Narrative Vamping

[00:40]

Hello, dear listener, and welcome back to Flight Through Entirety, the only Doctor Who podcast that remembers how relaxing it was back when the doomsday clock was a whole 3 minutes to midnight.

I'm Nathan.

I'm Brendan.

I'm James.

And I'm Tom.

Well, the monks are finally here, and like all of us, they really just want to be loved.

So let's see if humanity swipes right in the pyramid at the end of the world.

So we're in the middle episode of this trilogy, and I said last week that I thought that the trilogy was quite a good idea, but I can't claim with all honesty that I'm on board with literally all of the episodes.

[01:43]

How do you feel about it, Tom?

Well, I mean, in some ways, this is considering the story that began in oxygen, because we're still dealing with the consequences of the doctor's blindness and that's going to be a huge feature at the end of this episode.

I think my overall feeling about this is that this is serialisation done right.

You can tune into any of these episodes and they tell a complete self-contained story in their own right, whether that story is any good or not is something else we can get into.

But the threads that connect them are more than simply, oh, there's that word again, there is an ongoing narrative here, but it doesn't absolutely require, in fact, one of the weaknesses of extremists, I think, is actually, you didn't need it to set this episode up, because the doctor knows the monks are coming because a sock and great pyramid appears and somebody calls him.

So extremist has quite a lot to render itself moot.

And any rendering moot that hasn't been accomplished by the end of extremists is accomplished by the beginning of this episode.

So, yeah, but there are these narrative threads, like I said, not least of which, I really, remember being at the time, quite shocked, but nevertheless delighted at how big a narrative swing it was to blind the doctor at the end of an episode and then keep him blinded for the next 2 episodes.

[02:59]

I mean, that's strong stuff.

Yeah, I think, you know, like, I think the one thing that comes from extremacy into this episode is the idea that the monks have been able to survey all of human history and so they can find its weak spot.

Now, again, that's probably conveyed sufficiently in dialogue in this episode in any case.

Yeah, and they have a big sort of wibbly blue thing, which people can fondle.

Exactly.

And that's that does the job just as well.

Yeah, yeah.

I did say last week that I thought the idea of like a pre-invasion stage, you know, Android invasion one to 3 on the planet kraal, where we sort of experiment with an invasion.

That's a reasonable thing to steal from.

And then the beginning of the invasion and then the end of the occupation, I think.

That works incredibly well. doesn't it?

Like, as it's very different from a 6 part Doctor Who story.

It really still is 3 stories, but and LinkedIn a satisfying way.

[04:00]

I think Star Trek aspires these days to that kind of serialisation and Doctor Who does it very well here.

Yeah, like I was I was on extremist last week and so I was watching this one with a particular view to how Essential Extremist was. and extremist is kind of referred to as, oh, yes, it's those monks you told me about. and the whole, I do love the conceit at the beginning.

With the previously, it's interspersed with Bill going on a date with Penny now with the very helpful text now written underneath it.

That's great, is it?

Um, and you know, what it what it kind of makes me think of is last week was the episode that some shows do, and Nathan, I know you're going to cringe at this one. like course oblivion in Voyager.

Where it's like, hate that so much.

Yeah.

But it's like, this is our chance to kill everyone off last week in extremists without it affecting the ongoing the ongoing narrative.

But yeah, I think there is sometimes a problem with illusory stories, virtual stories, where you kind of get to the end of it, go, well, what was the point of that?

[05:07]

I still really enjoy extremists.

But yeah, Tom, I see your point about how essential is it when it gives you the monk's backstory and maybe saves about 5 minutes at the top of this one.

I mean, this is not the extremest episode, so we can move off this fairly rapidly, but my review at the time just consisted of a dialogue between the one of the monks and whoever was leading the operation, trying to figure out what had gone wrong and saying things like, yeah, mate, it was fairly easy to defeat the doctor.

I mean, he was blind.

Yeah, yeah, we made we made it blind in the simulation because what the point was to test our invasion plans against the most fearsome adversary we could imagine.

Why did you make him blind?

I mean, to be honest, the whole thing fell apart once everyone read the book that told them they were in a simulation.

The what?

and told everyone, sort of like an Easter egg?

It made it very hard to translate.

Et cetera.

Yes.

Yeah, quite.

My memory of this one, though, is that it was pretty good. and watching it this time, I have to say that I actually enjoyed it a whole lot.

[06:16]

And I think there are some things that it does very well, even though there are things that I think a little bit kind of undercooked.

But I really, really enjoyed the stuff with Erica and Douglas a lot.

I thought that was really fun.

She was really great.

I thought that the location really worked.

Like, you know, you could imagine a laboratory in 1970s, Doctor Who just being in the studio and having, you know, like a few test tubes and a Bunsen burner and stuff.

But this really looked like, you know, like an industrial laboratory.

You know where this industrial laboratory was originally supposed to be?

Global chemicals.

I would have been 1st draft.

And on top of that as well, the compound they were developing was DN8, a follow-up to DN6 from Planet of Giants.

It's sequel.

[07:17]

I love the cutting back and forth between the 2 of them.

And I loved the way it was completely baked into the rest of the story.

I don't know if any of you guys were watching House of the Dragon, but in series 2, we keep cutting back to some like random guys doing their own thing, completely disconnected from the main plot and in episode 7.

I think it is.

It transpires that these are secret dragon riders.

And so it's a bit of a thing because you had to sit through episodes where you're cutting weight of random people and it just feels like chess pieces being moved into position as opposed to the story organically unfurling.

But if you don't do that, then these characters who are going to be important later on, have no backstory.

So it's a bit of a bind.

But here, Moffat and Harness bake the fact that we have to keep cutting away right into the concept.

I think it's incredibly clever and works superbly well.

It's the, we get to see the monk reflected against a screen.

So we know quite early on that the monks are watching them, and that obviously becomes an important element in the resolution of that part of the plot.

[08:27]

And you've got the doctor's monologue, and the doctor, again, is genuinely monologuing in the Tartars.

He's not delivering his speech about the grandfather paradox or whatever at the beginning of before the flood.

He's actually in the Tartars.

Like he is in listen, just talking to himself, and you do get Bill shouting through the door, you know, a bit later on.

And he's talking about death and how our death is, in a sense, from his point of view, preordained, that at one point will go to a place for the last time that we'll ever go to it.

You know, I think perhaps I've watched The Vanquishers for the last time already.

No, we have to do it.

And what I think is really good, is the 2 events that actually cause this to happen.

The 2 inciting events, which is Erica's husband or boyfriend slamming her reading glasses in the door, and then Douglas getting drunk the night before, and he says, oh, you know, there was drinking and there were breakages.

[09:36]

And so both of them are images of glass breaking and we keep cutting back to them to remind us that that it's that that has sort of set this on the path, just this tiny thing, this tiny thing where he can't read the thing.

Erica can't read it because she hasn't got her glasses.

He can't read it properly because he's still hung over and he puts the decimal point in the wrong place, which I only really properly noticed this time round. despite how much effort Netheim puts into making sure that we see those numbers.

I just think all of that stuff is really terrifically good.

I do think Erica's a bit blasé about Douglas having been gunked. she's got a lot on her mind subsequently, but she never seems particularly upset about it.

So like, oh, that's the thing that happened.

He's dead.

I actually quite liked that reaction because and I'm not quite sure why.

I think, you know, the episode doesn't have time for her to be all kind of, you know.

[10:36]

And she does a kind of, oh, Douglas, what have you done?

You know, like there's an affection there.

Do you know what I mean?

Like an airline pilot.

She just got to work the problem.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It would have been.

I mean, it would have been terrible to have her too upset by it.

But yes, yeah.

It is a thing.

Capaldi bursting into tears.

I had a sort of Mandela effect with this because I thought that she barely reacted at all, but she actually gives a really good initial reaction face to Douglas just fizzing out.

Where I think the reaction is a little bit undersold is when the doctor can't get back through the door at the end.

And I think it's because, you know, Capaldi's in the foreground.

And I think Rachel, the actress playing Erica, thinks, oh, I'm probably out of focus.

I won't, you know, go over the top, but it's the literal, have I left the iron on?

Look.

But it's the only thing that could possibly be construed as a criticism of Rachel Denning's performance.

I think Erica is absolutely a wonderful character and really well performed.

[11:44]

In fact, I think that whole plot is done just incredibly well.

You know, it's not just the sort of everyday stuff like the workplace banter is really sort of fairly convincing, isn't it?

You know, the lunch thing when Douglas says, I'm going to go and have a lie under my desk.

I say that 2 or 3 times a week, you know, like all of that stuff, I think, really, really works really well.

I think a potential weakness of Moffat's writing is he's so facile.

So he finds that the jokes come so easily that if he isn't very careful, everything can kind of rise to this super sophisticated sitcom level and it can start to feel a bit synthetic.

And I can almost feel with that Erica Douglas stuff that he's just tamping it down enough.

This could have been a lot physio a lot funnier, but that would throw the whole tone of the episode off, and I can almost feel him just kind of putting a little bit of a lid on the banter and trying to keep it to like a recognisably human level of wit and not something which is too over the top.

[12:45]

And he does, he does, I mean, like maybe this feeds into it, but he is doing rewrites on this story at his mother's deathbed, basically.

Yeah, he's writing, he's doing rewrites in hospital with his mother.

God, I didn't know that.

Like Russell towards the end of his 1st reign.

He's starting to take co-credit here because it's a Peter Harness script, and he's co-writer on it, which I think earlier, he would have probably done as extensive a rewrite and not taken the credit.

He does give himself a number of co-credits in series 8, I think, but mostly I think they're the Danny Clara C.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

James touched on it there.

It was because due to how Moffatt was working on this.

He didn't have time to brief Peter Harness on further changes because there was a lot change from the 1st draft of this.

Erica was originally a truck driver disposing of samples from global chemicals in Ohio.

[13:47]

Yes, that's right.

Kate Lethbridge Stewart was going to be in it, but Gemma Redgrave was making Holby City.

And then Rebecca Front was supposed to be in it in the next draft as her character from the Zigon invasion.

And finally, Osgood's absence, or rather, the 2 Osgood's absences were because they were in America dealing with, quote, a Zigon who's infiltrated the Republican Party.

Unquote.

Oh, I wish that had been...

We did get a Trump record.

There is one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we did get a Trump reference.

We will get another one next week, sort of slightly more oblique one.

Although the president who kills himself disappointingly has black hair in last week's episode.

So they did miss a trick there.

But I doubt that he has quite enough introspection to respond in that way to any kind of news.

He probably would have just done the deal with them straight away.

Yeah, that's right.

But initially also in one of the earlier drafts, the 3 military leaders that killed off by the monks were originally actually, the various leaders or presidents of, I believe, America, obviously, North Korea and Russia.

[15:02]

Right, right, right.

Let's talk about them.

So we're back in Made Up a stand, which is where those events from Peter Harness's previous script took place.

What do we call it?

To Mesestan, which I always think sounds to me to me more like a fungal cream than a country.

It's really funny.

It was kind of, it seemed sort of very Eastern European last time.

It had, you know, it was sort of, you know, had a little church and, you know, like it was sort of a bit softer, the light was a bit softer, but here, we sort of seem to be very much in the Middle East.

So we have these 3 people.

Apparently there's some kind of thing happening day of the Dalek style where the 3 armies are all massing in one place because of some proxy thing and that's a big deal.

And then we have the 3 leaders of the armies or 3 kind of representatives of the armies there.

How do people feel about that aspect of the episode?

Well, it's all a faint, isn't it?

[16:04]

I mean, my potential criticism of this episode, which I don't think actually coalesces into an actual criticism, is that there's a bit of setup at the beginning, and then structurally there's a lot of what I call narrative vamping.

And then eventually we get the resolution.

And I think there are other episodes that feel more like that.

I think for all its virtues, the stolen earth feels a lot like that, with everybody just sort of moving into position, so we have that crackerjack ending, but no one is actually allowed to meet properly until the next episode, everyone has to be narratively kept apart.

I think the 2 things that stop it from feeding like that are this incredible sense of rising tensions throughout that.

Normally if somebody tries a thing and it doesn't work, I think, oh, well, that's because the script was 5 pages too short.

Here, it really does work to ramp up the tension.

And then as we also said, the ongoing, slow moving Rube Goldberg calamity of what Erica and Douglas are doing really helps to make everything else feel like not just using up time.

[17:09]

But like in fact, time is running out.

I don't feel that the 3 armies massing feels terribly sort of tangible.

It feels like a bit of a device, which is fine.

We needed devices to get our stories going.

I mean, it very clearly is a faint.

Like we are meant to think that this is the reason why we're 3 minutes from midnight or 2 minutes from midnight or whatever, but I never really get the sense that there's any particular conflict between those people.

They all seem to turn up sort of and start being very nice to one another and, you know, World War 3, we're against it.

And so they never really seems to be a point at which they're kind of going, we're kind of teetering on the edge here.

Anything could happen.

One of them could go crazy and decide to, you know, attack.

We very, very quickly all friends.

Yeah, there's no general Buckturgison here.

No, that's right.

That's right.

But it's, I mean, I guess the idea is because it is properly a feint, and so we're never made to feel cheated, and in fact, what ends up happening is we get the character beat of the doctor ordering an attack on the pyramid, which it seems that he does because he's scared because he's blind, and he feels the situation is somewhat out of his control, and so they all are involved in that.

[18:31]

And then we get the moment where they think the doctor's not going to be able to stop whatever calamity is happening elsewhere in the world.

And so they all agree again to go in and give their consent to the monks.

As it unfolds, it all feels very smooth.

It doesn't give me that feeling that I was referring to that I got watching mid-season episodes of House of the Dragon of these are just the chess pieces being moved into position.

Everybody does things that seem purposeful and like they are the things that those people would do if they happen not to massively advance the plot.

Well, that's life sometimes.

We all do things in our own lives that don't seem to be advancing the plot.

I think it also foreshadows the doctor's conclusion that there's misdirection going on because I think we as the audience expect the soldiers to want to fight each other.

Instead, we kind of get a replay of that moment in the curse of Fenrick, where the soldiers say war is just a game for politicians.

And, you know, they see very senior soldiers kind of kind of go, we're the ones who actually make the decisions on battlefields and we don't want a battlefield today.

[19:39]

I think that's possibly part of part of the reason behind it because a criticism of the Zygon 2 parter at the time was the sort of very militaristic attitude in parts of it.

And we've discussed very often that Stephen Moffat always reacts against himself.

He's always reinventing.

So this might have been him and Peter Harness both going, okay, well, we'll approach a similar idea from a different angle and see how we go with that.

I have to say my favourite thing about that is remember, you know, calling for an airstrike on the crinoid or something and it usually just involved a bit of stock footage and, you know, we'd cut to the planes going past or whatever.

And here we do order the airstrike and we get fabulous shots, like the monks in the cockpit.

He's just absolutely superb.

You know, because you're not even expecting to see the cockpit at all.

It's kind of like, oh, the cockpit, that's kind of exciting.

And then the monks are there.

Absolutely where they don't belong, like in absolutely the wrong place.

[20:39]

And so the scene of the guys being set free as well is kind of wonderful too.

You know, they're not killed.

They're just sort of transported and so they wander out of the pyramid looking like super bewilted.

It's really very good.

It's really great followed by a bunch of Russian submariners.

That's so funny as well.

And like for a 2nd I thought, oh, you know, we're trying to save money because there's a lot of sort of noise and stuff, you know, of something that's happening off camera and then we come back to like the submarine sticking out of the ground, which is such a great visual gag.

It's awesome.

Something I'd like to mention about those war room scenes for want of a better word.

We've got the doctor's sunglasses, heads up display once again, and that gives stats for everyone.

And I decided to pause it and have a look at some of those stats.

So Bill is 26.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep, fair enough.

Nardol is 237.

I'm looking good The thing is, though, he is looking good for it, he's not just sexy.

[21:44]

The thing is, though, ostensibly he's been with the doctor for the past 1000 years guarding the vault.

No, no, the doctor's only just started guarding the vibes and so he's only been at it for 70 years.

Yes, I was theorising like not all got annoyed occasionally and just took the TARDIS off for like 300 years from doctor's perspective.

Yep, nipped forward.

So we didn't have to wait.

The secretary general is 70.

Yeah.

The Chinese commander, whose name, whose name I'm probably going to mispronounce, uh, Jalian, is 41.

The American commander, um, Rabbit is 56.

However, I think there's a bit of a mistake when we get to Ilya, the Russian commander, who's apparently 70.

The actor is 46.

And he looks younger.

He's a handsome man.

I like the Russian guy.

And I thought maybe they just copy pasted the secretary generals, but the height is different.

The weight is different.

[22:44]

The temperature's different.

So, yeah, I mean, they probably did just copy paste it and not change the age.

He almost certainly just moisturises quite a lot.

He's very well preserved.

Yeah, that's right.

He's from part of Russia that doesn't get a lot of direct sunlight.

That's it. we go.

That's like, it's like the Hitchhiker's Guide, it's the Galaxy on TV, isn't it?

All this little extra in jokes.

Although the heads up display did annoy me in my review of extremists as well.

It was fine.

He wasn't that blind.

He had a heads up display in his sunglasses.

What was he using to look at the heads up display?

Sorry?

Oh, it's Sonic.

You see, I think that, yes, his eyes are damaged, but my guess is that the sound frequencies head cannon are creating the message and setting it to his brain directly without his eyes.

It's like Joe 90s glasses and Richard Forced, Rod, and I to watch all of Joe 90s. so I know all about that.

What I do think is odd is that it does show the outlines of hard surfaces, but not of people.

[23:46]

So I don't quite know how that works.

Maybe the sound goes through people who can say.

It doesn't do organic material, but it does do a It does your table, your conference table.

Maybe the numbers on that combination lock have been recessed.

Exactly.

Do you know it's established quite early on, isn't it?

Where Colonel Brabbit shows him an iPad, I think?

Or maybe maybe it's the Secretary General, shows him an iPad with some kind of sit rep on it and he says, oh, just give it to me in your own words.

So it's established that he can't see the thing on the surfaces, you know, he can't read.

My favourite bit of business around all of the blindness stuff is not all narrated.

It's like, oh, actually.

That's everybody.

Which you can almost certainly see with a heads up display, except that that's really funny.

And I do think too.

You know, they make the right decision to not give him some kind of space thing to not give him a Star Trek communicator.

And so he just talks into one of the wooden buttons on his duffle coat, which I just think is absolutely perfect.

[24:48]

And there's a moment too, where Bill notices that something is wrong with a doctor because he's called for the attack.

And I hadn't watched this for a while and I assumed that that was where the doctor was going to reveal to her, that he was blind and it doesn't end up happening.

But our doll sends Bill to talk to the doctor on the understanding that he's going to say that and he's about to, isn't he?

Yeah, but then the thought gives him the idea that he can blind the monks.

Yes, that's right.

And so he says the word blinded.

He's clearly about to say the word.

It's wandering sort of in his head, but that gives him the idea to do something else.

And so it never ends up happening.

And I thought all of that was like amazingly good because, you know, no one says the doctor's scared or the doctor feels vulnerable or, you know, he's behaving like this because he's blind.

Like we're just kind of left to kind of theorise about that, but everyone is clearly behaving that way.

And I thought that was properly interesting, given how little he gives away about that and how invulnerable he wants to seem.

[25:55]

And I think Capaldi is really, really good here.

He's such a big actor when he wants to be.

And again, there's a slight sense of him tamping his performance down a bit.

And that really works to sell this idea of this slightly more cautious, this slightly underpowered doctor who doesn't have the same kind of blase courage of his convictions that this doctor in particular very often has, just marching in and announcing to everybody what's going to happen, heedless of their emotional state or even sometimes the risks that he's taking.

But here he's much more cautious, much more nervous.

And I just think Capoundi really sells that without, as you say, making it too overt.

It's really good. isn't it?

He is terrific.

We were so lucky to have him.

Yeah, oh absolutely.

Just superb.

That's the other thing.

I think I felt watching this episode again, which was, because, you know, I was, I'd been reviewing every episode on my blog since Matt Smith took over and liking some and not liking some and being delighted some weeks and fulminating at the state of the nation other weeks, but I never felt that the future of the series was in any jeopardy.

[27:03]

Even if there was a run of episodes I didn't like.

I never felt that it was hanging by a thread the way I think anyone watching in the 80s felt because we'd, you know, watching the McCoy era, we'd been through the hiatus and we sort of knew that one more set of bad ratings could be the end and low, eventually it was.

And now with all these rumours circulating about whether Disney are going to re-up that same anxiety as present.

Yeah, yeah.

Something that was in the original draft, uh, which is completely absent.

You know, it's kind of like, yeah, we lose Kate, but we get Brabbit, you know, there are, there are analogous characters to unit in this, but originally the pyramid wasn't just going to land.

There was this amazing image of a young boy called Hassan in to Mizhistan, who one night wakes up, takes a sledgehammer to his wall and starts taking the bricks outside, and then you pull out to reveal all the children in this town are taking bricks outside and building a pyramid.

[28:21]

And then when the pyramid is built, a beam of light appears and Hassan is then the voice of the monks throughout the story.

And it's an interesting idea.

I can see why they got rid of it because it's a lot of work to set that up when the pre-titles of there's a pyramid that wasn't here yesterday does all that for you.

And very well, you know, a 5000 year old pyramid that wasn't here yesterday is perfect, very Doctor Who.

I wonder whether the pyramids age is a hangover from an earlier version of the script as well, because initially the monks were time controlling, time sensitive beings, they weren't just, you know, aliens with really great predictive computer modelling, they were able to actually foresee various multiversal futures.

And so it was actually them nudging things this way and that to try and make things happen.

As if they'd resurrected a pyramid from 5000 years ago and put it there now.

[29:25]

I said last week that I thought that the monks, if they work in extremists, it's because they are like the Catholic Church, only older and weirder and more terrifying.

It's more realistic.

And more realistic.

But do you know what I mean?

Like an ancient dead way of knowing.

And certainly next week when we look at what they do when they take over the world, and even here, where their job is to say, the world is going to end, and if you love us and do what we say, we will save you from it.

And they're called monks for a reason.

I think that the pyramid is actually not a great idea.

And next week, they call it the cathedral, and I just wish that it had been a weird, intricate Gothic looking thing.

[30:27]

Yeah, yeah, like something odd and strange, but absolutely Gothic.

And going into the pyramid.

It's so cheap.

That set is so terrible.

They have so absolutely run out of money.

And so there's no atmosphere to it either.

And I think if you're kind of selling the idea that they're these dead ancient monsters that belong in crypts and things, I think, you know, having a very clean spaceship made out of plywood is not the best way of going about selling that.

I also guess they're mummies and monks.

Yes, I suppose.

Mummies, pyramids.

Yeah.

There's a long tradition of putting together things that don't match.

Sure, monks don't belong in pyramids, but yetis with webs don't belong in the London Underground either, and that's interwork fine.

Sure.

I just thought that if you want to sell what they are.

Like it just seemed, it seemed like the show is nearly there, but not quite, or it doesn't quite fully want to commit to the monks are evil kind of religious leaders or something.

[31:31]

Like they don't properly want to sell that.

And so, you know, they tone it down by still making it ancient and weird, but not ancient and weird in a sort of mediaeval Catholicism kind of way.

I wonder if they'd get on with Commander Riker.

They are very keen on consent.

Yes, they are making consent.

This is our intimacy coordinator.

But I mean, that's the thing, isn't it?

Like consent is love.

Like love is slavery and that's what they're saying.

They don't want someone to calculate the odds.

They don't want someone to lie to them.

They really, really want to be loved.

And when it opens next week, we have, you know, the film strip, the information film, explaining to you how you should love the monks and why.

So all of that, I think, is super interesting, that is different from why or how aliens normally take over the earth.

And the rules are made very clear, I think, throughout the episode, but it does tie in, I think, thematically to that idea of what the monks represent.

[32:37]

And it is to that amazing ending where averting the biological calamity and restoring the doctor's site is the worst thing that could possibly happen.

And that's some really elegant plotting from Peter Harness and Stephen Moffatt there.

That's just gorgeous.

What I think is amazing, though, is that we avert the calamity and the monks are defeated.

Like they're looking at their watch as they're kind of going, oh no, like we've got it horribly wrong.

This is really bad.

You know, we're all sort of terribly triumphant.

And the only reason is it's that sort of door thing, emergency protocol, so Erica can't do anything.

Nah, doll's been infected by the thing, so he can't turn the camera on and see from the Tartars, you know, he's lying on the throat of the Tartars.

Like all of these dumb little things happen.

The sort of dumb little things that the doctor mentions in his opening monologue all happen that make the doctor have to die that make Bill agree, that make her consent.

[33:38]

And I think that's so brilliantly done.

Like it's just in the manner of about 30 seconds where we deal with sort of possible ways we could have dealt with it and there's all a silly little dumb reason why it doesn't work.

And in a normal episode that's over, isn't it?

Like at the normal episode, he gets out and suddenly it doesn't happen.

And I think that that's quite shocking and I can't remember if we knew going in, whether it was a monk trilogy or not.

I don't remember.

I didn't.

People talk all the time about the banality of evil.

This is like the banality of tragedy.

And I absolutely love that.

That's amazing.

It's really good And the only reason it has to happen is because she loves him and wants to save him because he's stuck.

He's already saved the day.

She knows he's already saved.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so the only reason she does it is because he's going to die.

And so she dooms the entire world just to save her friend.

It's brilliant, isn't it?

Because we have the faint, the original faint is World War 3 in made up a stand.

[34:41]

And then we get the biological catastrophe and that doesn't happen either.

And then we get this.

It's so good.

And I think that that's why this is better than I, than I remember it being.

I think this is a solidly good Doctor Who episode, even if I think the, you know, some of the war stuff seems a little bit undercooked, but it's clear why.

And I assume everyone on this call has seen or read the Andromeda strain?

No.

Not for years.

Yes, the original 70s film.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because the gag at the end of that, spoilers for the Andromeda strain.

It's a really weird book and film, actually, especially weird film because it is so much about the problem of how to kill this virus.

And so little about the personalities of anybody involved.

But the thing you take at the end and starts eating rubber gaskets and so can escape from the lab and that triggers the automatic detonation of the lab, but they figure out that this will just cause the virus to be spread over a wide area and mutate further.

[35:45]

So they have to shut it down.

And so then there's this race against time bit at the end.

But there's a line, I end up just sort of quoting in everyday situations.

I think might be from the novel, not from the movie, where when they finally managed to turn the key and stop it, and he collapses because he's been shot by these anaesthetic dance, when he wakes up, he says, did I get there in time?

and they say, yeah, 30 seconds left, hardly even exciting.

There's a real twilight zone quality to this entire episode, really, because you've got all this wordplay around what consent means and what pure consent is that ends up being love is consent, love is slavery.

You've got, um, the fact that the doctor can save the world, but, you know, then he's stopped by a door, which is a thing that Russell T. Davies said back in 2005.

You don't want a door to stop your story.

Yes.

With the sonic screwdriver being introduced, you know.

But something it really reminds me of, and going back to what you were saying, James, about the initial conception of the monks being sort of time sensitives.

[36:53]

First of all, one, this is another time I'm going to say this, over the course of the new series, there's been 2 times I've said, why couldn't it be Farrell's?

But the fact it happens in consecutive seasons is kind of significant.

But two, they also remind me of the Traelfamadorians from the works of Kurt Voniget, who are a time sensitive species.

They see in 4 dimensions.

So they already know that they're dead.

They already know they're alive, they're incredibly fatalistic, and the monks here have that line of, you know, we appear as corpses because all of you are corpses, like all of you exist and you don't exist and you've lived and you're dead and et cetera, et cetera.

And you know, it's an excuse for them to look like corpses.

But it does hint to that relationship that they have with time where they can see all these different time threads.

You know, Sylvester McCoy saying, you know, from various perspectives of time.

You've already left.

You've been here before, you haven't even arrived yet.

[37:53]

There's a lot going on under the surface of this that perhaps doesn't get fully explored, but I don't think it really matters because what we've got is so solid that we can just go, oh, I wonder if this is what they were going for.

I wonder if that's what they were going for, but it doesn't detract if it's not fully spelt out.

I think I'm happy that we never see the monks again.

Like, I don't think they're like the silence or the weeping angels.

They're not, you know, Moffatt's most successful creation.

And I do think, you know, the way that they look like corpses.

Like they look like those corpses that were kind of recovered from peat bogs or something like that, you know, that you see photos of in a history lesson or something at school.

Like they look like corpses in a particular way.

They're not just sort of standard issue zombies.

I got the impression, I mean, or maybe I'm misremembering this, that the monks were actually an idea that harness had for this script, which Moffatt then he saw the potential in them and decided, oh, we could do a link to 3 parter.

[38:58]

And so wrote extremists with the monks being introduced.

And then it's, you know, followed up, following me by Toby Woodhouse, yeah.

Also, there were supposed to be kung fu monks.

That could only have improved this 3 partner, I think.

Don't you think?

Kung Fu Monks, awesome.

Kung Fu Corpse Monks.

Even in a very late script at the end after the agreement has been reached, yeah, the script describes, a monk jumps on Bill's back and, you know, that that's part of the ending of it.

I don't think that makes them seem like kind of formidable and austere religious figures that part.

Do you know what I mean?

So, yeah.

Although.

They've been able to save money by having one actor do all the voices, so they do that 10th planet Cyberman thing of just having their mouths open and then tones coming out.

[40:07]

I did say last week that I thought that that looked stupid and I still kind of think it looks stupid.

It's not ideal.

The only other thing I think lets the episode down at all is that crucial combination lock does not look like any lock on any door that's ever existed.

It looks like it's made out of duplo.

Yeah, and I think, I mean, maybe this is one of those things where just efficiency trumps detail.

But I think a keypad would have made much more sense.

And then you get over the fact that he would be able to feel the combination on the keypad, just by making the combination longer, so Erica doesn't know it and can't call it out to him, I think that would have worked just as well.

Or, you know, like you're at Elgato stream deck, where it changes the numbers around for kind of security reasons.

So you don't know which numbers to press or something like that.

I thought that the business with him setting the timer for 2 minutes or something where he, you can tell that he can't see and he is just sort of tapping twice to make sure that he knows that the, that the time is 2 minutes.

[41:09]

Can we just talk about Erica again for a 2nd because there's that moment, that incredible moment where she says, you know that the bacteria are creating ethanol and you can use the ethanol to trigger your explosion and he just says, oh, look, I'm going to come back and, you know, we'll, he says something about like, you know, inviting her out or...

Yeah, what are you doing?

Yeah, yeah.

What are you doing after?

Basically inviting her to be a companion.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Would you like to travel the universe?

Yes.

I mean, she's so good.

And like the 2 of them work really well together and she's so terrifically enthusiastic.

I just thought that was great.

She's one of the sort of great guest stars of the year, I think.

There's a bit they had to cut because they cut out an earlier gagline.

Unfortunately, this two-part joke gets cut.

So early on, Erica's like, how could, you know, how can you stand to go in there and stand the feuds?

And he says, I'm Scottish and Baby Bio wouldn't even phase me, you know, and it's his old gardening product.

And when he says to her later, what are you doing after this?

[42:10]

There is a follow-up line where he says, anyone else?

And I still would have been explaining that baby bio joke, but you got it.

I mean, all of that, that business actually is actually quite effectively done, isn't it?

Because it's done very sort of quickly.

We just assume that the doctor, we get a little bit of conversation between Nadol and the doctor, Nadol says he's not human, the doctor says, I got your lungs on the cheap.

You better go inside anyway, and of course, he has to be incapacitated for the thing to work at the end.

So all of that done very neatly and very quickly without us feeling like we're having to head cannon anything or we're having to sit and listen to a boring explanation.

And I think that that's a thing that this episode does very well.

And something that next week's is not going to do very well.

No, next week's I didn't rewatch.

I really wanted to rewatch next week's when I got to the end of this one, but I didn't have time, but my recollection is it's entertaining, but it's a bit of a mess.

I do have one other problem with the chemical institute in this story.

[43:18]

And yes, absolutely.

Like the combination, the combination lock that doesn't even work, like a combination lock.

Like the Tumblers don't stop on any of the numbers, they just keep tumbling.

But my actual problem is, you know, you have this facility that's capable of going into lockdown, because you are dealing with dangerous chemicals, why would it have an option to directly vent into the atmosphere?

When you're using bacteria, which could be really dangerous to the human race?

Also, no one else is in the building.

It is just them.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, I think we see some people.

Do we see some people initially?

But when the whole crisis happens, the building's empty.

No one else is there.

They've all gone out to lunch or something.

No one invited Erica and Douglas to the staff Christmas party because they're weird and annoying.

And so they were always breaking their glasses.

Yeah, that's right.

There's other science fiction trope, the bomb that someone has to stay behind and detonate because that's how bombs are made.

There's a roaring trade for bombs like that.

[44:19]

That's right.

Okay, no one ever invented a bomb that you can just sit and make it go to where you want. a bond where you could push a button, then it would go off a little bit later.

Later.

That's always a good plan.

No, that's broken.

It's like having, it was like a couple of weeks ago where, where in the middle of where the hell are we?

Where are we?

Are we Bristol?

Where are we?

Bristol, where are we this season?

Right in the middle of resented, by the way.

Ah, we get an Uber.

Okay, Uberline. next week.

Yeah, sorry, this week.

Next week.

This week.

This week.

Yeah.

Yeah, a few weeks ago in Bristol, USA. mobile phone signal.

That house?

Why is that?

That makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah, just call Bill.

Stop, stop sending popes into her bedroom.

Clearly the other been to Bristol.

Yeah, okay.

Maybe it's a whole 5G dead zone.

The other thing I really liked is the doctor blinding the monks to figure out which camera they turn back on.

That's very neat.

It did remind me of an old joke that I've actually put in several scripts now about how do you tell if the government is bugging your phone?

[45:25]

Stop paying the bill.

I mean, it is really neat, isn't it?

He's really neat.

It's the 1st time for a while that I've just felt, you know, everything is just very neatly done and set up in a good way.

And that, that is brilliant where we go from, there are 200,000 of these things and we winnow it down and it's still 428 or whatever, but he finds the way of bringing it down from, you know, it's just like, which ones have reached stage two?

You know, which ones are using bacteria or whatever.

Like it all makes sense and it all really works very well.

It's very clever, I think.

I could have done without the GM Fairmongering, but that's a minor point.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, funny, you know, like the the doomsday clock is now currently sitting at a comfortable 45 seconds to midnight. right now.

So, yeah.

But we didn't mention climate, but obviously climate isn't going to kill everyone in the next kind of half an hour or whatever.

[46:28]

You know, we're not all going to be dead in a year.

Also, there were a lot of trees in the future, which I thought there probably shouldn't be if it was all the plants being killed, but like whatever.

Well, they were dead.

Dead palm trees, lovely.

Look, we know from Doctor Who and the Daleks in colour that you can have trees in a Dead Forest. there you go.

There you go.

I really enjoyed watching this again.

I think that's what I want to say.

This is a really, really good slab of TV, I think, everybody involved in it is really operating pretty much at the peak of their powers.

I'd forgotten just how bloody good Pearl Mackie is.

It's really a shame we only got her for one season because she is fantastic.

And the Dr. Nardal Bill relationship, I think, is great, even if Nardal's a bit underused this time round.

[47:31]

He sometimes has a reason to be there unlike certain companions in certain series, I could mention.

And it was just a real pleasure to watch this again.

And to see Stephen Moffat and Peter Harness, finding that balance that I talked about at the beginning between, on the one hand, a perfectly structured story can still fail to move you because it feels artificial as if we are just inserting Tabet into slot B in order to make things work.

But equally, if the story is a mess and the pieces don't mesh together, then it can be hard to be moved because you're just like, oh, we're doing that now.

We're going over here now.

It just becomes a jumble.

This, I think, is really accurately located at that sweet spot in the middle.

Everything's there for a purpose, but nothing feels as if its only purpose is to be part of the scaffolding that supports the story.

[48:43]

Well, that's all the time we have for this week.

We'll be back next week for a glimpse into our horrifying and inexorable theocratic future in the lie of the land.

In the meantime, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts, and you can keep up with us on our website, flightthroughentirety.com, where you'll find our social media links as well as links to all of our other podcasts, including our other Doctor Who podcasts, 500-year diary, and the 2nd great and bountiful Human Empire.

Until next time, perhaps we should consider making fractions a thing again.

Thank you very much for listening and good night.

Good night.

Ta ta.

Julio.

That was Flight Through Entirety, starring Nathan Bodley, Brendan Jones, Tom Selinski and James Selwood.

Theme arrangement by Cameron Lamb.

This episode, narrative vamping, was recorded on the 7th of September 2024 and released on the 27th of October.

[49:46]

Tom Zelinski can also be found between the covers of his new book, Star Trek, Discovering the TV series, in which he reviews all the episodes of the original series, the animated series, and the next generation.

See the show notes for details.

It's a wrap up, in a way.

There's some great ideas, isn't it?

It's got Michelle Gomez.

So, you know, like I'm there for that.

I watched them all in one day as a kind of movie length thing and as a, it'd be a great omnibus, actually, with some of the golf edited out.

Um, like it holds to them much better as a single story than it does.

Do you mean extremists?

So yeah, I so here's what I said about extremist this might be the tech.

What I said about extremists was that the central conceit doesn't make any sense because if you discover you're in a simulation, What?

[50:49]

Do you know what I mean?

Like what?

You know, it's like that beat where, you know, at the end of journeys end, uh, Billy Piper's left on a beach with a duplicate David Tennant, and you kind of think, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

I don't know how, how am I supposed to feel about these, like, donuts?

Titan comics.

I remember Joey Pants and the Matrix. you know the steak tastes just as good.

Yeah, right.

Well, so it's just it's like, so that doesn't sort of seem to mean anything.

And we said something like, why are we in CERN?

And we sort of said, like, like if CERN could have blown up the simulation or whatever.

Do you know what I mean?

sort of just a line away from making it all make sense, but it doesn't actually quite land there.

I don't know why they're killing themselves. at all, you know.

And of course, the random number thing is just absolute nonsense.

Yeah, existential crisis doesn't exist.

Yeah, but you do.

You can't have an existential crisis if you don't exist, but, you know, like, I think therefore I am, you know, like, like they exist.

[51:54]

You can't say to someone, you don't exist.

I mean, that's why that's a good line because it does, you know, whatever.

I do have one other problem with the with the chemical institute in this story.