Brendan, Nathan and Todd are all suffering from Lazar’s disease, or possibly withdrawing from hydromel, which might explain our somewhat listless approach to that critically acclaimed Doctor Who classic, Terminus.
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Terminus was released on DVD in 1992/1993. In the US, it was released on its own, as usual, (Amazon US), but it will cost you 70 US dollars, which would be crazy. You could also buy it as part of the Black Guardian Trilogy box set (Amazon US), which is how it was released in the UK and Australia (Amazon UK).
Notes and links
Liza Goddard plays Kari in this story. To Australian viewers, she is better known as Clancy in Skippy (1967–1969); Nathan has almost completely forgotten her role in the British sitcom Yes, Honestly (1976–1977).
Before Mawdryn Undead came along, Turlough was originally going to make his début in Song of the Space Whale by Pat Mills and John Wagner. This was finally recorded (as usual) as part of Big Finish‘s Lost Stories range range, as The Song of Megaptera, starring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant.
In his Big Finish story The Waters of Amsterdam, Jonathan Morris offers an explanation of why the Doctor has set up the scanner to check in on Tegan and Nyssa’s bedroom. (Bad Doctor!)
While we’ve been away, Brendan has roared into the 70s with a summary of Season 7 of Doctor Who, in which he confronts Autons, Silurians, John Abineri and a scary parallel version of himself. With hilarious results. If you want to find his summaries of the 1960s seasons of Doctor Who, check out the playlist on YouTube.
Episode 86 · Mawdryn Undead · Sunday 21 August 2016
Our 20th anniversary season of Flight Through Entirety continues with a discussion of Mawdryn Undead — yet another story including delightful elements from the show’s past, such as the Brigadier, the Black Guardian and a crappy word peril cliffhanger for Episode Three.
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Mawdryn Undead was released on DVD in 2009. In the US, it was released on its own, as usual, (Amazon US), but also as part of a Black Guardian Trilogy box set (Amazon US). In the UK and Australia, it was only made available as part of the box set (Amazon UK).
Notes and links
A weirdly bleached version of Nyssa’s outfit from Snakedance features on the cover of Goth Opera by Paul Cornell, the first novel of the Virgin Missing Adventures series, published in 1994.
Ian Marter played the gorgeously sweet Harry Sullivan in Season 12 of Doctor Who, but also wrote 12 Doctor Who novels, including a Companions of Doctor Who novel called Harry Sullivan’s War.
While we’ve been away, Brendan has roared into the 70s with a summary of Season 7 of Doctor Who, in which he confronts Autons, Silurians, John Abineri and a scary parallel universe version of himself. If you want to find his summaries of the 1960s seasons of Doctor Who, checkout the playlist on YouTube.
This week, the Mara are back, threatening the ancient BBC Television studio Manussa in Snakedance. Roll your eyes at Nathan’s usual jejune insults, marvel at Brendan’s theories about good Science Fiction, and become increasingly concerned at Todd’s vociferous complaints that no one gets horribly murdered in Doctor Who any more.
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Snakedance was released on DVD in 2011. In the US, it was released on its own (Amazon US), but in the UK and Australia it was released along with Kinda in the Mara Tales box set (Amazon UK).
Notes and links
Richard’s not here this week, so there’s almost no German Expressionism, and very little intertextuality. Nathan mentions Sandifer’s take on this story, as usual, so perhaps you’ll want to go and read that.
Todd refers to the Flight Through EntiretyKinda lovefest, which is the pun-tastic Episode 79: Kinda Lingers.
Episode 84 · Arc of Infinity · Sunday 31 July 2016
Doctor Who squelches back onto our screens with the first story of Season 20 — Arc of Infinity. It’s a rollicking tale of quad magnetism, pulse loops, transduction barriers and impulse lasers, tastefully decorated with shiny plastic sofas.
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Arc of Infinity was released on DVD in 2007. In the US, it was released on its own (Amazon US), but in the UK and Australia it was released along with Time-Flight in a box set that would have been the worst Christmas present in human history (Amazon UK).
Notes and links
Johnny Byrne wrote 8 episodes of Season 1 of Space: 1999, and some of them were actually quite good. Sort of.
Leonard Sachs, this week’s President Borusa, wasn’t actually in The Pallisers (1974), but he had actually appeared in Doctor Who before as Admiral de Coligny in Nathan’s favourite story, The Massacre. The First and Fourth Borusas were in The Pallisers, along with other famous Doctor Who alumni, including Antony Ainley, Moray Watson, Donald Pickering, John Hallam, Derek Jacobi, Peter Sallis and June Whitfield.
The story about Ace encountering an Ergon while selling fried chicken was Anti-Matter with Fries by Gareth Roberts, which appeared in issue 199 of Doctor Who Magazine.
Tomorrow sees the release of Doctor Who in 10 Seconds Series 6, which will be every bit as delightful as all of the previous episodes. You can watch the entirety of the series by checking out the playlist on YouTube.
It’s the end of another season of Flight Through Entirety, we’ve run out of money and no one really gives a crap anymore. So join us as we listlessly discuss the worst story of the 1980s: it’s Time-Flight.
Don’t buy the story!
Time-Flight was released on DVD in 2007. In the US, it was released on its own (Amazon US), but in the UK and Australia it was released along with Arc of Infinity in an unspeakably horrid box set (Amazon UK).
Cornell, Day and Topping are the authors of The Discontinuity Guide, a repository of hilarious facts about the classic series. Here’s their take on Time-Flight.
This French & Saunders sketch tells you everything you need to know about what went wrong with Doctor Who in the 1980s. Sorry about the crappy quality though.
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll beset you with bipedal fibreglass turds and bubbles of Fairy Liquid until you agree to watch Time-Flight again. This side of madness or the other.
Doctor Who in 10 Seconds
While Brendan edits the next episode of Doctor Who in 10 Seconds, in which he speedily summarises the delightfully strange and groundbreaking Doctor Who Series 5, why not take the opportunity to watch all of the previous videos in the series by checking out the playlist on YouTube?
All you hippy losers who thought Doctor Who was whimsical family entertainment can leave now: Eric Saward is back, and he’s brought enough guns with him to make Charlton Heston feel insecure about his masculinity. Only Beryl Reid can save us! It’s Earthshock.
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Earthshock was released on DVD in 2004 in the US (Amazon US), and in 2003 in the UK and Australia (Amazon UK).
When we first see the crudely-realised dinosaur fossils in the cave wall in Part 1, Malcolm Clarke treats us to a little musical reference to the Fossils movement in The Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns.
Sometimes beloved Doctor Who cast members wrangle upsettingly on Twitter, and when that happens, it’s the duty of a Doctor Who podcaster to put on a velvet fairy costume and call them out. Which is what Nathan does here.
Whatever his qualities as a writer and script editor (and they are few), Eric Saward was amazingly able to draw inspiration for this story from films that hadn’t even been written yet, including Aliens (1986), and the prescient and criminally underrated Starship Troopers (1997).
Fans of Beryl Reid will also enjoy knowing that Joe Orton was one of their number: it was for her that he wrote the part of Kathy in Entertaining Mr Sloane.
This story recklessly replaced a script called The Enemy Within by acclaimed English novelist Christopher Priest, who had previously had a script rejected for Season 17. Surprisingly, it has never been dramatised by Big Finish.
Eighties Cyberleader and Darth Vader impersonator David Banks wrote a horrific coffee table book called Cybermen (1989), in which he makes a futile and deeply inadvisable attempt to turn three decades of appalling Cybernonsense into a coherent narrative. Best avoided.
Spoiler alert: Adric snuffs it at the end of this story, so this is our last chance to plug Matthew Waterhouse’s elegiac and entertaining autobiography Blue Box Boy. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK) (Amazon AU)
Today Brendan released the fifth (sixth?) video in his ongoing series Doctor Who in 10 Seconds, in which he dextrously summarises all that endless base-under-siege nonsense from Doctor Who Series 5. To watch all of videos in the series, check out the playlist on YouTube.
In this convention-busting episode of Flight Through Entirety, Brendan (Jamie Lee Curtis) really hates this week’s Doctor Who story, while Nathan (Lindsay Lohan) quite enjoys it. And Richard (Mark Harmon) splits the difference by being witty and charming as always. Welcome to Cranleigh Hall: it’s Black Orchid.
We all love Moray Watson, who plays Sir Robert in this story. He’s still with us, after a career spanning 6 decades. Richard remembers him fondly from Catweazle, a children’s TV programme about an 11th-century wizard (The Creature from the Pit’s Geoffrey Bayldon), who finds himself trapped in the present day. The producers of The Avengers considered Watson as a possible replacement for Patrick Macnee had Macnee been unwilling to return for the show’s final season. Watson also played George Frobisher, Rumpole’s hapless old friend in George Frobisher in Rumpole of the Bailey.
The second worst lawn party in human history is depicted in the Monty Python sketch Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days.
Terence Dudley produced Terry Nation’s Survivors, a post-apocalyptic story set in a world where a global pandemic has wiped out everyone except a small number of lovely middle-class white people.
Once again, here’s Bonnie Langford’s reaction to seeing Brendan dressed as Bonnie Langford from Time and the Rani.
Fans of things that are insanely entertaining will enjoy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a 1953 comedy starring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe.
Brendan’s work on Doctor Who in 10 Seconds continues unabated. So far he’s summarised the first four seasons of Doctor Who and created a hilarious blooper reel for the first three episodes. You can watch all five videos by checking out the playlist on YouTube.
Bondfinger
Over at Bondfinger, Sean Connery is now a distant memory, and we’re heading into Rodge’s highly acclaimed Blue Period. Our most recent commentary covers The Spy Who Loved Me: previous commentaries include The Man with the Golden Gun and Live and Let Die. You can find all of our commentaries on our website, and you can keep up with all the Bondfinger news on Twitter and Facebook.
Episode 81: The Worst Lawn Party Ever
· Download (50.0 MB)
A lot going on this week: Brendan wanders from the manor house to the mill and then back to the TARDIS, oh, and then back to the manor house again; Nathan is moving test tubes from one box to another; and Richard is, oh, I don’t know, assembling a vibrating meccano set or something. Hold onto your hats: It’s The Visitation.
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The Visitation was first released on DVD in 2006. A special two-disc edition with extra things was released in 2013. (Amazon US) (Amazon K)
Fans of slightly terrible films in which Samuel L. Jackson is unexpectedly killed mid-speech by genetically-modified sharks will enjoy Deep Blue Sea (1999). Fans of Richard Chamberlain and Fred MacMurray being killed by a swarm of bees will enjoy The Swarm, a 1978 horror film directed by Irwin Allen.
Richard riffs on Alexei Sayle’s surreal 1982 hit “’Ullo John, Gotta New Motor”, which includes such immortal lyrics as “Your goat’s made a mess of the carpet”, and “He stuck his head in a dustbin, and then ran through the laundrette”.
On the Buses was an inexplicably successful British sitcom which ran on ITV from 1969 to 1973, and spawned a stage play, a board game and three horrifically forgettable films in three successive years. The first film was the second most popular movie at the British box office in 1971, beating out Diamonds Are Forever.
Clive Swift played Jobel in the massively overrated Revelation of the Daleks and Mr Copper in the rightfully beloved Voyage of the Damned. He is, of course, most famous for his role as Richard (“RICHARD!”) in Keeping Up Appearances. In 2008, he gave a hilariously dyspeptic interview to Benjamin Cook from DWM.
TARDIS Eruditorum’s Elizabeth Sandifer hasn’t appeared here in the show notes for a while. Here’s her take on this story.
Perhaps, despite its marginal relevance to this story, the Terileptil android inspired Siimon Reynolds to create this 1987 ad campaign warning the people of Australia to use condoms to protect themselves from HIV.
Yesterday Brendan released the long-awaited Season 4 episode of Doctor Who in Ten Seconds. It’s sweet and hilarious, as always, and Brendan is wearing a particularly lovely shirt. You can see it here. To see all the previous episodes, as well as the blooper reel, just check out the playlist on YouTube.
Bondfinger
Our commentary podcast on The Spy Who Loved Me was released yesterday, probably. So, off you go! And once you’re done, you can also enjoy our commentaries on all of the preceding Bond films, from Dr. No to The Man with the Golden Gun. You can find these commentaries on our website, and you can keep up with all the Bondfinger news on Twitter and Facebook.
Episode 80: A Death Wish, But for Adric
· Download (60.7 MB)
As usual, this week, Brendan, Nathan and Richard are condemned to an unending cycle of suffering and futility, relieved only temporarily by ruminations on the existence of Nerys Hughes. So, hold off on the fire and acid for just forty minutes or so: enough time to hear us discussing Kinda.
Buy the story!
Kinda was released on DVD in 2001. It’s available by itself in the US, but in the UK and Australia it was released alongside next year’s Snakedance in a box set called Mara Tales. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
Notes and links
Almost immediately, Richard identifies some books which might have inspired this story, including Ursula LeGuin’s 1989 Novel The Word for World is Forest, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and, most importantly, Chinua Achebe’s 1994 novel Things Fall Apart.
If you are in any way sceptical of the claim that Tegan’s entire dream sequence is reminiscent of an 80s pop video, you might be convinced by the 1980 video of Visage’s “Fade to Grey”.
Mary Morris plays (another) Number Two in the eighth episode of The Prisoner episode Dance of the Dead. She’s dead posh in it. Take a look.
Blue Box Boy (yes, we’re linking to it again) tells the story of Matthew Waterhouse coaching Richard Todd. Matthew does claim that he was joking when he told him “Of course, the secret to TV acting is not to look at the camera!” (Amazon US) (Amazon UK) (Amazon AU)
There’s a notable omission from Will Brooks’s photographic cover for one of Paul Cornell’s upcoming Titan comics featuring the Third Doctor. Remind me, why are we talking about Richard Franklin again?
Aris wrestling with the snake on the studio floor at the climax reminds Richard of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders in Lucky Bitches. But even if that wasn’t true, I’d be tempted to link to it anyway.
Doctor Who in 10 seconds continues to be a thing, and so while you wait for Brendan’s groundbreaking Season 4 episode, why not revisit the spectacle of Brendan hilariously summarising each Doctor Who story of the first three seasons in no more than 10 seconds? Just check out the playlist on YouTube.
Bondfinger
Well, we’ve recorded our latest commentary podcast on The Spy Who Loved Me for release next week. Exciting, what?
Episode 78 · Four to Doomsday · Sunday 19 June 2016
The world will be destroyed in four days, apparently, and to prepare for this, Brendan is wearing a stylish green velour suit, Richard has gathered his hair in a delightful side ponytail, and Nathan has just really let himself go. It’s Four to Doomsday.
Buy the story!
Four to Doomsday was released on DVD in 2008 in the UK and Australia, and in 2009 in the US. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK).
Notes and links
Fans of Philip Locke, who plays Bigon in this story, will enjoy his performances in three episodes of The Avengers: From Venus with Love, Mandrake and The Frighteners, which also featured Stratford Johns, who plays Monarch in this story. Horrifyingly, Philip Locke also plays creepy sexless henchmen Vargas in Thunderball.
Much like the Urbankans, cane toads were introduced into Australia to control the grey-backed cane beetle. As usual, this didn’t go well.
This YouTube video includes every utterance of the words “some kind of”, “some sort of” or “some type of” in Star Trek: Voyager. There are 393, for God’s sake.
We’re tremendously proud of Brendan’s latest video project, Doctor Who in 10 seconds, in which he flies through entire seasons of Doctor Who, hilariously summarising each story in no more than 10 seconds. Enjoy the spectacle by checking out the playlist on YouTube.
Bondfinger
While you wait for next weekend’s commentary podcast on The Spy Who Loved Me, why not enjoy our previous commentary podcasts on all of the preceding Bond films, including The Man with the Golden Gun, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Dr. No? You can find these commentaries on our website, and you can keep up with all the Bondfinger news on Twitter and Facebook.
Episode 78: I’ve Walked Between That Cow
· Download (50.9 MB)
