Episode 277 · Heaven Sent · Sunday 26 November 2023
If you think because she is dead, I am weak, then you understand very little. If you were any part of killing her, and you’re not afraid, then you understand nothing at all. So, for your own sake, understand this. I am the Doctor. I’m coming to find you, and I will never, ever stop.
This week, Rob Valentine drops by to spend four-and-a-half billion years admiring how clever Steven Moffat, Peter Capaldi, Rachel Talalay and Murray Gold are. It’s Heaven Sent.
Rob feels that this episode echoes another tale about digging an escape tunnel: The Shawshank Redemption. Here’s Morgan Freeman’s character red, talking about Tim Robbins’s Andy: “I remember thinking it would take a man six hundred years to tunnel through the wall with it. Old Andy did it in less than twenty.”
In Viktor E Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1959), he argues that the primary human drive isn’t pleasure or sex or the avoidance of suffering; instead, he says that we are motivated by a desire for meaning.
And finally, after the closing credits, Simon offers us a pick of the week courtesy of his husband, Brian. It’s Helen O’Hara’s Women vs Hollywood: The Rise and Fall of Women in Film (2021), which talks about the way that female film directors like Rachel Talalay are punished more harshly for their failures than men are.
Did you all enjoy The Star Beast? Of course you did. But if you want to know what we thought, check out our new Doctor Who flashcast, The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire. Like Jodie into Terror before it, The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be released a day or two after each new episode of Doctor Who and will contain our ill-considered and half-baked initial reactions to the episode. Keep an eye out on the new podcast website or on our social media accounts for details.
Our second newest podcast is Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, whose second episode was released yesterday. In that episode, we talked over the show’s second episode (sort of) Force of Life, featuring a young Ian McShane who frankensteins his way around the Moonbase freezing people and causing a great deal of fancy camerawork.
Maximum Power is continuing its journey through Series C of Blakes 7. This week, Servalan gets her end away with one of the help in The Harvest of Kairos.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. No new episode last week, instead they recovered from watching perhaps the worst episode of the entire Star Trek franchise, the Star Trek: Voyager episode Threshold.
Episode 277: The Time on Him
· Recorded on Sunday 12 November 2023 · Download (57.6 MB)
Episode 276 · Face the Raven · Sunday 19 November 2023
This week, we’re hanging out in a mystical London street full of Sontarans, Judoon and Cybermen, investigating a murder with Johnny Spandrell — only to find, to our horror, that the murder hasn’t happened yet. And, of course, that it’s time for Clara Oswald to Face the Raven.
Notes and links
Fridging or Women in Refrigerators is a trope in which a woman is murdered and the emotions of her male parent/lover/friend become more important to the narrative than the death of the woman herself. This article from The Guardian discusses its use in Strangers, an ITV drama in which our very own Devla Kirwan’s death evokes trauma in her husband, our very own John Simm.
China Miéville’s novel Kraken (2010) also depicts a London with secret hidden streets, these ones full of monsters and cultists. (It also features a villain called the Tattoo, who is literally a crazed sentient tattoo.)
Rigsy’s offscreen girlfriend Jen, who we hear on the phone but don’t see, is played by Naomi Ackie, who goes on to star as Whitney Houston in the 2022 biopic Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody.
On 27 November we’ll be launching a Doctor Who flashcast called The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire. Like Jodie into Terror before it, The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be released a day or two after each new episode of Doctor Who and will contain our ill-considered and half-baked initial reactions to the episode. Keep an eye out on the new podcast website or on our social media accounts for details.
Our second newest podcast is Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, whose first episode was released just a couple of weeks ago. In that episode, we talked over the show’s pilot Breakaway, in which the moon is hurled from its orbit by a terrible nuclear explosion. We’re hoping to release Episode 2 next weekend.
Maximum Power is continuing its journey through Series C of Blakes 7. This week, the crew of the Liberator run into a strangely disappointing figure from Auron mythology in Dawn of the Gods.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, they watched perhaps the worst episode of the entire Star Trek franchise, the Star Trek: Voyager episode Threshold.
Episode 276: The Planet Quantos
· Recorded on Sunday 29 October 2023 · Download (59.3 MB)
Episode 275 · Sleep No More · Sunday 12 November 2023
This week, in orbit of the planet Neptune, a Doctor Who story is created which kills literally everyone who watches it. Which is why we should probably have thought twice before inviting the lovely Jeremy Radick to discuss it with us.
Notes and links
Steven Moffat’s version of Dracula (2020) is actually Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s version of Dracula. It stars the beautiful and terrifying Claes Bang in the title role, and it features the full complement of Moffat and Gatiss tropes, which will either be to your taste or not.
And The Ring (2002) — a remake of the Japanese film Ringu (1998) — also contains a video which will kill all the people who watch it. (In seven days. It’s nice to have a definite timeline.)
Nathan and Erik Stadnik also share a birthday with Samuel Anderson. Forgot to mention that.
Our newest podcast is Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, whose first episode was released just a couple of weeks ago. In that episode, we talked over the show’s pilot Breakaway, in which the moon is hurled from its orbit by a terrible nuclear explosion.
Maximum Power is continuing its journey through Series C of Blakes 7. This week, the crew of the Liberator encounter some pacifists with a surprisingly deadly weapon in the third episode, Volcano.
Episode 274 · The Zygon Inversion · Sunday 5 November 2023
This week, we’re all enjoying bombing and threatening one another, until the Doctor comes along and delivers a long speech about New Cruel People, which starts making us feel bad about ourselves. And fair enough. It’s The Zygon Inversion.
Notes and links
The Decimas were tiny squeaky-voiced aliens, who looked like nothing so much as miniature Zygons; their leader was played by our very own Deep Roy. They appeared in the fifth episode of Blakes 7, Web, and so you can hear more about them in Maximum Power episode 5, Color-coded Anoraks.
Sonequa Martin-Green is the astonishing beautiful lead in the first of the new new Star Trek series, Star Trek: Discovery. Her ability to convey genuine emotional distress in Series 1 was so impressive that they required her to do it in just about every scene in Series 2.
And Truth or Consequences is a real place in New Mexico, a small town that voted to name itself after a radio game show in 1950. (Before that, it was called Hot Springs.)
Picks of the Week
Simon
Simon recommends seminal Cold War-era horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), which has been an influence on Doctor Who all the way back to The Faceless Ones.
James
James brings us back to 2023 with his recommendation of Marvel’s TV miniseries Secret Invasion, which itself goes back to a comic book crossover storyline that ran for a few months in 2008.
Peter
Peter suggests Barbenheimer, which was this year’s weirdest media trend, watching Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) on the same day. If Bonnie is still around in 2023, you have to believe that she participated.
Last week, we released the first episode of our new Space: 1999 commentary podcast, Startling Barbara Bain. In that first episode, we talked over the show’s pilot episode Breakaway, in which the moon is hurled from its orbit by a terrible nuclear explosion.
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 was our James Bond commentary podcast, which also covered 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, continues its coverage of Blakes 7 series C, with a discussion of the second episode, Powerplay.
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 lovely episode of Star Trek: Voyager. B’Elanna crash lands on a bronze-age planet and becomes the inspiration for a beautiful young playwright in Muse.
Episode 274: Orange Babies
· Recorded on Sunday 17 September 2023 · Download (53.9 MB)
Episode 273 · The Zygon Invasion · Sunday 29 October 2023
This week, we’ve invited twenty million Zygons over for cocktails, and now we’re starting to feel self-conscious about cooking up all that salt-and-pepper squid. And so soon we’re involved in an international political thriller that takes us from Fake New Mexico all the way to Madeupistan. It’s The Zygon Invasion.
Notes and links
Sister Lamont from Terror of the Zygons was played by Lillias Walker, who died in August at the age of 93. I hope she knew how many small children she terrified. Bless her.
El Sandifer’s interview with Peter Harness was broadcast on the Pex Lives podcast feed. You can find it here.
Friend-of-the-podcast Erik Stadnik has just finished the RTD1 era on his podcast Doctor Who: The Writers’ Room, in which he and Kyle discuss the various writers and eras throughout the show’s history. In their most recent episode, they start their long journey through the Steven Moffat era with a discussion of The Eleventh Hour. Highly recommended.
Yesterday, we released the first episode of our new Space: 1999 commentary podcast, Startling Barbara Bain. Space: 1999 was, at times, a thoughtful and beautifully realised British science fiction show that dealt with questions about the very nature of the universe, and at other times was mostly about astronauts trying not to get eaten by unconvincing monsters with rubber tentacles. Our first episode, Breakaway, sees the moon hurled from its orbit by a nuclear explosion and heading off into space for some thrilling new adventures.
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 was our James Bond commentary podcast, which also covered 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, makes a start on Blakes 7 series C, with a discussion of the first episode, Aftermath.
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 were astounded to find ourselves enjoying a late-era episode of Star Trek: Enterprise in which the Vulcans go completely rogue — Kir’Shara.
Episode 273: Electrified Pubic Merkins
· Recorded on Sunday 10 September 2023 · Download (55.0 MB)
Episode 272 · The Woman Who Lived · Sunday 22 October 2023
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 · Download (52.8 MB)
Episode 271 · The Girl Who Died · Sunday 15 October 2023
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 · Download (52.0 MB)
Episode 270 · Before the Flood · Sunday 8 October 2023
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 · Download (54.3 MB)
Episode 269 · Under the Lake · Sunday 1 October 2023
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 · Download (50.0 MB)
Episode 268 · The Witch’s Familiar · Sunday 24 September 2023
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 · Download (63.6 MB)
