It’s been a mere 900 years since last week’s episode, and it’s time to check in with Ashildr to see if she’s still the naive and loving young girl she was back in her Viking village days. Or — like the rest of us — has she simply turned into Peter Capaldi’s Doctor? It’s The Woman Who Lived.
Notes and links
Nathan refers to the Blackadder the Third episode Amy and Amiability in which a young woman played by Miranda Richardson disguises herself as a highwayman called the Shadow, who has a serious problem with squirrels. The first scene of this story is very much written by someone who remembers that episode.
In his massive best seller Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell proposes the theory that it takes 10,000 hours to become really proficient at something. If you want to hear two of our favourite podcasters rip Gladwell’s book apart, they do that in an episode of their podcastIf Books Could Kill.
The Doctor Who production crew gave Maisie Williams and Rufus Hound video cameras so that they could record things that took place during the production. One of Rufus’s videos made it onto the Series 9 blu-ray release; three of them can be found on the BBC’s YouTube channel — here, here, and here. Watch them: they’re adorable.
Picks of the week
Todd
Todd recommends the Torchwood episodes also written by Catherine Tregenna, particularly the sad and beautiful Captain Jack Harkness, as well as Meat and Adam (and Out of Time, a brilliant episode that we didn’t mention).
Simon
Simon wants you watch The Beast (2023) starring Léa Seydoux, who played James Bond’s love interest in the two most recent films. It’s a romance set in three different time periods, 1910, 2014 and 2044. It’s due for release some time early next year.
Richard
Richard has headed into Big Finish territory, particularly those stories starring Rufus Hound as the Monk, particularly The Missy Adventures, whose first three box sets also feature Rufus Hound. He also appears with Tim Treloar and Katy Manning in Volume 4 of The Third Doctor Adventures.
Nathan
Nathan’s back on his Star Trek thing again, and this time it’s Star Trek: Lower Decks Series 4, which is nearing its end as we release this episode. You can also catch our coverage of Lower Decks on Untitled Star Trek Project.
We are launching a new commentary podcast on Space:1999 next weekend, so keep an eye out for more details during the week. (The title is, for now, still a closely-guarded secret.)
A couple of our podcasts are finished or on hiatus right now. Jodie into Terror was our flashcast on every episode of the Whittaker era, recorded just a couple of days after the broadcast of the episode. Bondfinger is our James Bond commentary podcast, which also covers some of our favourite spy-fi TV shows of the sixties and seventies.
Maximum Power is back! Our podcast about Blakes 7, co-produced with the Trap One podcast, returns today with a pre-Series C episode based on the Big Finish Blakes 7 story Warship, set between Star One and Aftermath. We’ll be back each week to cover each episode of Series C.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week we watched a surprisingly enjoyable episode of Star Trek: Voyager, which gave Janeway and Chatokay some time to pursue a mostly non-cringeworthy romantic relationship.
Episode 272: John Scott Martin in a Zarbi Suit
· Recorded on Sunday 10 September 2023 · Duration 0:53:31
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This week, we remind ourselves of what the Doctor stands for, as we watch him train up some very silly Vikings to be sweet and funny enough to see off an invasion by big stupid monsters with mouths full of teeth. Stacey Smith? joins us to discuss the story of The Girl Who Died.
Notes and links
Stacey discovered how much she liked this episode while watching it for Who is the Doctor 2, an unofficial guide to the Smith and Capaldi years, published in 2020.
Wallander was a Swedish TV series based on the detective novels by Henning Menkell. It was re-made in English, in a version starring Kenneth Branagh as the detective, and featuring our very own haematophobic Viking Heidi (Barnaby Kay).
And finally, the director of this episode, Ed Bazalgette, is very likely to have featured in this music video, familiar to both Nathan and Stacey from their childhoods: Turning Japanese by the Vapors.
A couple of our podcasts are finished or on hiatus right now. Jodie into Terror was our flashcast on every episode of the Whittaker era, recorded just a couple of days after the broadcast of the episode. Bondfinger is our James Bond commentary podcast, which also covers some of our favourite spy-fi TV shows of the sixties and seventies.
Maximum Power is a podcast about Blakes 7, a co-production with the Trap One Podcast. Our Series C coverage is impending. Clear your schedules.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. We took a break this week, but if you want to hear Nathan squeaking incredulously about the weaknesses of a Star Trek series, we recommend taking a listen to our coverage of Star Trek: Enterprise. We’ll be back this Friday with a commentary on quite a good episode of Star Trek: Voyager.
Episode 271: Eels with Jazz Hands
· Recorded on Sunday 27 August 2023 · Duration 0:52:42
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This week, a bone Vervoid joins in the fun as we travel back in time to Wales in 2015 pretending to be Scotland in 1980 pretending to be somewhere in the Soviet Union. And it’s hard to say which time paradox is the most annoying, the bootstrap one or the predestination one. Thank goodness Frazer Gregory is here to help us sort it all out — it’s Before the Flood.
Notes and links
Like Steven B in our episode on Flatline, Frazer uses the Christopher Nolan film The Prestige (2006) as a way of understanding what Toby Whithouse is doing by setting up the bootstrap paradox at the start of this episode — it’s a magic trick.
Likewise, Frazer compares this story’s unresolved conclusion with the way that the Season 9 episode of The SimpsonsDas Bus throws its ending away with a hilarious voiceover from James Earl Jones.
El Sandifer refers to the Fisher King as a Bone Vervoid in her TARDIS Eruditorum essay on this story. Bone Vervoid. Warning: she is considerably less kind to these two episodes than we have been.
Of course, A Long Tradition of Doctor Who Monsters That in Some
Way Resemble Human Genitalia is the title of Flight Through Entirety Episode 168, and it refers to Human Dalek Sec in Evolution of the Daleks. It is currently the record-holder as the longest title of any episode of Flight Through Entirety.
We refer to some of Peter Serafinowicz’s earlier work, including his role as the voice of Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace (1999), In 2002, he appeared in Look Around You, a spoof of educational science programmes for schoolchildren. And in 2007, he appeared in his own sketch comedy show on BBC Two, The Peter Serafinowicz Show, which introduced his character Brian Butterfield, who he continues to play on tour this year. The Butterfield Diet Plan is a must see.
Picks of the week
James
Fans of weird time paradoxes will also enjoy Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987), which, through a time paradox of its own, was the inspiration for Adams’s own Doctor Who stories, City of Death (1979) and Shada (1979, but in a nearby parallel universe).
Peter
Fans of weird time paradoxes will also enjoy the Sex in the City sequel TV series And Just Like That.
Nathan
Nathan picks the podcast Strong Songs, where enthusiastic and talented musician Kirk Hamilton analyses the music that he loves, in order to discover what it is that makes it great. Highly recommended.
Frazer
Like Nathan two weeks ago, Frazer recommends that you watch the wonderful new Star Trek series Strange New Worlds, which finished its second series earlier this year.
Jodie into Terror was our flashcast on every episode of the Whittaker era, recorded just a couple of days after the broadcast of the episode. Bondfinger is our James Bond commentary podcast, which also covers some of our favourite spy-fi TV shows of the sixties and seventies.
Maximum Power is a podcast about Blakes 7, a co-production with the Trap One Podcast. It’s on hiatus right now, but it will be returning with our coverage of Series C some time next month, we think.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watch a credible and highly-regarded episode of The Original Series with a monster in it that makes that hydra thing in Time-Flight look horrifyingly realistic.
Episode 270: Scottish Reasons
· Recorded on Sunday 13 August 2023 · Duration 0:55:07
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This week, we’re playing Doctor Who madlibs — cowering in an UNDERWATER BASE, waiting for the ELECTROMAGNETIC GHOSTS to pick us off one by one. Fortunately, Peter Capaldi and some attractive young people are here to keep us entertained. We’re Under the Lake.
Notes and links
The CEO of this base under siege is apparently called Richard Pritchard, a name some of us first encountered in Broken News, a 2005 comedy which replicated the exprience of channel hoping between 24-hour news channels during an emerging international crisis. On one of those channels, news anchor Richard Pritchard was accompanied by Katie Tate and Melanie Bellamby (Torchwood’s Indira Varma).
The coordinate system Nathan refers to is called what3words: it divides the Earth’s surface into 3 × 3 metre squares and assigns a three-word phrase to each square. At the risk of compromising my opsec, the pub I’m going to for dinner tonight has its front door in the square cross.paying.bucked.
Jodie into Terror is our flashcast on every episode of the Whittaker era, recorded just a couple of days after the broadcast of the episode. Bondfinger is our James Bond commentary podcast, which also covers some of our favourite spy-fi TV shows of the sixties and seventies.
Maximum Power is a podcast about Blakes 7, a co-production with the Trap One Podcast. It’s on hiatus right now, but it will be returning soon with our coverage of Series C.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watch the Series 5 finale and Series 6 premiere of Star Trek: Voyager — Equinox and Equinox, Part II — moderately entertaining episodes that fail in a very characteristically Voyager way.
Episode 269: Baseless Criticism
· Recorded on Sunday 13 August 2023 · Duration 0:50:36
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This week, the Doctor chats with Davros, Missy chats with Clara, and the four of us wonder if those chats are fun enough to sustain forty-five minutes of television. All while actually having quite a fun chat ourselves. It’s The Witch’s Familiar.
Notes and links
Quite a few mentions are made of the 60-minute LP of Genesis of the Daleks. This was released in 1979, more than 10 years before the first VHS release, so for much of our childhood it was the only Doctor Who story we could actually own (apart from the novelisations). Naturally, we basically know it off by heart.
The convention in Sydney that Nathan talks about took place in November 2015. In fact, it was where we all met Steven B for the first time. Here’s an account of the event published at the time in The Guardian.
The last time Moffat wrote for both the Daleks and the Master, the Master was played by Jonathan Pryce, and it was a story that also featured sewers full of faeces. That story was The Curse of Fatal Death, which we’ve linked to many times before and which you should all re-watch immediately.
Richard sees thematic parallels between this story and the 1961 film Judgement at Nuremberg, featuring Judy Garland, obviously, a lot of very accomplished actors and mad-uncle-of-the-podcast William Shatner. He also draws a parallel between the conversations here between the Doctor and Davros and the ones between Patrick McGoohan and Leo McKern in the final episodes of The Prisoner.
Sir Ken Adam (1921–2016) was the designer on many of the early James Bond films, from Dr. No in 1962 to Moonraker in 1979. He’s particularly famous for his sets’ modernist design and angled ceilings.
Picks of the week
Simon
Simon recommends a quiet and thoughtful science fiction film After Yang (2021), in which a family has to come to terms with the death of their AI assistant Yang. Here’s the review from The Guardian.
Todd
Todd recommends the Australian competitive reality TV show Hunted, in which 24 people are dropped in Melbourne and have to avoid being captured by various former police officers and cybersecurity experts. Here’s a review from the Sydney Morning Herald.
Richard
Richard urges us to watch (or re-watch) the last two episodes of The Prisoner — Once Upon a Time and Fall Out, both of which star Leo McKern as Number Two.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November. Stay tuned for more details: there’s only a few weeks to go now.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Stay tuned for news about the release of our coverage of Series C: the wheels are in motion.
There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we are horrified by all the heterosexual romance on display in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Price.
Episode 268: A Very Busy Barnaby Edwards
· Recorded on Sunday 6 August 2023 · Duration 1:01:23
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So Doctor Who is back, doing the same old thing for another year, but this time we’re relitigating the main moral question of a thirty-year-old episode: can we kill a genocidal dictator even though he’s just a small child with a dirty face lost on a battlefield somewhere? Tom Spilsbury joins us to discuss The Magician’s Apprentice.
Notes and Links
Nathan compares the hand mines in this episode to the terrifying Gloom Spawn from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
Tom and Peter mention two videos that accompany this episode. The first one is a deleted scene on Karn starring Clare Higgins as Ohila; the second one is a six-minute skit by Steven Moffat called The Doctor’s Meditation, in which the Doctor’s attempts to meditate fail because of the poor quality of the water he’s drinking and so he spends days and days getting the townsfolk to dig wells instead.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November. Stay tuned for more details: it’s not long now.
Our James Bond (et al.) commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Stay tuned for news about the release of our coverage of Series C.
There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watch a top-tier episode from Deep Space Nine’s sixth season, Rocks and Shoals.
Episode 267: Making My Head Hurt
· Recorded on Sunday 30 July 2023 · Duration 1:05:57
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It’s Christmas in July, and what could be more Christmassy than having your brains sucked out by predatory alien crabs? Why, Nick Frost as Santa, of course! So welcome, everyone, to your Last Christmas.
Notes and Links
We often use an episode’s show notes to enumerate a story’s influences, but Mr Moffat has already done it for us. Towards the end of the episode, Shona picks up a piece of paper which outlines her Christmas Day itinerary, including DVD (Alien), DVD (The Thing from Another World), and DVD (Miracle on 34th Street). She also plans to forgive Dave, which is nice.
Brendan mentions the long-forgotten Doctor Who spin-off Class, whose only season aired towards the end of 2016. Peter Capaldi’s Doctor appears in the first episode, which is his only onscreen appearance between the 2015 Christmas Special The Husbands of River Song and the 2016 Christmas Special The Return of Doctor Mysterio.
Before Last Christmas there was, of course, Inception (2010): Christopher Nolan’s film about people making a journey through nested dreamscapes.
Brendan mentions the Futurama episode called The Sting, which is full of nested dreamscapes in which it’s unclear who is doing the actual dreaming. Clever, moving and ridiculous — you could almost say Moffaty. (Futurama is back right now with a new series. Exciting.)
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November. (We also hint at another untitled Doctor Who project this episode, but you’ll find out more about that later in the year.)
Our James Bond (et al.) commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. We’re determined to bring you our coverage of Series C later this year.
There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watch a terrible episode of the Animated Series called Bem and spend a lot of time laughing.
Episode 266: The Tangerine in the Window
· Recorded on Saturday 17 June 2023 · Duration 0:55:12
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Peter Capaldi’s Doctor might not be sure if he’s a good man, but can Nathan, Todd, Peter and Simon be sure if his first series is a good series? Let’s find out (while determining who to snog, marry and avoid on the way).
Notes and links
Thank you to Steven B for his question about the ratings during the Capaldi era.
Fans of tables of numbers (like Todd) will also enjoy the Doctor Who Guide’s ratings page, which has information on the ratings and audience appreciation data for every Doctor Who episode since An Unearthly Child.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November. (We also hint at another untitled Doctor Who project this episode, but you’ll find out more about that later in the year.)
Our James Bond (et al.) commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. We’re determined to bring you our coverage of Series C later this year.
There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watch an episode of Voyager with Kazons and Seska and things. Just like the old days.
Episode 265: New Life Crisis
· Recorded on Sunday 18 June 2023 · Duration 1:18:20
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It’s happened again: it’s the end of the season, and all our long-dead relatives have come back as Cybermen. Only this time, instead of hanging around the kitchen reeking of tobacco, they’re wandering through graveyards and — well, that’s it really, wandering through graveyards. Fortunately, Missy is here to liven things up a bit. It’s Death in Heaven.
We mention Doctor Who and the Silurians as a previous story where the Doctor comes into conflict with soldiers, and we refer to El Sandifer’s take on the end of that story, a scene which presents this conflict explicitly but which is never followed up in any satisfactory way.
Richard brings up Chris Addison’s Radio 4 comedy series Civilisation, which co-stars the original Ford Prefect, Geoffrey McGivern.
And, finally, the Doctor plummeting to his death from a plane inevitably reminds us of Roger Moore in a similar situation as James Bond in Moonraker (1979).
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Recording of our coverage of Series C is nearing its conclusion: it will be ready for you later in the year.
There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watch an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Genesis, in which the crew devolve into various types of monsters and animals, upsetting fans who have the (baffling) expectation that their franchise will take itself more seriously.
Episode 264: Absolutely Ainley
· Recorded on Sunday 4 June 2023 · Duration 0:53:09
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This week, Danny’s death is somehow made up for by the culmination of a season-long arc which finally brings Michelle Gomez properly into the limelight. It’s Dark Water.
Notes and links
This week’s evil corporation is 3W, which gets it’s name from the three words Don’t cremate me. But, as Brendan points out, it’s also the production code for Invasion of the Dinosaurs. We explain about production codes in unnecessary detail in the shownotes for Episode 237.
The Black Orchid problem is that a two-part story has its climax at the halfway point instead of somewhere more appropriate. It’s identified by El Sandifer in her essay on that story.
Well, we found the clip for the shownotes: Brendan mentions Chris Addison’s appearance on an episode of Have I Got News for You? hosted by Tom Baker. The whole episode is worth a watch, but the incident that Brendan refers to starts here.
Once again, we allude to the Troops to Teachers programme, which gave veterans the chance to fast-track their teacher training so that they could work in schools. The Guardianreports on the scheme here.
Fans of Missy’s (other) gay sidekick Dr Chang can see much more of Andrew Leung in Lilting (2014), where his lover is played by Ben Whishaw.
We’re also on Facebook and Mastodon, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll turn up unexpectedly on your next trip to London and reveal to your surprise that we’re actually the Vardans, from the beloved Doctor Who classic, The Invasion of Time (4Z).
And more
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Recording is continuing on schedule, and our coverage of Series C will be ready for you later in the year.
There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watch an episode of the kids’ show Star Trek: Prodigy, and have a really good time.
Episode 263: Terribly Gay
· Recorded on Sunday 4 June 2023 · Duration 1:01:12
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It’s like the New Forest only newer, as well as more sudden and completely worldwide. But is it here for revenge, or to provide us with some much-needed help? Let’s find out as Mathew Hounsell and Kevin Burnard join us to discuss In the Forest of the Night.
Notes and links
Here’s an article on William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, from which this episode gets its name (and its tiger, I guess). Delightfully, as well as providing a short analysis of the poem, it reproduces Blake’s full version of the poem in its original form as a text on a watercolour painting. [Sadly, a cyberattack on the British Library in October 2023 has caused the loss of this article and a good deal of its digital collection.]
Bubble Shock is the extremely unhealthy soft drink created and marketed by the alien Bane in the first story of the first season of The Sarah Jane Adventures.
The Gaia Hypothesis proposes that living organisms and the environment in which they evolved form a complex, self-regulating system that keeps the Earth habitable. It was developed in the 1970s and has generally recieved a fair degree of criticism ever since.
We’ve got an exciting new Doctor Who project to launch at the start of 2024, but — annoyingly — we’re not going to tell you anything more about it until later in the year. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, you can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Recording is continuing on schedule, and our coverage of Series C will be ready for you later in the year.
There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watched in stunned horror as Enterprise chief engineer Trip Tucker got unexpectedly pregnant, with predictable results.
Episode 262: She Was the Hydrangeas All Along
· Recorded on Saturday 6 May 2023 · Duration 0:55:40
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This week, we’re doing some judicially-mandated cleaning up around a council estate in Bristol when we make some terrifying discoveries about the source and nature of the graffiti we’re painting over, and some even more terrifying discoveries about our own and our friends’ moral characters. Also, someone left the TARDIS prop from Logopolis Part 3 lying around here somewhere. It’s Flatline.
Notes and links
Brendan mentions Jamie Mathieson’s film Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel (2009), a film starring Chris O’Dowd, Dean Lennox Kelly and Marc Wootton as three friends in a pub coping with a weird Moffat-y time travel thing. Nathan mentions Toby Whithouse’s series Being Human (2008–2013), originally about a ghost, a vampire and a werewolf flat-sharing in Bristol, and eventually about a completely different ghost, vampire and werewolf flat-sharing on Barry Island: Jamie Mathieson wrote four scripts, one for each of the last four seasons of the show.
The idea of beings living in a two-dimensional world was explored as early as 1884 in Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, written by an English schoolmaster, which combines a lightly comic critique of Victorian social hierarchy with imaginative speculation about the weird experience of living in a two-dimensional world.
Steven’s description of Series 8’s gradual development of the Doctor’s character as a magic trick is explicitly based on The Prestige (2006), an early Christopher Nolan film in which two Victorian magicians, Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman, are pitted against one another in a quest for the ultimate illusion.
In For Your Eyes Only (1981), Roger Moore’s Bond tries to protect a young woman by dissuading her from killing the people who murdered her parents. That woman was Carole Bouquet, whose bottom and alarmingly long legs adorned the film’s poster, six years before the first release of Adobe Photoshop.
We’ve got an exciting new Doctor Who project to launch at the start of 2024, but — annoyingly — we’re not going to tell you anything more about it until later in the year. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, you can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Recording is continuing on schedule, and our coverage of Series C will be ready for you later in the year.
There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we say goodbye to Star Trek: Picard Series 2, before it returns in 2023 as a massive television event.
Episode 261: The Prestige
· Recorded on Sunday 30 April 2023 · Duration 0:55:07
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This week, a technologically-augmented interdimensional mummy runs amok on a replica of the Orient Express in space under the control of a terrifying alien intelligence or something. It’s a day at the office for Doctor Who, in Mummy on the Orient Express.
Notes and links
Mummy on the Orient Express marks the triumphant return of Janet Henfrey to Doctor Who after about twenty-five years: she plays Miss Hardaker in The Curse of Fenric. She will come back some time after that to play the Adjudicator in Sil and the Seven Seeds of Arodor.
David Bamber is in charge of this version of the Orient Express: Nathan recognises him immediately as Cicero in Rome and as Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice. Richard notes that he plays Adolf Hitler in Valkyrie (2008), and perhaps more terrifyingly Noel in Camping, a sitcom created by Julia Davis. Si saw him turn up in an episode of Endeavour, the Inspector Morse prequel set in the late 1960s.
Meanwhile, Christopher Villiers returns to Doctor Who as Professor Moorhouse; thirty years earlier he was young Hugh Fitzwilliam in The King’s Demons. Alarmingly, Richard is right to suggest that he is a descendant of the aristocracy.
And finally, Frank Skinner is a famous standup comedian and radio presenter. The show Richard is thinking of may be The Rest is History on Radio 4, but he has been in many, many radio shows over the years.
You can see John Sessions’s 1994 audition to play the Doctor in the TV movie here on YouTube. He plays the terrifying General Tannis in the BBC webcast Death Comes to Time (2001).
In 2018, Jenna Coleman starred in a TV miniseries called The Cry, which was shot in Australia.
We’ve got an exciting new Doctor Who project to launch at the start of 2024, but — annoyingly — we’re not going to tell you anything more about it yet. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, you can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Recording is continuing on schedule, and our coverage of Series C will be ready for you later in the year.
There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watched a massive soap opera event two-parter from Deep Space Nine, complete with long-lost children and scheming lookalikes — In Purgatory’s Shadow and By Inferno’s Light.
Episode 260: Dangle Your Lallies
· Recorded on Sunday 30 April 2023 · Duration 0:45:57
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This week, Nathan, Brendan, Simon and Colin are trapped in a room with only forty-five minutes to decide whether Kill the Moon is terrible or a towering work of genius. It goes quite well, surprisingly.
El Sandifer’s essay on TARDIS Eruditorum contains, as you might expect, a clever reading of this episode, and both Brendan and Nathan find reasons to refer to it here.
Colin and Brendan mention science fiction shows called The Expanse and Babylon 5, but I absolutely refuse to do any research into them at all.
We’ve got an exciting new Doctor Who project to launch at the start of 2024, but — annoyingly — we’re not going to tell you anything more about it yet. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, you can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Recording is continuing on schedule, and our coverage of Series C should be ready for you later in the year.
There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we were bored rigid as the crew of the Enterprise completely dismantled a horrible authoritarian human colony in The Masterpiece Society. Back to Deep Space Nine next week.
Episode 259: The Goldilocks Zone
· Recorded on Sunday 29 January 2023 · Duration 0:57:25
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This week, Pete Lambert and Hannah Cooper join us for a particularly embarrassing Coal Hill School parents’ evening, which goes horribly wrong when a Mechanoid is found roaming the premises. It’s The Caretaker.
Notes and links
Pete has a dim memory of something similar happening during his childhood, but mere months before Series 8 aired, the Troops to Teachers programme was introduced, giving veterans the chance to fast-track their teacher training so that they could work in schools. The Guardianreports on the scheme here.
Vasquez Rocks is a park not far from Hollywood, and was famously used in the original Star Trek episode Arena (the one with the lizard man in a skimpy cocktail dress). A particular famous rock formation, nicknamed Kirk’s rock is recreated in the opening shot of this episode.
Nathan alludes to the fact that Barbara is absent from Episodes 4 and 5 of The Sensorites because Jacqueline Hill was on holiday, and that she returns from her time on the Sensorite spaceship with a spectacular tan in Episode 6.
In the Press Gang episode UnXpected, Mmoloki Chrystie’s character Frazer Davis encounters the fictional Colonel X, who was the main character in a cheesy spy-fi show he watched as a child. Michael Jayston is magnificent as Colonel X. (You might be able to find it on YouTube if you look hard enough. It’s worth the effort.)
We’ve got an exciting new Doctor Who project to launch at the start of 2024, but — annoyingly — we’re not going to tell you anything more about it yet. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, you can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Recording is continuing on schedule, and our coverage of Series C should be ready for you later in the year.
There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watched a barely competent episode of the Original Series called Wolf in the Fold.
Episode 258: Both as Bad as One Another
· Recorded on Saturday 28 January 2023 · Duration 0:49:21
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Nathan, James, Peter and Simon come to in a bare darkened room full of mid-range sound recording equipment with no memory at all of how they got there, only to find — to their horror — that they have agreed to podcast about our next Doctor Who episode, Time Heist.
Notes and links
In a discussion of this very straightforward episode, there’s nothing specifically intertextual or in need of explanatory notes. So you get the week off this week. Or, if you like, you could listen to Untitled Star Trek Project’s take on Star Trek’s take on the heist movie, Deep Space Nine’s Badda-Bing Badda-Bang.
About all those baffling Blake’s 7 references ten minutes from the end: a pivotal Blake’s 7 episode, Pressure Point, featured a long descent into a space base where each level was identical apart from the colour of the gel used in the lighting of the set. You can hear more about that in the episode of Maximum Power which deals with it — Project Managing His Adventures.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Recording is continuing on schedule, and our coverage of Series C should be ready for you later in the year.
There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we welcomed Seven of Nine to the Voyager family in the two-part season finale/season opener, Scorpion.
Episode 257: Mr and Mrs Teller
· Recorded on Sunday 8 January 2023 · Duration 0:48:56
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This week, we’re joined under the Doctor’s bed by Fiona Tomney, to discuss whether monsters are real or imaginary or both, and to squee repeatedly over the Capaldi performance. It’s Listen.
Notes and links
We don’t actually talk about the Missy Reveal in our episode on The Time Meddler. The Missy Reveal at the end of Dark Water was first broadcast the day before the release of Flight Through EntiretyEpisode 13, Airwick Gatport, which means that the Capaldi Era was broadcast into a world where Flight Through Entirety was still discussing Doctor Who from the 1960s.
The Blair Witch Project (1999) was a found-footage style horror movie that was absolutely huge at the time of its release. Like Listen, it hints at the monster repeatedly without ever really showing it on screen.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show. Plans are already well underway for our coverage of Series C later in the year, probably.
There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we tracked the terrifying personal journey of Kira Nerys from beloved terrorist to hidebound administrator in the Series 1 Deep Space Nine episode Progress.
Episode 256: Level of Ambiguity
· Recorded on Sunday 15 January 2023 · Duration 1:02:12
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This week, Nathan, Richard, Todd and Adrian Phoon leave the peasants of Worksop to their mud-eating and get together to ask themselves the questions Is the Doctor as big a hero as Robin Hood? and Is Robin Hood even real?, only to come up with some very surprising answers. It’s Robot of Sherwood.
Notes and links
There have been any number of film versions of Robin Hood, which is part of the point, but Richard is mostly reminded of the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn as Robin, directed by Michael Curtiz, with an Oscar-winning score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
Errol Flynn didn’t go to Scots College in Sydney, Nathan: it was Sydney Church of England Grammar School, commonly known as Shore. He claimed to have been expelled from Shore for having sex with one of the ladies who worked in the laundry.
Star Trek: The Next Generation did its fantasy Robin Hood episode in its triumphant fourth season. It guest starred John DeLancie as Q and was called Qpid.
Here is an article in The Guardian from 2014, reporting the cuts made to this episode because of the beheading of two American journalists by members of Islamic State.
We spend some time talking about Ben Miller’s career. He’s one half of Armstrong and Miller, of course, as well as doing two series of Death in Paradise. Paul Cornell’s Primeval episode which featured Miller hunting a dinosaur was called Traitor Revealed.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show. Plans are already well underway for our coverage of Series C later in the year, probably.
There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watched another episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — this time, the delightful fantasy romp The Elysian Kingdom. There are new episodes out every Friday.
And finally, Brendan and his friend Bjay have joined forces to play and review videogames on The Bjay BJ Game Show. Take a listen: it’s funny, well-informed and completely enjoyable.
Episode 255: Phallocentric Energy
· Recorded on Sunday 8 January 2023 · Duration 0:52:44
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This week, we’re joined by Adam Richard, shrunk to a microscopic size, and sent on a mission consisting mostly of ruthless moral self-examination. Meanwhile, somewhere else completely, a romcom is taking place. It’s Into the Dalek.
Notes and links
Some of us are old enough to remember the constant television repeats of Fantastic Voyage (1966), in which a small submarine and its crew are shrunk to microscopic size to remove a blood clot from the brain of a scientist who is defecting to the West. The glamorous catsuited assistant to the crew’s chief scientist is played by a young Raquel Welch.
Richard identifies as the chief influences on this episode Fantastic Voyage and Rob Shearman’s Doctor Who episode Dalek. (Which we discuss on Episode 137, To Mainsplain Aliens.)
Of course, Peter Capaldi was most well known for his role in Armando Ianucci’s political comedy series The Thick of It, in which he played Malcolm Tucker, the Prime Minister’s sweary and frankly terrifying political enforcer. Ianucci will go on to create Veep, in which Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays the hapless Vice President of the United States, and Avenue 5, starring Hugh Laurie as the captain of a luxury space cruiser which goes catastrophically off course.
Moffat’s first sitcom Joking Apart has been mentioned before on the podcast. Its main character also discovers how terrible he is as a person during the course of the first series.
Class was a short-lived and ill-fated Doctor Who spinoff, written by Patrick Ness and set at Coal Hill Academy. Peter Capaldi appears as the Doctor in Episode 1, and the season itself is broadcast between Series 9 and Series 10 of Doctor Who. It is cancelled after the first eight-episode run.
Trinity Wells, the American newsreader during the first RTD era, does have her very own Big Finish story: Driving Miss Wells by James Goss, which is part of the second Lives of Captain Jack box set, released in 2019.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show. Plans are already well underway for our coverage of Series C later in the year, probably.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. We’ll be back with a new episode this coming Friday, but while you’re waiting for that, you can still catch our most recent episode, in which Joe and Nathan got together in person for the first time ever to watch the notorious Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Justice.
Episode 254: Animosity and Horror
· Recorded on Sunday 8 January 2023 · Duration 0:48:51
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After half a lifetime of waiting, the time has come for Peter Capaldi to finally take on the role he was born to play. But is twenty-first century Who ready for this spiky and unpredictable leading man and his sexy and unhinged mortal enemy? We’re about to find out — but first, let’s take a Deep Breath.
The new title sequence was based closely on a concept created in 2013 by digital artist Billy Hanshaw, which quickly garnered hundreds of thousands of views and was spotted by Steven Moffat, who said it was the “only new title idea I’d seen since 1963”. You can read the story of its creation in Connor Johnston’s interview with Billy Hanshaw at Doctor Who TV.
So. Elizabeth Tower, which houses Big Ben, is 97.5 metres tall, while a Tyrannosaurus rex standing upright is, we think, only about 5 metres tall. But in November 2022, paleontologists Jordan Mallon and David Hone suggested that the largest T. rex could have been 70% larger than the largest specimen we have now, and it could have weighed about 15 tonnes. Which suggests that Madam Vastra knew what she was talking about.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show. We’ll be back again for Series C later in the year, probably.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. We’ve been taking a break for the last few weeks, but in our most recent episode, Joe and Nathan got together in person for the first time ever to watch the notorious Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Justice.
Episode 253: A Peter Capaldi–Shaped Time Tunnel
· Recorded on Sunday 11 December 2022 · Duration 1:05:11
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