Hello, dear listener, and welcome back to Flight Through Entirety
the only Doctor Who podcast.
You're sick of being cold and wet and hypnotised, left, right, and
centre, savage by bug eyed monsters, never knowing if I'm coming
or going or being.
And boy, are we sick of that Sonic screwdriver.
I am Brendan.
I'm Nathan.
Are you all right, darling?
And I'm Todd.
And I'm worried about you, though.
Are you okay?
I'm fine.
I just want my hair washed and to feel human again.
And it's not for a lack of shampoo. for a lack of hair.
We are onto one of the most memorable stories of the run of Doctor
Who.
It is the most recent story shown on, in his most recent classic
Doctor Who story shown on BBC 4, in fact.
It is the hand of fear.
Well, this one's mine, and it's terrible, isn't it?
It really, really is totally bad.
Can I just say, the script falls through from Dougie Campfield to
write out Sarah Jane Smith?
So, oh, I know, we're going to go to our dynamic duo of Bob Baker
and Dave Martin.
They're going to be great to write out Sarah Jane.
So Dougie Campfood was going to write the script.
Is that the story?
writing a script that involved Sarah dying in the end.
She's going to be killed off, some sort of...
That was a terrible idea, though.
Yeah, it was called, it was called the Red Fort, and it was going
to be based around the French Foreign Legion.
It was initially thought to be the finale of the last season.
They were thinking about writing Sarah out in that story.
And then, you know, they were thinking about mulching her in Seeds
of Doom.
Were they really?
Yeah.
That, that, that's part of the reason the mulchers in the script.
They were going to mulch.
They were going to mulch Sarah Jane.
Why do people like him?
Well, that's the thing.
I think once they realised once it's like, hey, let's have a
multure in there.
Hey, let's put the compa- Oh maybe not.
No, they could have done the alternative, which was actually to
turn her into the crinoid and force the doctor then to blow her up
with it.
With the airstrike.
Oh, really?
I mean, they're not going to kill Sorenson in Planet of Evil
mulching Sarah might be a good idea.
That really frigging annoys me.
I don't get to say it.
It annoyed us as well.
Don't worry.
We mentioned it.
Instead, with the red fort.
I can't remember if there was even going to be an alien
influence.
It may have just been a historical, but Sarah was going to die at
the end.
The French Foreign Legion were going to sort of give her a full
military funeral with honours for fighting alongside the Legion
and the doctor was going to leave alone because, you know, this is
a fun family program.
Thanks, Dougie.
But this script, this script had been around for a while as well.
Yeah, yeah.
And also had, I think, the brigadier from the future or something
sacrificing himself.
It was it was also going to be like 6 parts.
Castria was called Omega 3 or Omega 3, and Bob Holmes had to point
out to these writers that there's a character called Omega.
Omega?
Oh, my God, whatever, who they actually wrote it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not only that, when Dave Martin comes back much later to write 4
canine kids books, he's got a villain in that who's this tall guy
in a mask and a cloak called Omegon.
Omegon, brilliant.
That's his brother, actually.
A little known figure in Time Lord history.
So back in the 70s.
You know, Bob Baker and Dave Martin wrote some decent things.
I, you know, Clause of Axos is all right, I suppose.
They were kind of accused of having too many ideas and not
developing any of them, remember that?
But here, that got no ideas at all.
There's really, really nothing going for this.
So it's set on Earth, at least in theory, but this version of
Earth consists of a quarry, the most underpopulated hospital
you've ever seen, and a nuclear power plant.
At no point are we anywhere in anything recognisable as Earth, as
far as the people at home are concerned.
You know, the quarry has the most lamentably poor security
procedures you've ever seen.
Sarah gets dug out, you know, clutching the hand.
She's carried off by 2 of the most leisurely kind of slow moving
paramedics in television history.
She gets taken to a deserted hospital that consists of, you know
like a corridor, um, and really that's about it. 3 flats, you know
reconstructed for like 2 different sets, one with, is it Rex?
Yeah, Rex Robinson's back.
And he's lovely.
He's Gebek.
He is lovely.
Tyler.
But I agree with you completely, Nathan.
It's like this cliche little set piece to get from here to here to
here to get to the nuclear power station.
Nothing is real.
It ties into what I was saying in the last podcast that Sarah Jane
has become not a real character.
We're not really in a real situation.
It's just for moments and nothing much more than that.
And Bob Baker and Dave Martin.
My god.
I have this theory, and the theory is they write 2 good episodes
of Doctor Who, a season, you've just got to find them among the 4
or 8, you know?
Thank God in the next season.
That's all I can say.
But they're just...
Philip Sandafar has this theory that people's television careers
see them gradually get worse at writing for television. as
television evolves.
Do you know what I mean?
So someone who's quite a good writer in the early 70s is not quite
so good a writer, sort of later on.
And certainly these later Doctor Who's that they do are pretty
terrible.
But this, I think, oh, well, there's underworld next year.
But this, I mean, this is really, really bad.
There's no characters to speak of.
You know, there's Dr. Carter, who is very charmingly played by Rex
Robinson.
You know, he's really very likeable, but he has nothing to do.
And all he's there for is to plummet to his death.
I mean, what a horrible, horrible thing.
Well, he gets some nice lines with the doctor doing the exposition
about the nature of the hand.
But yeah, but then he grabs a big rubber spanner and sort of
lunges at the doctor and falls off a catwalk.
And that's really terrible and awful, you know, why does that
happen?
And then you get Professor Watson, you know, he's basically our
only other human character, and he's just a sort of base commander
but it's also undeveloped that really nothing very much can be, you
know, said about him either.
So it's really thin.
There's hardly any guest cast at all.
I mean, you've got his assistant woman up in the control box, which
I think is the director's wife, and they had to develop that
character, which was originally a man, and they made it into a
woman.
Thank goodness there's a woman.
It's Ms. Jackson.
She's fabulous.
Yes, yeah.
And then there's that unfortunate dude whose name I can't think of
at the moment.
Driscoll?
Yeah, who goes into the nuclear reactor.
He's got great pants.
Okay, I'm just gonna jump in here and say, I really like this
one.
We haven't finished.
I'm not finished.
Okay, I'm just, I'm just foreshadowing, so carry on.
I need to go back to episode one.
Yeah, right?
Because I hate the Andy-Pandy outfit.
It is one of my least favourite outfits on Sarah Jane after a
season where I think she's looked dynamic.
I just want to just go, ah!
But Rex Robinson actually has some dialogue in there about how
crummy it is.
Remember, he's on the phone and she's escaping.
She's wearing a pink overalls thing.
Yes, yes, like Andy Pandy.
Like someone has clearly snuck that into the script after seeing
the costume that she's been given.
Well, I think she's had some really wonderful outfits.
I love terror of zigons, that the green thing.
The green thing is great.
I really like the little blue outfit in evil.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. with the scallop sleeves.
Yeah, dress in Pyramids of Mars.
I adore the pink thing in Android invasion and she looks fantastic
in the last story and in Seeds of Doom.
I'm not a big fan of Brain of Morbius, but I think, you know, what
the hey.
I thought I liked that.
I think you did like that one, but, you know, I just think this is
one of her worst ones.
And I kind of looked at it and I kind of thought, what is that?
And she puts some of that white thing later on in the story.
And even as a kid, I went, that's a Joe Grant thing.
It is.
It's actually Katie's coat from the Green Day.
It is Joe Groundsco.
It is the original.
But can I go back to the beginning and it's like, you know, poor
Sarah Jane Smith.
Since the Android Invasion, she's been giving us lists of
everything that she's been put through, like in the Android
Invasion, like she just, like, we're either going to burn up in
the atmosphere, suffocate, be crushed to death, in the brain of
Morbius.
I've fallen out a flight of stairs, menaced by a huge claw and
blinded.
Then in the seeds of doom, I think it's going to be blown up, shot
minced machine, managed by the crinoid, you know?
And now here, we walk out into the quarry and the whole wall, the
whole side of it just blows up and she's buried alive.
Even the doctor's not buried alive.
She's put through another trauma and later on in the story, she
gets the gas at her.
She almost falls down some huge crevice, you know, she's going to
walk into a nuclear reactor.
You know, this poor woman.
Poor, poor woman.
And this is what we've been saying.
The fact that she doesn't really respond to any of these things
beyond sort of vaguely bitching about them makes her less right
real as a person.
But, I mean, this is in an environment where nothing is really
real, I think.
But I'll say this.
I love Elizabeth Staten, and I just think she does a wonderful job
despite these unreal situations to try and give this character
believability.
Let's move beyond Sarah in the setting and let's actually talk
about the aliens.
So we actually open on the planet Castria, which is very cheaply
realised.
It's a couple of people in anorax growling and shouting doing
Stephen Thorne impersonations.
Yeah, it's so cheap that one of them is Roy Skelton.
Oh really?
They only have one set of gloves for the costumes.
The other one actually has to have mittens, so you don't take
pants.
And it's really just the most involved way of executing someone.
I don't know.
Can you not shoot a castro in the head or something?
Or just electrocute them?
And it's 5 minutes.
Like I actually sit there going, 0 my goodness, this is still
going on.
Like in a new series, this would be a pre-credits.
Yeah, take 20 seconds.
Yeah, yeah.
So they have to shoot him into space and then explode him by
remote control, even though they've got no power and no resources
and the whole planet's falling to pieces.
Yeah, and you know what?
Planets falling to pieces.
We find out later they know their planet's dying anyway.
Why did they have to shoot him off into space?
Why not just blow him up on the surface?
So this is another thing too.
It is one of the things that Holmes does during his tenure script
editor, is introduced just any number of villains who are
criminals from the past.
And so last year we had Morbius, who was not sufficiently executed
enough by the time laws.
Now we have Eldrad, who's not sufficiently executed enough by the
Castrians.
We've had Soutec, of course, who was not... who wasn't executed.
Cuted enough by sirens.
And we are actually going to have coming up in the end of the
series just for change, a criminal from the distant future instead
of the distant past.
So this is something that happens over and over again.
And here it's so much like Morbius that it is just completely
lacking in sort of inventiveness or imagination, I think.
Now, Richard hasn't commandeered Todd's time bubble, but he has
sent me a text.
He wants me to mention, which is, of course, we have another
transgender character in Doctor Who in the form of Eldrad.
You know, that's like I like Judith Paris as the monster.
And I don't like Stephen Thorne because his costume is terrible
and it's Stephen Thorne and he just shouts and he's completely one
node.
And they even address it in the dialogue of, like her, couldn't
stand him.
Yeah, yeah, but did you think that that was odd at the time as a
child?
You know what I mean?
I would have had no experience at all with trans people back
then.
It didn't strike me as strange.
As a child.
It didn't strike me as that, you know, you did have David Bowie
and Ziggy Stardust and that sort of androgynous sort of look, and
that's where I think as a child, I kind of thought that's where
Judith Paris took it.
They treat her voice, don't they, to lower her?
Yes, yes.
But to sort of say that it's a trans thing.
Like, that's very, like, taking what is very relevant now. and
putting that back onto what was then.
They would never have gone into that thinking that this is going
to be a trans person or anything like that, you know?
I mean.
No, but it's much like, it's much like the relationship between um
between Giuliano and Marco.
The trans community did exist in the 70s, but was far less visible
than it is now, just like the gay community lesbian community
whichever rainbow community you want to mention.
But I think a very telling thing here, of course, is that Eldrad
is quite surprised by his new form when he is the Judith Paris
Eldrad.
So there is an element of being trans in there because one of a
definition of trans is when your body gender does not conform with
your internal gender and 21 out there who is trans and if I'm
getting the terminology wrong, I do apologise.
But yeah, I think for Doctor Who to do that, especially when today
we still have all these violent or vehement debates about whether
we could have a female doctor.
You know, for me as a kid, Eldrad changing gender wasn't a weird
thing because the doctor had changed face.
So why can't you change from male to female?
I didn't necessarily find it a weird thing?
It was just a monster thing.
And I thought, oh, that's original, that's a twist, that's
different, you know, that's the way I saw things, you know?
What do you think is the purpose behind it?
It is a bit strange.
I mean, she's supposed to like have modelled herself on Sarah.
Yeah.
I mean, it at least gives us a war.
Yeah, I think I think it's the whole woman thing and I think it is
a twist on the thing.
Oh, everybody's going to expect that it's a man.
Because it always is.
And this time that's the twist.
And I think that's why they did it.
But I do take it now that if somebody who is trans, who might be
very young, like, you know, I'm talking in their teenage years, to
watch a show like this now to see this sort of thing, maybe that's
something that, you know, they would identify with or, you know, go
oh, wow, you know, look at this.
Obviously at the time, something never crossed my mind.
Oh yeah, and you know what?
I am reasonably sure that Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes had
no idea of that possible, possible connection with it.
But yeah, I think it's a very good decision for the show because
we've had one trans or gender queer character before in the form
of Alpha Centauri, who is identified as having no gender, but has
the voice of the feminine gender.
Oh, he gets he gets masculine pronouns.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
So there's a sort of trans element or gender queer element there.
Not only does Judith Paris give a great performance, but there are
elements of both gender in her performance as well.
Tom absolutely adored her, and you can see that he cannot keep his
hands off her.
He's constantly carting her around.
He's constantly touching her.
I've never seen a picture of her outside of the makeup.
That's right I'd really love to know actually what she looks like
but I think the performance is absolutely stunning and it's what
saves the middle part of this story, in my opinion, her
performance. and the connection that she begins to have with the
doctor and with Sarah. and how manipulative the character is, and
it has to adapt to its situation to get what it wants.
And that's one of the aspects of this story that I really, really
like.
There's one beautiful shot of her, where she's in the TARDIS, and
they've just landed on Castria, and the doctors opened up the
scanner, and she's standing in front of the scanner, but you can't
see, like she's just in front of the scanner, all that you can see
is her standing in front of that sort of miniature blasted
landscape.
And I think it's, you know, really well framed.
In fact, one of the things this show does have going for it is, of
course, it's Lenny Maine, who's directing.
And there's a lot of film work and particularly the film stuff
when Sarah and Driscoll are both possessed wandering around the
nuclear reactor.
And it's like there's some kind of fisheye lens or something and
it's shot in really uncomfortable close-ups and it really makes a
character who, you know, we're normally reassured by in Sarah
really quite sort of alien and disturbing looking in those
scenes.
So there are moments of good direction, I think.
No, I agree with you.
I think the direction saves a lot of this. at times I don't know
whether it saves it.
Well, it holds it together when it should be just falling to
pieces, you know?
I can forgive this story a lot.
Probably by Judith Paris' performance, knowing, in hindsight, it's
Elizabeth Sadden's final performance.
Except it's not, though, is it?
We get her for years and years to come.
But at the time. at the same time.
Those last minutes in the show.
Well, before we come to that, though, can we talk about how
terrible Castria is?
Well, can I just say how terrible Castro is?
What a boring place it is.
The set's really terrible.
It is, again, no, because Leisure Grotto with a bottomless pit.
We defeat Eldrad by tripping him with the doctor's scarf so that
he falls into a pit.
It really is just terrible.
And Stephen Thorne's trip is terrible itself because he doesn't
trip.
He steps over it and then they just cut to him falling down.
And then they throw the doctor throws the ring down after him.
I mean, that makes a hell of a lot of sense guys.
So, I mean, all of that's kind of terrible.
But I want to step back for a minute and hear Brendan's spirited
and full-throated defence of this story.
Really?
Yeah.
That's another thing.
The hand in the box, is that modelled after Stephen Thorne or
somebody else?
Oh, I don't know.
I suspect it's modelled after one of the visual effects crew.
It doesn't look like Stephen Thorne's hand.
It doesn't look like Judith Paris's hand.
Thorne has 6 fingers on each hand.
Did you know that?
Yeah, yeah, I did.
Yeah, he got one of them from Reg Whitehead.
But I'm just saying if Eldred's normal form is a male, shouty like
Stephen Thorne, should it look like him?
Shouldn't a hand look like him, not something completely
different?
It's sort of a man's hand.
Do you know what I mean?
And by then we haven't seen Stephen Thorne, so...
I think one of those...
The thing, the problems with his is the fact that Stephen Thorne
never saw Judith Paris in studio.
They never saw each other in the studio.
Yeah, of course.
It was only at the rap party dinner that they actually saw each
other.
So you were me, darling.
And I kind of think that's...
I think that you were me.
I think that's a mistake.
Yeah, they should have been discussed on to have a look to see
what she was doing.
Because I actually do quite like...
He could have picked up some acting tips from that.
But I do quite like the fact that when he comes out of the
regeneration thing he talks about, he goes, doctor.
Sarah.
I always like it when the baddies, you know, have a connection
with, you know, the companion, you're like, you know, that's kind
of nice, but go ahead, Brendan, defend away.
You know, I want to hear it.
Okay, as I said, I quite like the story.
So we arrive on earth.
We are now in timeline number two.
Todd, you haven't heard our Pyramids of Miles podcast yet, but
suffice it to say I've solved the unit dating problem, and Sarah
is now slightly in the wrong timeline.
Moving on.
So we have the whole quarry accident.
Quarry falls on Sarah, et cetera, et cetera.
I like the scene in the hospital.
Yes, you know, it's very sparsely populated.
But I love the doctor's scene with the doctor in the hospital and
the whole discussion about, oh, Gallifroy.
I haven't heard of it.
Maybe it's in Ireland.
I think that's the 1st time we get the island gag.
He's a terrible actor, that guy.
No, I think he's very good because to him there's nothing
extraordinary about what is happening.
No, no, no, no.
The dialogue is fine.
The actor is not good.
That's all continue.
Thank you, Mr. Beal.
Moving on, you know, we then get Rex Robinson, who is, of course
fabulous.
And yeah, I love the idea that the doctor has just grabbed, you
know, your everyday pathologist in a hospital and introduced him
to the idea of silicon life.
Yeah, I'm not saying this is a brilliant story by any means. saying
I like it.
We go to the Nunton power complex, and I think they missed a trick
there by not having the Newton power complex from the claws of
Axos kind of drawing at full circle there.
I really like Glenn Houston's performance as the director there.
I like his interplay with Miss Jackson.
I even like the cliche thing of calling home and kiss the children
for me.
Kiss the children for me.
It is really cliche.
It is really cliche, but he performs it so well.
It's not histrionic, and I know he's a bit of an idiot, you know
shooting at Eldred and not listening to the doctor and blah, blah
blah, but he's also a genuinely heroic character in that he's
facing down his death.
He demands that everyone leaves.
You know, someone has to stay in case things can go on and Miss
Jackson tries to say he's like, no, you have to go as well.
And then he has the moment calling his wife.
It's a very heroic moment because it's not about comforting
himself.
It's about comforting the people around him and thankfully he
survives at the end.
You know, if he had been killed by Eldrad.
I think that would have been even worse than Sorenson surviving.
I don't disagree with you.
I actually agree with you on this.
I think that I actually like his performance. and I like all those
things that you've commented on.
We've got Judith Paris, of course, and her wonderful interplay.
Yeah, she's got the great interplay with Tom, but you've come to
expect Tom to have a really good interplay with the villains.
Like Tom always seems to step up his game a bit in the villain
scenes.
What we get here that we don't really see elsewhere is Sarah
getting really strong interplay with the villain.
In Doctor Who stories, where the villain overtakes the companion's
body or bases himself on the companions form, say, look at New
Earth.
There's sort of lots of commentary from Cassandra in New Earth
about the eccentricities of the body and whatnot.
Whereas Eldra just goes, oh, you know, it'll do, I suppose.
I have to slub it.
The thing I really like.
The crux of it is, you know, when they meet Morbius, they taunt
him and then push him off a cliff, and when they, when they with
Stigren, they taunt him and, you know, flip him into a virus, and
they're always taunting the villains.
But in this situation.
They get 2 episodes of the villain being like another companion.
That's something new.
You know, all the things you said that are wrong with the story
the uneven pacing, cliche, the lack of focus.
I agree that they're there.
But as always, what Bob Baker and Dave Martin do is they bring a
new idea.
And it's not necessarily the best fleshed out idea.
You know, we've just had Louis Marx giving us a great historical
runaround and before that, we had Robert Banks Stewart.
Yeah, it's certainly not as good as those other 2 stories.
But that idea is intriguing.
I'm glad Doctor Who don't do it all the time, but the idea of a
villain coming along.
Kind of coercing, but not really coercing the doctor.
The doctor's still happy to help in a fashion.
The idea of a villain coming along as a companion is very
interesting.
And the story leads and builds to that.
And then we get the traditional villainy comeuppance at the end.
No, I think it's really good.
Okay.
So I think I agree with you on all that you've said, like in terms
of those positives in the story.
And I really do like that, which is why I forgive this story a
lot.
I see all of its negatives and I do like it.
I like the teaming up with the villain.
I think that is good.
But what we do need to talk about is the final scene.
So we've had, we have a moment where earlier on, I think it must
be episode three, where the doctor is going into the complex to
meet Eldred and Sarah follows him.
And the doctor's not very demonstrative.
You know, in fact, a lot of the time he's really distant and he
doesn't show much affection towards Sarah.
He's a little bit like Capaldi and Jenner, I think.
Do you know what I mean?
You don't actually see, there's no physical affection between
them.
He's frequently kind of short with her and things.
But there is, there's that little moment where they say that they
worry about each other.
You know, I worry about you and she says, well, I worry about
you.
And that's, you know, as close as we get to them kind of
expressing how much they love each other.
And it is that thing, you know, I've said that it's essentially
poor writing that Sarah has kept following him into the TARDIS.
But within the show, it is because she really likes him.
And she's the longest serving companion.
Is she definitely the longest serving companion?
Distance.
Yes. from her start to her end.
Yeah, in terms of episodes?
No, no.
Yeah, yeah, it's still...
Fraser Heinz has more, yeah.
Yeah.
Janet might have more time because there's a big gap between...
Moncopolis in season 19.
And Castraval.
Right, right.
But and she had a very short gap between her 1st and 2nd season
too.
L years.
I really, if you go with 3 seasons +2 on, yeah. that is more.
And, you know, since the 60s, you know, she's done more than Joe
She's been here for a long time.
She's, you know, introduced us to Tom Bacon.
She was the 1st companion I ever saw.
And so, remember, Brandon got a bit emotional when Pertry left
even as we were discussing it.
And I said at the time, that never happened to me when the doctor
changed, but it always did when the companions changed.
And this was the first time that I had ever seen that happen.
And I was inconsolable.
And this time I held it together, because I know that she's, she
goes on, she'll be back in the 5 doctors and venture, we are lucky
enough to have her for, you know, the Sarah Jane adventures for
all those seasons.
So we know that this isn't the end of Lee Sladen's time as Sarah
Jane Smith.
But it is a pretty good scene.
It's a tremendous scene and I remember as a kid, as this was
unfolding, I was just there going, this isn't happening.
I was like in my own self and I was trying to hold back tears.
I was blubbering, like, you know, and I went to bed, just
distressed, and I remember having dreams, rewriting the end of
this so that she would not leave.
Like I was that devastated by the whole thing. convincing myself
that next episode that there'll be some rewrite and somehow that
he'll go back and get it.
I just couldn't cope with it.
She does overact a little bit in it, and it is partly because the
character is bunging it on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So she lists all the terrible things that have happened to her and
she's going to leave, but she's just waiting for that Florana
moment, isn't she?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Florana or cassiopear?
Yeah.
And it just doesn't come.
And Tom is, again, it's hard to imagine like David Tennant not
hugging or mugging or, you know, all of those kinds of things, you
know, because he's so demonstrous, but Tom, like Tom even just
does this sort of monosyllambic bye, you know, as she walks out.
And then we get the, you know, remember me, don't forget me, and I
won't forget you, but he doesn't really overtly show very much
affection towards her at all.
But that doesn't mean I think that it's not there.
No, no, absolutely.
I mean, especially sort of as she as she goes towards the door, he
can't look at her.
You know, he puts on his coat.
Eddie, he turns up his collar to block his view of her.
You know?
The turn up collar would become a thing for him later, but he's
never done it before.
And yeah, I think it's the whole thing of I'm going to look very
intently at the console now, so I don't have to watch you go.
He only turns around when she speaks again.
Yeah.
So I'm getting emotional again.
Yeah, no, I can see it.
I can see it.
It is, it's, look, it's not quite as devastating a moment as Joe
No, no.
Which is weird because in a way, it's it's sadder because it's not
her choice.
Or his.
Or he is, I mean, in a way, yeah.
Yeah, it's sadder in that way.
But at the same time, it's also more hopeful because even though
it's not her choice, she accepts it and we kind of know she's got
a life to go back to, in Aberdeen.
In Aberdeen, in Aberdeen, 2 years out of time, yeah.
And it's, um, she mentions Harry and the brigadier.
I think it's so, it's so funny that, you know, the brigadier
hasn't been in the show for a year, but he's still mentioned, and
you still mentioned all the way up to this and then no more.
Yeah, yeah.
Same with Harry.
We'll never get another mention.
But I'm talking about the brigadier.
Yeah, yeah.
It's been, you know, although it hasn't been in it for a year.
He, you know, since the web of fear or whatever. you know, that
that long, that grounding back to earth, that connection with the
audience, which has been whittled away piece by piece is now
gone.
I won't attempt it again.
Will they?
It's going to be a very long time before we get a companion from
contemporary earth.
We won't.
And I think it's going to have a bigger impact on the show and
it's success in terms of ratings, then we realise at this point in
time.
That impact is not there yet, but it's about to be.
Yeah, yeah.
Talking about the impact of this, just moving way, way, way
forward.
One of the inspirations for flight through entirety was the
podcast Splendid Chaps, which part of the creative team behind
that was also behind the ABC series outlanded, which is about a
group of gay science fiction fans, including Christine Anou as a
lesbian character, whose girlfriend, played by Roz Hammond, comes
over at one point during a meeting to collect her stuff because
they've broken up.
The stuff Ross Hammond has is all the stuff that Sarah Jane has
when she leaves the Tartars.
Oh, like a stuff.
She's got a stuffed out, a pot plant, a yellow mac, and a tennis
racket.
And you know, I've never seen the show.
Her hair is done like Sarah Jane, and I'm pretty sure there's even
the line in there of Don't Forget Me.
Yeah.
And it's very, it's very much observed.
It's Adam Richard and Co. and he's a big Doctor Who fan.
Yeah, so, you know, that's the impact, that's the impact of this
scene.
It's the impact of Sarah Jane.
You know, if you ask people, if they remember Doctor Who from
their childhood, they're going to remember Tom Baker, maybe John
Pertwee, but they're going to remember Sarah Jones Smith.
Well, dear, so before we get too emotional, we're heading off into
that undiscovered territory that Nathan and Todd were just talking
about, we don't have contemporary Earth companions, and indeed, in
the next story, we don't have any Earth characters at all.
I'll be taking over the discussion of deadly assassin, regarded by
some as a massive classic.
It's very sweet how hopeful you are.
Yes, I agree.
And as you can see by some, perhaps not.
Do find us online at flightthroughentirety.com, flight through
entirety on Facebook and iTunes and FTE podcast on Twitter.
And if you check out bondfinger.com.
We have 2 commentaries available, one for Dr. No and one for from
Russia with love.
Also, Bondfinger on Facebook, Bondfinger on iTunes and Bondfinger
cast on Twitter.
Until then, thank you very much for listening and good night.
Good night.
See you soon.
That one's flat your entirety with Todd Beeley, Nathan Buttonley
and Brendan Jones.
This episode, not sufficiently executed enough, was recorded on
Sunday, the 2nd of August.
The next episode will be released on September 27, 2015.
If Eldred wanted to be hailed as king of nothing, he could have
just become Australian prime minister.
Two different sets, one with, is it Rex?
Who's Rex Harrison?
Rex Harrison's back.
You know?
A radiology department.
Oh, sorry.
It's not Rex Harrison.
Oh, X Robinson.
We'll do that again. put that on the credits.