Episode 288
Honour the Invisible
Sunday 20 October 2024
This week, Brendan, Nathan, Steven B and Johnny Spandrell penetrate the heart of the Vatican, only to discover that behind its dusty and arcane lore lies an eldritch horror that threatens the very idea of existence itself. It’s Extremis.
Notes and links
The most important inspiration here is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), a massively popular and widely-panned thriller about a dark secret that threatens the credibility of the Catholic Church itself (but probably not the one you’re thinking of). Perhaps this review of the book will give you a good sense of its style.
It turns out that the dark secret in The Da Vinci code was originally revealed in 1982 in a best-selling book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (or in the US, more pithily, Holy Blood, Holy Grail). This book was, terrifyingly but unsurprisingly, co-written by our very own Henry Lincoln, co-writer of The Abominable Snowmen, The Web of Fear and The Dominators.
Steven remembers the first Doctor talking about his religious beliefs in a passage from The Empire of Glass (1995) by Andy Lane. Here, in Chapter 6, the Doctor is talking to Galileo. “In short, sir, I am currently an agnostic, and by the time my life draws to its close, and I have travelled from one side of the universe to the other and seen every sight there is to see, I firmly expect to be an atheist. Does that answer your question?”
In a recent episode of The Bjay BJ Game Show, Brendan and Bjay review a game called The Talos Principle, a video game set in a computer simulation which deals with questions of identity and religion.
Nathan has a website called the Randomiser at therandomiser.net, which can help you pick a random Doctor Who story to watch, but which can also (more importantly, perhaps) reassure you that you’re not living in a computer simulation.
The properly randomised Doctor Who podcast which Nathan appeared on is called Pull to Open, with Pete Pachal and Chris Taylor.
As a kind of public service, Steven alerts us to a 2015 article by Charlie Brooker about a group of German researchers created a version of Super Mario World in which Mario was self-aware and emotionally affected by his experiences in the game.
Steven also draws our attention to a branch of philosophy concerned with the possibility that we might all be living in a computer simulation. This 2020 article in Scientific American sums up the state of play.
Johnny refers to Kit Pedler’s original conception of the Cybermen as a race of Star Monks — an idea that El Sandifer runs with in a productive and interesting way in her essay on The Tenth Planet.
Johnny Spandrell takes aim at this story in an entertaining and insightful blog post on Extremis, written in 2018.
Here’s a link to the Character Options Series 10 action figure set, featuring the Doctor, Bill and a heavily made up Missy, for those of you who enjoy that kind of thing.
And finally, here’s Donna Summer singing about this story forty years early in Once Upon a Time….
Follow us
Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.bsky.social and Brendan is at @retrobrendo.bsky.social, while Steven is on X at @steedstylin and Johnny is @JohnnySpandrell. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.
You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll basically just blurt out in your hearing that Santa isn’t real.
And more
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
Just two weeks ago, on Startling Barbara Bain, we faced what is perhaps the most memorable and terrifying episode of Space: 1999 ever with our usual mix of valour and prosecco. It’s Dragon’s Domain.
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 visited a holographic jazz bar in Vegas in 1962 for a surpassingly brilliant episode of Deep Space Nine called His Way.