream within a dream or
even if Gullifree itself exists in some article or some node or
point of energy and doesn't have a physical reality anymore and
it's all in a dream scape.
The way the narrative folded around.
It felt like, again, it felt like a bork is...
I mean, are those cloisters meant to be the same kind of under
galleries that we see in the deadly assassin?
Do you know my?
Yes, and you know my favourite bit of that?
They've almost got the same light tubes that they used to use on
Buck Rogers as fuel lines.
So the, all they use in Texas City Station on Journey to where in
Space 1979?
Stairs in deleted scenes from Battlefield.
Yes, that's it.
Lop, lop, lop, lop.
That it.
Shame he didn't have the keeper of the Matrix.
They could have recast him. would have had a field day with that.
Who was it originally?
James.
Oh, no, we need that.
You are.