Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to Flight Through Entirety
the only Doctor Who podcast who's been arrested in New York for
carrying a sausage sandwich.
I'm Brendan.
I'm Nathan.
I'm Todd.
And we are heading off to the roll right stones, which are quite
deadly because they are the stones of blood.
So, it's the 100 story.
So, congratulations.
We've actually talked our way through 99 stories, and this will be
our 100th one.
So happy birthday to ask.
Yes, and just like Tom Baker in this, we're not getting a cake on
top.
No, they were going to have a cake, weren't they?
And it was vetoed.
Yeah, as being too self-congratulatory, which is probably fair
enough.
Yeah, yeah.
The other visual gag was going to be, they were going to give the
doctor a present, which was an identical scarf to the one he
already had, and he'd go, oh, it's wonderful.
It's just what I always wanted and it was going to be the stump
scarf.
This is a bit of a strange story, isn't it?
It's our 1st story by David Fisher. wonderful.
Yeah, and he'll go on to contribute to the program over the next
couple of years.
He'll do Androids of Tara.
Well, in fact, next story.
He writes 8 episodes in a row.
He'll do creature from the pit next year in the leisure high of
the year after that.
And he is the man that wrote the Gamble with Time, which became
the City of Death.
Yeah that's right.
And of course, did somebody mention the Fumarsi?
Terrific.
It's really hard not to see this script as a kind of commentary on
or reaction against the Hinchcliffe era.
Much like last season.
I think this is more proof that the Graham Williams era does
horror better than Philip Hinchcliffe.
What we have here is like a criminal from the past who is
masquerading as a god.
I've got my hands in my head.
I never see these things till Nathan starts...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Start talking, listeners.
You can't unsee it, can you?
But yeah, criminal from the past.
A criminal from the past, and then we get a sort of strange Gothic
building, like Fetch Priory last season, we get the big whore
which is a beautiful location, by the way.
I just think it looks, it was absolutely spectacular.
And we've got a priest and there's a coven of worshippers and all
of that sort of thing.
And it seems like just it's not going to be a very good retread of
a Graham Williams era thing.
Certainly, DeFreeze, the head of the coven is pretty terrible.
So, what?
Yeah, I think he's shockingly bad.
I think he's fantastic.
Oh, he's wonderful.
This is my favourite story of the key to time.
Is it?
I can certainly understand.
I can see that.
But what they do is they do the sort of Hinchcliffe thing and then
just throw it away unexpectedly halfway through and decide to do
something more fun instead.
And I think it's really terrific and it works really well as a
sort of commentary on the Hinchcliffe era.
Yeah, sure.
Fine. that's how you want to see it in your head.
I just sit back, relax, and I enjoy.
And well, there's so much to enjoy, isn't there?
I mean, I'm kind of with you, Todd, in that I quite like
DeFreeze.
And I think what's so great about DeFreeze is he's set up to be
the villain, but of course he isn't the villain.
The villain is Cesare, who we will come back to, because 1st of
all, we need to comment on.
Professor Amelia Rumford and Vivian Faye.
See, this is a story with a tiny, tiny guest cast, isn't it?
In fact, it's basically just those 2 women.
You get DeFreeze and Martha who are sort of horribly healed in
episode two.
You get the Magara who don't come along until, what, episode
three?
You get the campers who are just in one scene.
So it's basically all rests on the shoulders of those two.
And normally I don't like it when there's a small regular cast.
Like I just tend to think that's, you know, tie semi complained
about pyramids of Mars, for instance.
But when the 2 characters are so wonderfully fun, it's really
really hard to object.
So you've got Vivian Faye, who is Susan Engel, and she's just arch
and wonderful and funny and hilarious.
She has an instant rapport with Romana, I think, with a sort of
bond over her low opinion of what men are like.
But she's so smooth.
Straight away, you know there's something not right, and I like
that.
Like, as a kid, I just thought, not just a little bit too sickly
sweet and nice.
It's just something not quite right about you.
Do you know what she reminds me of?
She reminds me of that character in K9 and company.
Remember?
Juno Baker.
Juno Baker, who's kind of hits on hits on Sarah, and looks like
she's about to invite her to one of their swingers evenings.
You know what I mean?
So she's a little bit like that.
And certainly...
Yes, that the sort of leering ways she refers to sausage
sandwiches.
You know what I mean?
Or there's that thing where Amelia Rumford is, you know, offers to
allow Romana to ride on the back of her bike and...
It'll be a new experience for you.
There's no need to be afraid.
Yes, that's exactly right.
Oh, I just love her performance.
And I can't believe like, I can't envision anybody else playing
that role.
But Anna Blackman was offered that role.
And she did not take it because she wanted Professor Rumford's
wrong.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
She wrote back.
I read the script.
But I think Bea Lehman will be having all the fun.
Well, that was a big mistake because she'll have fun 7 or 8 years
later.
Which is a really terrible story.
Yeah.
I love the voice.
Interestingly enough, just Avengers connection.
Susan Engel auditioned to replace Diana Rigg.
Oh wow.
And the mute footage of her auditioning with I believe it was
Moray Lang standing in the steed.
It was either Moray Lang or John Woodvine, both stood in for steed
during those auditions, but she does audition for it.
So you only see her physical performance, but she's still got that
sort of look that Vivian Faye does.
If any listeners who want to try and find that.
It's on the UK edition of the Avengers series 6.
I just love her sausage sandwiches.
Like I love sausage sandwiches.
Like as a kid, with tomato sauce, just fantastic.
Bit of onion.
And no, I won't go that far.
But I just remember we used to play Doctor Who charades.
And one of my clues in one of our, I don't know, silly objects was
Vivian Faye sausage sandwiches, just tickled my fancy that much.
I mean that's ridiculous.
But, hey, what, hey.
It's like a good name for a trivia.
It's a good name for pub trivia team, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, sausage sandwiches.
Fantastic.
And of course, then we've got Amelia Rumford.
Again, she is just terrific.
This is her last performance and she's terribly old.
Gosh, I didn't realise, yeah.
I think this is the last thing that she's in.
She struggles a little bit with the dialogue at the beginning, I
think, and that just comes across as her being an old lady
though.
I think that's right.
I bet she, because she's an academic and she gets to sort of
rehearse these academic rivalries and past comments on various
professors like that fool Lidwell Morgan and talking about
treatises and, you know, the surveys and things of the 9
travellers and stuff.
Survey of Dr. Borlays.
And you can see her kind of reaching into a memory for the
dialogue.
But she's really, really funny and appealing and she's really
lively.
And, you know, there's a great moment.
I think it's probably an episode 2 or 3 where she wants to go and
capture one of the Ogre for the sake of science, you know.
With a trump should.
I've never heard an Evelyn Smythe, big finish audio.
Is everyone as old as Amelia?
Evelyn is younger than Amelia, but and far sharper, but the same
kind of wit and the same kind of no time for pomposity, you know
very sort of down to earth and what have you.
Because she's not as she's not as fussy as Amelia, but yeah, she's
very much cut from the same cloth.
Because Amelia works really well with the doctor, the doctor is so
big and so compelling to watch, but she really kind of outperforms
him.
She really is able to stand up to his sort of scenery chewing and
get herself seen.
I love the humour that I think David Fisher brings into the
script.
But again, I mean, how much it's David, how much it's Anthony Reed
on the same page.
Like, you know, you're talking about, you know, when the doctor's
tied up on the stone going to be sacrificed and she she shoes
everybody away and she comes, what are you doing there?
Why, you know, and pulls a knife on him.
I don't mean to cut him free, but still, so she pulls that next to
his face.
And all the and all the stuff she gets to do with K 9.
I just think...
Yeah, she's a great double act with K9 actually.
A real success of David Fisher's scripts, and he'll do it again in
all his scripts, is whereas Holmes would give you the double act
of other characters.
So the master and Farrell or Jago and Lightfoot together or um
Scarman and Su Tech.
David Fisher's double acts is pairing up a guest cast member with
one of the regulars.
So you've got the doctor and Professor Romford, you've got Romana
and Vivian Faye, then you've got Professor Romford and K9.
Because, of course, you know, once your characters are established
it's sometimes hard to find new things to do with them.
Tom and Mary are great at finding new ways to read lines with each
other, of course.
But instead, if you mix them up with other people and get to see
them reacting strangely, especially with the doctor and Romana
both being aliens.
And I suppose the spoiler alert, Vivian being an alien as well.
The only sort of real human main character we have is Professor
Romford.
And that's the thing.
She is so human compared to the doctor's aliens and compared to
his grandiosity.
And she brings him down without even trying.
I think that's another difference between her and Evelyn.
Evelyn like sort of tries to bring the 6 doctor down when he's
being a bit bompous.
Whereas Professor Rumford, she will brings him down just because
she's fabulous in talking about sausage sandwiches and bringing
Romana a thermos of tea because men are so unreliable, which
brings me to another great thing David Fisher does.
All of his stories have strong, well drawn roles for women, which
is something that has been really sorely missing in the last few
years of Doctor Who.
So here we have Professor Romford and Vivian Faye.
Even Martha as well, you know, because DeFreeze tries to send her
away, but she very much knows her mind and, you know, I won't
leave you, but earlier on, no, I won't do this.
It's murder.
You know, she speaks up for herself.
She's so bad I'm not going to leave you.
Yeah, she's terrible, but it's a great chance.
She might be terrible, but the one thing I did notice in this is
that, you know, she's willing to speak up and say, look, we've
sacrificed chickens or whatever it is before.
This is going too far and so I actually, she brings a bit of
humanity to that sort of stuff that's going on.
So actually, you know, I have a lot more sympathy for her
performance this time around than I have had previously.
Then we get the campers.
We get Pat and I don't think he's...
He doesn't get a name.
He'll be back.
She's in Dragonfire.
Well, she's dead in this.
As a kid, as a kid, I just kind of thought, oh, well, yeah, he's a
bit better than, but it did freak me out as a kid, like, you know
these campers quite innocently, then like just die.
And it's happened last year with that poor guy in the woods and
image of the fend dial.
That really did get to me.
It's the skeleton hand.
It's the skeleton hand and the screaming and the fade to red.
Yeah, yeah.
Again, I think it's an example of the Williams era doing horror
really well and going with the less is more approach.
You know, you don't you don't need to see their gut spilling out
or anything like that.
You get it from the performances.
Well, a pity they couldn't have done that with K9 after he's
attached because you get all of that ticket tank.
And steel wool.
They're still wool wet.
I mean, it's so unconvincing, and it's so great when Romana goes
back to the Tartars with him to have whatever looks like a beta
from an electronic whisk, like as she's prodding into, you know
prodding into K9, you think, you know, I kind of think, oh, they
could have done a bit better with that.
What they couldn't have done any better with is the giant toppling
fibreglass rocks that they decide to use as our enemy aliens for
this week.
They're really, really incredibly bad.
No, I disagree as well.
I find them actually quite stunning and I actually get was really
frightened as a kid and I really think they look wonderful.
Do you?
And I, you know, it makes no sense that rocks move like that, but
of course, they're not really rocks.
They're ovary.
And, you know, so I just imagine they sort of levitate very
slightly, but some sort of rationing along. actually think they're
fantastic.
Yeah, yeah.
I really, really like them.
I always think they look like they're about to fall over.
Not for a 2nd they look like that they're actually made of rock.
You know, they're like big fibreglass things.
I think they have great sound design. you know what I mean?
I think they're glowing yellow rocks is mental.
Maybe, but I disagree with you.
I found them terrifying as a child.
And I think part of it is the sound design, that sort of
heartbeat.
But it's also, as the doctor says, And I think even before the
doctor says this line, you realise it as a viewer, perhaps not
consciously, how do you kill a stone?
And that's the thing.
It's just a wall coming towards you.
Now, in the original script, David Fisher had them toppling over
onto people and crushing them.
That would have been great.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm glad they didn't go with that because that would have
looked rather comical.
I thought that they were going to be rock men in David Fisher's
group.
That was the other thing.
And Daryl Blake kind of said, well, look, you know, we can make
the suit and it's not going to look terribly convincing and then
we've got to have a special effect to get them to morph from the
upright thing to the suit.
There's not that many scenes of them attacking people.
Let's just have them as upright rocks.
And I think it's actually a much better solution because if we
think back to the male Eldrad's costume, we weren't we weren't big
fans of that as well, and it just would have been more of the same
of that.
It helps emphasise their alienness.
They're not bipedal.
They're not binocular.
You can't talk to them or reason with them because they don't
communicate on the same level of rocks because they're just big
rocks. they should come back in a new series.
Gareth Roberts, I think, once wrote a comic strip, must have been
Gareth Roberts, but couldn't be anyone else.
Yeah, for DWM, in which the one that the doctor kind of matadors
off the cliff gets crushed into sand and becomes sentient sand
that attacks people.
Do you remember that?
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think it was Gareth Robertson.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, can I just say, though, that cliff?
There are 2 moments in classic Doctor Who where I did the behind
the sofa thing.
Okay.
Except in my case, our sofa was up against the wall.
So I actually had to run into the other room where you could still
just see the TV from and hide behind a bookcase.
So we had a bookcase against the wall and I put my head into the
Funkin Wagnall's bookcase we had.
My parents had a set of Funkin Wagnals encyclopaedias and just
sort of poked my head around until it was done.
It was the cliffhanger where Romana goes off the cliff.
I found it really confusing as a kid because Tom, of course
refused to actually participate in pushing her off the cliff and
been in those sequences up to it.
And so when she's looking and the voices there, I was kind of
going, what's going on?
Now I actually think it's quite effective that it's just his
voice.
I actually do think it's a problem.
It is hard to tell what's meant to be happening. as a child, yeah
as a child.
Now, I think personally, I know the story, I know what's happening
but yes, it is a problem.
And then unfortunately you get Mary's scream and she's not really
a screamer.
And then in the next episode, she spends, I don't know, she must
have great carbs or something, but she's on that cliff forever.
And then you get the CSO of the sea, and then that awful shot
when...
Yeah, he's pulling it back up.
Yeah.
And the sunset, which just doesn't work.
And they just stay on it too long.
It's the one sequence in this whole story that doesn't work
because I actually think the outside broadcast stuff because it's
done a video.
It done on video.
It looks great.
Yeah, yeah, and they have night shoots, you know?
Yeah, they have night shoes. they have some day for night and it's
and it's some of the better day for night that I've seen.
I never think days great. night's any good.
It's not great, but it's better than some of the other stuff we
get.
I mean, the key for Dave tonight is you either want to have a
completely clear sky or a completely cloudy sky.
If you get patches like we saw in Doctor No a couple of months ago
it becomes really obvious that it's that it's day.
That cliffhanger, I rationalise to myself as a child in that we
don't see who pushes Romana off the cliff, but I never thought
it's a projection of the doctor.
I thought, they're using the doctor to call her out there and then
someone else pushes her off the cliff.
But then she climbs back up and has the whole thing of, no, no, it
was you, it was you.
And as a kid, I just went, oh, okay, that's what was happening.
Yeah, yeah.
I think it's most unclear.
And I think it's very surprising for Tom to say that because, of
course, just 3 years earlier, he had no problem playing his robot
replica.
Well, what about what about Todd pointed this out the other day in
conversation that he's quite happy for the cliffhanger of episode
2 of the next story to run up to Romana and Clubber in the head.
Yeah, yeah.
Yes, yes, yes.
We were talking about this, yeah.
Yeah, I think he was probably just being a bit Tom.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He was just being crunchety, I think.
But there's so many nice little things out on location.
Like I love it when he just throws the umbrella away, you know, for
no reason at all.
I assume that Romana picks it up on a way back to the Tartist.
It is littering.
It did worry me.
Like, I just love the fact that she wears the most inappropriate
shoes to measure the ground density or whatever it is that she
does and then I don't particularly like that outfit, but I do like
the red dress that she comes back.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Before Vivian Fay decides to get dressed up to look like some sort
of owl because that's what you do when you're the villain of the
week and pushes her into the vortex.
I love that Romana doesn't react to the fact that Vivian's dressed
up as an hour because for Romana, that's just, oh, okay, that's
evening wear on this planet.
Fine.
She did say she'd been a brown owl before.
Exactly, maybe that's it.
I just thought the baby instead of goes, oh, what's going on there
in the circle, you know, let's go find out and then pushes her
in.
And so that's when the story takes a big turn because suddenly
we're in hyperspace and we're throwing the kind of horror premise
away a little bit and replacing it with a science fiction
premise.
And I've certainly heard people express the opinion that the 2nd 2
episodes are weaker than the 1st ones, but I have to say that I
really, really, really enjoy the 2nd half.
So I think the set is really good.
Like the spaceship set is, you know, well designed.
We get to see a Wiran.
We get to see a Weiran again.
Well, in a cupboard.
It is funny, like, you know, that Romana is in this cell with an
Android and there's the we're in, like, there's no continuity
between production teams. just like these old things around.
We just put them in there.
So be it.
Have you noticed that the Android has really big comedy red lips?
Yes.
Have a look again.
It's a kraal android, but with big googly eyes and comedy Jessica
Rabbit red lips.
It's very strange.
And then suddenly we get the reveal that Vivian Faye, who we know
is a kind of man hating villain.
She's she killed her husband on his on their wedding night.
Three of them, I think.
Yeah, Señor Kamara didn't make the crossing over from Brazil.
It's a great cliffhanger.
I love conceptual cliffhangers or reveal cliffhangers.
Things like last year with I've locked the creature in with us.
Yeah, and so this one, it's the series of portraits of Vivian Faye
that are all the same person.
And originally that was going to then lead into the titles, but
the episode was underrunning, so they moved the Romana getting
transported scene, which still works as a cliffhanger.
You know, it's it's a double cliffhanger.
That's fine.
So then we actually get to see her in real life and she's silver.
And there's a fabulous moment where in the trial, which we'll get
to in a minute where she says, I'm Vivian Faye of Rose Cottage, you
know, ask anyone in Boscow and they'll recognise me and kind of go
yeah, but they will kind of thing, what the hell are you doing
looking all silver like that?
So is she normal silver?
And she paints her body.
Yeah, foundation.
Yeah, she just puts a lot of foundation on normally.
No, no.
The, the...
Of course it's a segment.
The segment lets a change.
Yeah, because this is the 1st indication we have that the segments
have individual property is in and of themselves because Romana
comments that the 3rd segment has the power to change objects or
at least their appearance.
So it's like, well, all the segments seem to have that power
seeing as one of them's been a lump of Jethric, and one of them's
been a planet.
I like the fact that at the beginning of the story, we have enough
time for them to put their segments together.
Ramana can do it and the doctor can't and we get the little recap
with the...
Finding the doctor tells Ramana that it wasn't the president.
Thank goodness we get over that.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I also quite like in that early on with Romana's outfits.
He sort of tries to walk through and she's like, not yet.
What do you mean, not yet?
I'm not ready yet.
What?
The doctor has no idea that we get this great joke that women like
to change their clothes and what have you.
But of course, with Romana, one can understand that she is
exploring new outfits and new looks because Time Lord Society is
so staid and so stolid, you know.
The frocks are so terrible.
And the frocks are so terrible.
She just would have had a pink velour number like Rodan.
And I'm saying Rodana's Rodan, because of course that's a giant
pterodactyl monster from Godzilla series.
No, of course, Roman is trapped in hyperspace. forever.
But of course, here in hyperspace, we do have a trial with a few
interesting characters.
Yeah, so Cesare is there looking on the trial.
She's covered in silver and all I can think about when I'm
watching her on screen is the makeup lady applying silver to her
breasts and what that would have been like.
It's actually a very low plunging taste.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
This does not...
It's the Magara.
Oh, I love the Magara, the justice machines.
The flashing lights, the little bleep, bleep, bleep, bleeps, and
the little conversations, they have like, you know, when the
doctor makes his escape, like my eloquent defence of your client
and all that sort of stuff.
It's just so funny.
And again, I kind of think that they are like Rubik's cube boxes
like actual machines, but you don't see that they've got their
chameleon circuit flashing and that sort of thing.
So that sort of is hovering in space or whatever.
I think that's a great way of realising them too.
It doesn't work 100% of the time because the actor's sight lines
are off and off.
But it is much better than having some stupid ball thing or, you
know, something floating in the air.
I think they're really good.
And I think it helps the line, you know, where the doctor says, you
know, that he's worried that he might be found guilty because
they've got a bit of fluff in their sprockets or whatever you've
got in there.
The fact that they're just sort of a box of flashing lights, you
know, that I think that really helps that line work better.
We'll get back to the witnesses that he calls.
But the last witness. when he says I have another witness to call
and they go, who?
And he goes, you.
I mean, that always takes me by, took me by surprise as a kid.
I just thought it was really, really clever.
You know, and then they go, they're having their little animated
conversation about, you know, this is more still regulating, sort
of, I just love that.
But of course, he does call other witnesses, one of which is...
Oh, yes.
This is Romana, he calls.
And, you know, in the guidebooks and the companion books and all
of that sort of thing.
Romana's name is always given as Romana Verat Trilunda.
But in fact, Tom and Mary don't pronounce it that way at all this
season.
So she's Romana de Varat Nalunda when she's introduced in the
rebos operation.
And here, of course, in the formality of the courtroom, the doctor
refers to her as Miss Devaratnalunda.
That's hilarious.
Hilarious. just love it.
You know, there's so many good things about it.
In a way, I understand when people say, oh, you know, it all goes
to hell in the last 2 episodes, but really what it is, it's kind
of like the horror premise has played out.
We've had the chase, we've had people die.
So we could leather rinse repeat, but even Hinchcliffe didn't do
that.
If you look at Pyramids of Mars, you know, we go off to Mars for
the last episode.
For a terrible last episode.
Yeah, and this is so much better.
And especially things like when Romana is asked to call her, call
herself a mere humanoid.
She says, I object to the wording.
But in fact, the Megara, ah, great kind of Douglas Adams style
creation, aren't they?
You know, they're justice machines.
Douglas Adams is very much about bureaucracy and the way that
systems are cruel to individual people and also about the way that
technology gets out of control or, you know, impacts negatively on
our lives in a way that we don't expect.
So these are justice machines with absolute contempt for
humanity.
Like, the only reason to care about justice is because you care
about people.
Do you know what I mean?
Because justice is something that you do to people.
So if you don't care about people, if you've got out of contempt
for them.
What the hell is the point of justice?
But these, they have absolute contempt for human beings, and we
learn, of course, that they were called in one time by a big
galactic federation, and they found the galactic federation in
contempt of court, and blew up the entire galaxy, and that's a
complete kind of Douglas Adams sort of thing.
And so the idea that your legal counsel might be involved in
executing you later on, you know, is very much along those lines.
I want to go back to the pronunciation of Romana's now.
Because for me, it'll always be Romana Voltana.
And I'm now going to go into sidetrack, which is a bit of a
convention anecdote.
I don't know, you should remember this.
Yeah, I remember him very well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So Mary Tam came out to Australia in 1993 for convention, which
was the 1st convention that I was involved with helping and I was
just one of the little clems and he became much more important
later on.
And I picked Mary and her daughter, Lauren up from the airport.
And Mary was suffering from a throat condition.
She was already very croaky, going from hot to cold, you know, and
so I was very green in those days.
And so I decided, well, we were going to Parramatta for the
convention, which was about a 50 minute drive from the airport, but
I thought, oh, no, what we'll do is we'll drive over the harbour
bridge and we'll show you the opera house and, you know, a good
adding a good 15 to 20 minutes on our trip at that time.
But for whatever reason, that day in Sydney, like this fog just
blanketed everything.
You could see nothing.
It was so muggy and hot.
We were so hot in the car and I turned on the air conditioning.
The air conditioning had this conniption, which I just, you know, I
don't know.
All this white gas just went out of the air conditioner straight
into Marytown in my face.
Like, it never had it before, never had it since, right?
So I almost gassed Mary Tanned in the car.
But I might have got a handset that show had a throat that was, you
know, a croaking voice.
So it wasn't my fault.
I'm just saying to people who went to that convention.
At that time, Doctor Who was getting shown, I think, on repeats in
the morning on the ABC, like really early in the morning.
The cupboard managed to get an announcement to say that there was
a evention coming up with various guests because back then
listeners, we didn't have the internet.
So what we had was we had an answering machine service basically
ring someone's number.
So, a friend of the podcast, Peter Griffiths, had an answering
machine, and they came back to the answering machine in the next
few days, and there was this child's voice on there.
I can only imagine it's like that child that becomes the
tochlophane in season three.
And the child said, oh, hello, I'd like some more information
about the Huvention with Joe Grant, the Turlo, and Romana
Voltran.
So Roman of Voltana got shortened and became Voltran, so Mary
suffered from Voltran.
Yeah, it was a terrible illness.
Terriblely throughout that entire convention.
And yeah, she was, she was...
And if that young child is out there listening to us now.
Our voicemail is, no, they didn't leave their number.
It was just that was it.
Hang up, kick goodbye, you know, so they never found out who it
was.
Please let us know so we can give you information on that
convention.
I like Tom's barrister's wig.
But he's pulled off that he has a barrister's wig in his pocket
and he just pulls it out.
I think that's spectacular.
I have a barrister's wig in my pocket right now, just in case.
But I just have all the witticisms and I think that's part of
Antony Reid and David Fisher.
I'm not from outer space.
I'm from inner time.
Little things like that, but...
I love how the Magara sentence Vivian Faye to 1500 years
imprisonment, followed by perpetual imprisonment, and they're to
be served consecutively.
Well that's how they do things in America, you know.
I have always quite liked the idea that sometime around 3478, you
know, there might be a moment where Sisera of Diplos could
escape.
And you know, they could bring back Susan Engle.
She's still acting.
I saw her in Midsummer a few weeks ago, you know.
You said she's looking pretty good.
She's looking pretty good.
I just think it's so funny.
I think it's so funny the way that Amelia just has to redo the
whole survey with like Vivian as a stone right there.
Three of the other stones gone.
Yeah, yeah.
And then she gets a very, very quick goodbye to the doctor
Ramana.
It's very rushed there at the end, but her top is very see
through.
Yes, we do get some Beatrix Lehman nipple in that scene, which is
a little bit unfortunate.
It was very cold.
I don't think she, I don't think she believed in wearing a bra.
No.
And I do like it's fine.
I do like the comedy ending with, again, with the doctor, failing
to put the key to time together as a jigsaw and giving a withering
look to...
In fact, I think we call back in the Armageddon factor, and I
think Romana has to do the assembly again.
Yeah, it's something that comes up a number of times.
It's rather, I think it's quite fun. that she can't recognise what
they are, but she can put them together.
And he knows what they are, but can't put them together.
This might be my favourite Graham Williams story.
It's so very good.
And there's very little to fault in it.
And what there is to fold in it, there are so many other stories
guilty of as well, you know, the occasional floppy prop or
whatever.
And it just seems like the entire cast had a great time making
it.
Like the bit where the Magara do go, it's fed up, modulated voices
of David McAllister, and Gerald Cross, and they're saying things
like, ping, ping, ping.
There's my friend David.
Bong, bong, bong, bing, bing, bing.
So they're obviously having fun.
And there's the famous story that John Leeson, who was actually in
the outside broadcast fan doing canine's voice live, which is
lovely, was out one day on a break, taking photos of the stones
and got chatting with Beatrice Lehman about photography and what
have you, and she loved dogs.
So, you know, in her mind.
Oh, you're a dog.
I love you.
At the cast after party, she walked up to him with this brown
paper bag and said, this is for you.
Open it, and it was her, I think, 20-year-old Lika camera.
Incredibly expensive, incredibly valuable.
And John's just like, what?
And she just said, oh, I've not used it in years, darling.
You have it.
You love photography so much.
And he just left going, What?
It just sounds like everyone had such a fun time.
And unlike other stories where people say, oh, yes, we had so much
fun.
The audience have fun with this as well.
And even at the end, even though, you know, Vivian Fey has killed
100s of people either by herself or by proxy through the ogre
you're kind of like, oh, she's imprisoned.
And yeah, the professor's lost a friend and she has to do the
survey again, but she has an academic reputation to consider.
It's such a good script and I'm so glad that we get more of David
Fisher further down the line as well.
I just, you know, as Nathan was saying so far this season, every
story puts a smile to my face and I'm enjoying Doctor Who again.
Yeah, it really is a fun year.
Well, that is all the time we have for the Stones of Blood.
We will be back next week for my personal favourite ever Doctor
Who story, the Androids of Tara.
Wow.
Yeah, I know.
That's a big call.
I know.
I will be explaining myself.
Good.
Until then, you can find us at our website, flightthroughentirety
com, flight through entirety on Facebook and iTunes and FTE
podcast on Twitter.
Over on Bondfinger, we have the 1st 5 Sean Connery films available
as commentary.
So that's Dr. No from Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball
and you only live twice.
You can find those on Bondfinger.com, Bondfinger on Facebook and
iTunes and Bondfinger cast on Twitter.
Until then, may all your citric acid products be used in the
defence of planet Earth.
Thank you very much and good night.
Good night.
See you soon.
That was flight through entirety with Todd BLB, Nathan Bottonley
and Brendan Jones.
This episode, the full Ed Will Morgan, was recorded on the 4th of
October, 2015.
The next episode will be released on December 27th. much like
hyperspace, we hope that this podcast is a theoretical absurdity
that you've always wanted to get lost in.
I am on.
You are on.
Fantastic.
Uh, well, I just need to remember what my, my thing was...
Things of blood.
Oh, yeah, I remember.