This week, Nathan, Simon, Peter and their new friend Mathew find ourselves wandering some space corridors in search of some kind of button that will bust us out of this time loop. Are we on board the USS Voyager during one of its less successful high-concept episodes? Or do we find out — to our horror — that we’re on a Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS?
Notes and links
We don’t mention him by name, but the writer of this episode is Steve Thompson, who also wrote The Curse of the Black Spot (about which, more here) and Time Heist (co-written by Steven Moffat).
The eponymous Law of Conservation of Detail can be found explained on the TV Tropes wiki. In short, only detail relevant to the story will be included in an episode, particularly a constrained 42-minute television episode. Its corollary is that any detail included in an episode should be expected to be relevant to the story.
Simon alludes to the film 127 Hours (2010), in which a young American man’s arm is trapped under a boulder in a canyoneering accident and so he decides after five days to break the bones and then cut it off in order to free himself. Somewhat surprisingly, Simon significantly underestimates the number of hours it would take someone to make that decision.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on 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 releasing our final episode on The Power of the Doctor some time later this month.
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, whose coverage of Series B will be starting soon, with a Very Special Episode That I Absolutely Can’t Tell You About.
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 this week, but we recommend the episodes in our back catalogue where we talk about Enterprise. There’s usually some good ranting to be had.
Episode 241: The Law of Conservation of Detail
· Recorded on Sunday 19 June 2022 · Duration 0:50:40
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This week, Dougray Scott, Jessica Raine and two scary skeleton creatures are all so unspeakably horny that all Nathan, Corey, Si and Pete can do is Hide.
Notes and links
Jessica Raine, who plays Emma in Hide will go on to play Doctor Who’s first producer Verity Lambert in An Adventure in Space and Time, a drama about the origins of Doctor Who which is released a few months after this episode. But more about that later, perhaps. (Spoilers!)
Sound Effects No. 13: Death & Horror was an album produced by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1977 and used continuously in TV and stage productions ever since. Mary Whitehouse complained vociferously about its release, because of course she did.
Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) also features time-travelling astronauts with a ghostly influence on the past. It’s hard to imagine that it makes that much more sense than Hide though, isn’t it?
I considered writing about the racist lyrics of Cole Porter’s Let’s Do It, but after a second’s reflection, I’ve decided to just let you Google them for yourself. But really, don’t.
The Stone Tape (1972) was a made-for-TV movie written by Quatermass’s Nigel Kneale and featuring Jane Asher and Doctor Who’s very own Ian Cuthbertson. Like Hide, it features researchers spending the night in a house haunted by a spectral woman, but Neil Cross would like to make it very clear that for copyright purposes, it is in every way a legally distinct entity from Hide.
And finally, Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman? was an episode of a comedy radio programme called Whatever Happened To…?, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in June 1994 — featuring Jane Asher (again) as Susan Foreman. It was released as a special feature on the DVD of The Dalek Invasion of Earth.
Actually, there is one more thing. The story from The Sarah Jane Adventures that we talk about in the tag is called Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?. It’s amazing. Go and watch it immediately.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Pete is @Prof_Quiteamess, and Si is @Si_Hart. Despite what he said on the podcast, Corey does have a Twitter account, at @CoreyMcCor. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on 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 releasing our final episode on The Power of the Doctor some time in October, we expect.
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, whose coverage of Series B will be starting soon, with a Very Special Episode That I Absolutely Can’t Tell You About.
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 went back or forward in time to the first series of Star Trek: Discovery and watched Vaulting Ambition.
Episode 240: Ghost Reasons
· Recorded on Sunday 12 June 2022 · Duration 0:43:58
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This week, we’re joined aboard a Soviet submarine by Mark McManus, Jack Shanahan and a low-effort lizard alien, who proceeds to run around the boat in the nude murdering members of the crew. But we’re all too interested in Jenna Coleman, David Warner, some guys from Game of Thrones and a discarded fibreglass suit of armour to notice.
Notes and links
The tale of Steven Berkoff’s wilful destruction of the climactic scenes of The Power of Three is told in its entirety in Episode 234: Stop Watching a Kids’ Show.
Those of you lucky enough not to remember 1983 might need to be told about The Hunt for Red October (1990), a film set on board a Russian submarine captained by a typically Scottish-sounding Sean Connery. Mark Gatiss is definitely looking over his shoulder at that film while he’s writing this episode.
Nathan refers to the most recent episode of Bondfinger, where we comment on am episode of The Saint which contains scenes of French people speaking to one another in English with a French accent. (Which is just the sort of thing they probably do all the time just to prank us.)
Here’s El Sandifer’s brutal assessment of the Ice Warriors: “…if we’re being honest, the fact that they are literally green reptile monsters from Mars has to mark the point where the show has simply given up on monsters and concluded that the audience will accept anything.”
Spencer Wilding played Skaldak in this story and was the Wooden King in The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe and the Minotaur in The God Complex. He also played Darth Vader in Rogue One. Fans of hefty lads will enjoy his Instagram. I certainly did.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on 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 releasing our final episode on The Power of the Doctor some time in October, we expect.
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, whose coverage of Series B will be starting soon.
The Doctor has a very limited first date repetoire: watching the destruction of Earth with weird aliens, visiting a far-future traffic jam full of weird aliens, seeing an entire marketing department being slaughtered by weird aliens, and stopping a gentle space whale from being endlessly tortured by English people. And his first date with Clara is no exception: hiring a space moped from a weird alien called Dor’een and visiting The Rings of Akhaten.
Notes and links
It’s in her essay on The Bells of Saint John that El Sandifer says that the second part of Series 7 “is an extended exercise in not fucking up too badly that is, in everyone’s eyes, undermined by fucking up at least once, though opinions differ on precisely where.”
The Rings of Akhaten came ninth last in Doctor Who Magazine’s First Fifty Years poll in 2014. (Yes, that’s number 233, as Peter happened to remember with perfect accuracy.) You can find the rest of the results here. Time and the Rani came third last, so, you know.
Emilia Jones, who played Merry in this episode, is 20 years old now, of course. In 2021, she starred in a film called CODA, in which she played Marlee Matlin’s daughter. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2022.
Yes, a before-they-were-famous Rock “the Dwayne” Johnson did feature in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager called Tsunkatse, in which he is beaten up by Jeri Ryan’s Seven of Nine. Here is Johnson admitting to this on Twitter (complete with video evidence), and here is Jeri Ryan’s reply.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on 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 recording our final episode in just a few weeks from 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, whose coverage of Series B will be starting soon.
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 found ourselves enjoying an episode of Star Trek: Voyager called State of Flux.
Episode 238: There’s an Apostrophe
· Recorded on Sunday 29 May 2022 · Duration 0:59:20
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It’s 2013 and Doctor Who is back for its anniversary season — with a new companion, a new outfit for the Doctor, and a lethal and potentially world-ending new threat from the Internet, more than a decade before the invention of Web3. Keep a close eye on your apes, everyone: it’s The Bells of Saint John.
Notes and links
Celia Imrie is known and loved by all of us here at FTE from her role in Absolutely Fabulous as Jennifer Saunders’s rival in PR, Claudia Bing from Bing, Bing, Bing & Bing. Here’s an in-depth interview with her, about her career both as an actress and a writer, which published in The Scotsman in 2016.
Danny Hargreaves was Doctor Who’s extremely photogenic special effects supervisor, who was always a very welcome addition to any episode of Doctor Who Confidential.
And, finally, it’s time that we sat down and had a serious, proper talk about Doctor Who production codes. From the very beginning of the show in 1963, every story was referred to internally by its production code, which was initially a single capital letter from A to Z, then a double letter (AA to ZZ), then a triple letter (AAA to ZZZ) and then finally an initial number followed by a letter (4A to 4Z and so on). And so An Unearthly Child was A and Ghost Light was 7Q. Back in the day, certain of us knew the production codes for every story — sadly, in these hectic modern times, we have better things to do. You can find out all about the ins and outs of production codes here.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on 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 recording our final episode some time in October.
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, whose coverage of Series B will be starting any second now.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In the most recent episode, they are surprised to find themselves fighting to the death over a beautiful woman, in Amok Time.
Episode 237: A Proud Bear Holding a Bag of Chips Getting to Be Celia Imrie
· Recorded on Sunday 29 May 2022 · Duration 0:47:52
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Christmas, 1892: The Doctor has retired from saving the universe after a disastrous mid-series finale earlier in the year. He is cheered up somewhat by his encounter with a feisty young barmaid, who is intrigued enough to follow the Doctor home, only to learn a valuable and ultimately fatal lesson about the importance of railings. Richard E Grant is here too, as usual, delivering his lines through heroically clenched teeth. It’s The Snowmen.
Notes and Links
We refer to Clara several times as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl — a quirky female character whose main purpose in the narrative is to pull the male hero out of an emotional funk. The phrase itself was coined by a critic called Nathan Rabin, who has since said that he regretted ever coming up with the term.
Saul Metzstein, who directed this episode and several other successful Doctor Who episodes in Series 7, would go on to work as second unit director on the disastrous 2017 flop The Snowman, now best known for its terrible marketing campaign and for the fact that its protagonist was a character called Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender).
By 2013, Richard E Grant had twice played non-canon Doctors: He was the Ninth Doctor of Paul Cornell’s animated webcast Scream of the Shalka, which launched a whole new version of Doctor Who in 2003 in a parallel universe nearly adjacent to this one. He also played the Tenth Doctor (aka the Quite Handsome Doctor) in Steven Moffat’s first ever Doctor Who story The Curse of Fatal Death, broadcast as part of Red Nose Day in 1999. You can watch it here, and you should.
And our last trope for the day is fridging, which means killing a female character solely for the effect it has on the male hero. I can’t think how this one came up.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on 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 recording our final episode some time in October.
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 will be returning later this year with its coverage of Series B.
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 head back to the 1990s to see how Chief O’Brien is getting on, in The Wounded.
Episode 236: Good Smugness
· Recorded on Sunday 24 April 2022 · Duration 1:02:35
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"Tell her, this is the story of Amelia Pond. And this is how it ends.”
Amelia Williams
Many of us grow up: we live in a real world of marriages and families, jobs and mortgages. But some of us can never bring ourselves to leave our imaginary friend behind. Can you imagine the leaden apprehension when we learn that the choice has been taken from us forever? Kevin Burnard joins us for The Angels Take Manhattan.
Notes and Links
It doesn’t take us long to mention that the Doctor is carrying the Target novelisation of this story around in his jacket. (“How does anything get there? I’ve given up asking.”) Steven Moffat’s one Target novelisation is his brilliant version of The Day of the Doctor. Worth a read.
Nathan has checked, and upsettingly there isn’t a chapter in the Doctor’s Melody Malone book called Escape to Danger, which sets it apart from a large number of Doctor Who novelisations.
Simon compares the experience of watching this story to the experience of watching the Star Trek: The Next Generation series finale All Good Things…. Of course, if you want to listen to Nathan and Joe Ford’s experience of watching All Good Things…, take a listen to their commentary in Untitled Star Trek Project, episode 18.
The Doctor’s plan to nip back in time to get the ceramicist to paint the word yowza on a Qin Dynasty vase was apparently inspired by Professor Chronotis, who pulls a similar trick between paragraphs in Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
And Rory gets to say a final farewell to his father Brian in a scene released by the BBC in 2012. You can find it here.
Kevin Burnard has been spending less time working on the Twelfth Doctor Fan Audios than before, but he still loves them enough to plug them here. His Untitled Faction Paradox Project is still incoming.
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 will be returning soon with its coverage of Series B.
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 sat staring in horror at an Animated Series episode called The Time Trap.
Episode 235: River Knows All the Space Reasons
· Recorded on Sunday 24 April 2022 · Duration 1:01:34
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This week, we have half an hour of fun character-based nonsense followed by a fairly disastrous five-minute Doctor Who episode. But we’re all too busy reminiscing about the end of an era to notice. Adam Richard joins us for The Power of Three.
Notes and Links
This week’s real-life villain Steven Berkoff had worked with director Douglas Mackinnon before on a film called The Flying Scotsman (2006), which stars breakout Doctor Who star Jonny Lee Miller as someone who wins a world title in cycling while riding a heavily-modified washing machine or something.
Douglas Mackinnon is delightfully oblique in his description of Steven Berkoff’s on-set behaviour during The Power of Three in this interview in Starburst magazine.
As is now generally well-known, a sixteen-year-old Chris Chibnall appeared on Open Air in 1986 to criticise The Trial of a Time Lord in the presence of writers Pip and Jane Baker. Worth a watch.
And finally, in the tag, we all discuss this French & Saunders sketch, in which Dame Helen Mirren delivers an unforgettable acting masterclass. Delightfully, it has been memorialised forever on Dame Helen’s very own website.
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 will be returning soon with its coverage of Series B.
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 watched a classic episode of the original series called The Doomsday Machine.
Episode 234: Stop Watching a Kids’ Show
· Recorded on Sunday 20 March 2022 · Duration 0:45:00
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This week, we’re in the Wild West for some down-home, old-fashioned, country-style moral philosophy. The burning question: is it permissible to let that well-spoken middle-aged country doctor get killed just because he sawed up a bunch of people and turned them into psychopathic gun-wielding maniacs? Steven B joins us to discuss a well-shot, well-acted, well-written and thought-provoking episode: A Town Called Mercy.
Notes and Links
The Trolley Problem is a well-known thought experiment which interrogates whether we think that the greatest good for the greatest number is a reliable way to determine the correct course of action, a moral position called utilitarianism. It’s illustrated in this video here.
We hear Kahler-Jex narrating the making of the Gunslinger, in the aptly titled prequel minisode The Making of the Gunslinger.
Dante’s Divine Comedy depicts Purgatory as an island-mountain in the Southern Hemisphere, which the souls of the saved must climb in order to be cleansed in preparation for their ascension into heaven.
Steven feels like this episode doesn’t quite have the ability to bring together all of its moral issues into a coherent whole. He is reminded of T S Eliot’s essay Hamlet and His Problems (1921), in which Eliot complains that Shakespeare is unable to create an “objective correlative”, a means of successfully expressing Hamlet’s emotions through the depiction of a concrete series of events on stage.
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 will be returning soon with its coverage of Series B.
And finally, there’s our new Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watched the justly-overlooked Star Trek: The Next Generation classic Power Play.
Episode 233: A Mild-Mannered Josef Mengele
· Recorded on Sunday 20 March 2022 · Duration 0:54:52
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This week, there’s a massive Silurian spaceship pre-crashing in the direction of Planet Earth, and the whole gang is on board for the ride. Brendan’s on the lookout for discarded teeth, Nathan’s holed up in an escape pod watching reruns of Mitchell and Webb, James’s progress is being hindered by the unfeasibly large amounts of vegetable matter in his pants, and Fiona is doing a terrific job of keeping her feisty new companions under control. Somehow, life finds a way, in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.
Notes and Links
Nathan clearly thinks that the US is in Europe, since we were last there in Daleks in Manhattan and will be there again in The Angels Take Manhattan (not to mention The Chase, some of which is even set in Africa). Understandably enough, he has also forgotten The Abominable Snowmen.
Before David Bradley took on the role of the First Doctor in Twice Upon a Time, the First Doctor was played by Richard Hurndall, who played Nebrox in a gloriously terrible episode of Blakes 7 called Assassin. (Yes, I know, every episode of Blakes 7 is gloriously terrible.)
As James rightly points out, the velociraptors in this episode had previously featured in Primeval, which was a family-friendly Sunday night science fiction series which mostly involved dinosaurs attacking Dougie Henshall. A fun show, which kind of outstayed its welcome a bit.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on 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 releasing our Legend of the Sea Devils episode in a few days’ time.
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 will be returning soon with its coverage of Series B.
We’ve been off the air for a few months now, but apparently all it takes to bring us all back together is a few thousand Daleks desperate to find out who’s been playing them Bizet’s Carmen from deep inside their terrifyingly impregnable prison. Unfortunately none of us can muster much interest in any of that: instead, we’re worrying about the state of Amy and Rory’s marriage and wondering why on earth the new girl has turned up a year early. It’s Asylum of the Daleks.
Notes and Links
As is now well recorded, the B-Ark was a giant spaceship built by the people of the planet Golgafrincham, so that they could launch into space an entirely useless third of their population, including the telephone sanitisers and advertising account executives. You can learn more about the wisdom of the people of Golgafrincham in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Oswin is an old Anglo-Saxon name meaning “friend of God”. An Oswine was king of Northumbria in the Seventh Century; his predecessor was King Osric. Ingrid Oliver’s Doctor Who character, first introduced in Day of the Doctor, is called Osgood, and Richard is correct that the Os- element means God in both names.
Richard also mentions Jean Cocteau’s La belle et la bête (1946), particularly as an inspiration for the strange vision Amy has of Daleks as people as she succumbs to the Asylum planet’s Dalekifying influence.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on 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 releasing our Legend of the Sea Devils episode mere days after its first broadcast this Easter.
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 will be returning soon with its coverage of Series B.
When loveable middle-class white lady Sue Brockman (Claire Skinner) loses her husband Pete (Hugh Dennis) after his plane goes missing over the English Channel, she decides to withhold that information from her children (Tyger Drew-Honey, Daniel Roche and Ramona Marquez), because she is afraid it might ruin their Christmas (which it totally would). But her world is soon turned upside-down by a mysterious stranger (a very young Prince Philip in his first television role), who beguiles the children with hot and cold running lemonade before whisking them off to an extraterrestrial forest which is about to have massive vats of acid dumped on it. Meanwhile, surprisingly, obnoxiously messianic lion Aslan (Liam Neeson) is nowhere to be found. Mark McManus and Pete Lambert guest star. It’s The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe.
Claire Skinner also started in the Outnumbered Christmas Special The Broken Santa in 2011, which was watched by 8.47 million people. (This episode of Doctor Who was watched by 10.77 million viewers. So take that, Claire.)
Bill Bailey, who plays Droxil in this episode, admits publicly that he is a massive Doctor Who fan, which we think is terribly brave. Here he is playing the Doctor Who theme reimagined as Belgian jazz. You really need to watch it.
Arabella Weir starred as the Doctor in a Big Finish audio story called Exile, part of its Doctor Who Unbound series. Pete was not impressed.
Wizards vs Aliens was created by Russell T Davies and Phil Ford in 2012, in a way to replace The Sarah Jane Adventures after the death of Lis Sladen. Its second episode, Grazlax Attacks, was a hilarious rip-off of Gremlins (1984).
And finally, the prequel scene to this episode was included in the DVD and Blu-ray releases of Doctor Who Series 7 in both the US and UK.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We will be releasing our take on the New Year’s Day Special Eve of the Daleks sometime very early in January.
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 just released a new episode a couple of days ago, a spoilerrific roundtable discussion of the most recent James Bond film No Time to Die.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has finished its coverage of Series A of Blakes 7, and which will be returning to discuss Series B early in the new year.
And finally, there’s our new Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we had a great time watching an episode of the hilarious Star Trek cartoon series Lower Decks — I, Excretus.
Episode 230: Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World
· Recorded on Sunday 12 December 2021 · Duration 1:04:23
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We’ve reached the end of an ambitious and controversial series of Doctor Who, and so we’ve all gathered at Demons’ Run to find the answers to some pressing questions. What were the high points and low points of the series? Amy’s pregnancy arc — tasteless or distateful? Who was our favourite guest star? And, finally, what is the First Question, and who will eventually answer it? It’s our Series 6 Retrospective.
Richard says that he things that the science-fiction ideas which Steven Moffat introduces in this season are ideas from the so-called Golden Era of literary Science fiction, and he names two possible inspirations: Hugo Gernsback, who founded Amazing Stories and who gave his name to the Hugo Awards, and Ray Bradbury.
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. Keep an eye out in the coming days for our Christmas Special, in which we return to our roots for a roundtable discussion of the latest Bond film, No Time to Die.
And finally, there’s our new Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watched an episode of Deep Space Nine’s final series: Take Me Out to the Holosuite.
Episode 229: Playthings of Steven
· Recorded on Sunday 28 November 2021 · Duration 1:03:49
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This week, the Doctor and River Song get married in an episode that completely rewrites itself before our very eyes, and the eyepatch anecdote makes its triumphant return to the show. You are all cordially invited to The Wedding of River Song.
Notes and links
Richard identifies some possible inspirations for this episode, including Cloud Atlas (2004) by David Mitchell and The Master and Margarita (1967) by Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov.
Nathan mentions Steven Moffat’s adaptation of Dracula (2020), in which two of the three episodes use the same narrative framing technique he uses in this episode, where the events of the episode start to impinge on the story being told in flashback at the start of the episode.
Steven B calls The Doctor’s Wife a “nerd-baiting title” in our episode on that story, called, appropriately Nerd-Baiting Title. Nathan levels the same accusation against the title of this story.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ve completed our coverage of Flux, so you can go back and relieve the highs and lows of the most recent series of Doctor Who with us.
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 will be discussing the Series A finale this week, and which will be back next week with a Series A retrospective.
And finally, there’s our new Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watched our first episode of Enterprise, with predictably horrifying results.
Episode 228: The Magic Mavic Chen Principle
· Recorded on Sunday 24 October 2021 · Duration 0:58:43
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This week, a quick trip to Colchester with Joe Ford and Jack Shanahan, to try on a new frock at Sanderson & Grainger before being horribly murdered. In the meantime, of course, James Corden is learning a valuable lesson about fatherhood, while the Doctor comes to terms with his impending certain death, probably. It’s Closing Time.
Notes and links
We start the episode by making a list of similarities between this story and Series 5’s The Lodger. By the most amazing coincidence, Joe and Jack joined us for the first time on our episode about The Lodger earlier this year.
No, Nathan, it’s nail polish remover, not nail polish that finishes off the Cybermen in The Moonbase. (Thanks, Brendan.)
Brendan cracks the joke that the Cybermen came from Marinus, which is actually a thing that happens (spoilers) in the Doctor Who Magazine comic The World Shapers.
Joe is right — the scene where those Cylons start singing All Along the Watchtower in Battlestar Galactica (2004) is one of the great moments in television history. No spoilers.
Team Knight Rider only ran for a single season in 1997–1998, which suggests that the cliffhanger Brendan mentions didn’t have the effect on audience figures that the creators might have been hoping for.
And finally — it’s not Brendan who cracked the code in the tag: the theory that the M in Swarm stands for Meglos comes from @joshryancarr on Twitter. At the time of publication, Flux Chapter 6 is mere hours away, and so there’s still time for this theory to be proved true. Fingers crossed.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on 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 releasing our final episode for the current series this Tuesday.
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’re also involved in the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which is just weeks away fom the end of Series A. Episode 12 will be released today.
And finally, there’s our new Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watched the third Star Trek episode ever recorded — The Corbomite Maneuver.
Episode 227: Alfie
· Recorded on Sunday 10 October 2021 · Duration 1:03:22
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This week, Nathan and Peter find themselves trapped in the corridors of a grimy English hotel with Si Hart and Conrad Westmaas, where the rooms are full of biting into a woollen jumper, turning up to your maths exam totally naked, and the fact that one day, you, your loved ones and everyone who has ever heard of you will be completely and irrevocably dead. The janitor seems pretty fit though. It’s The God Complex.
Notes and links
It goes without saying that the ur-text for the scary hotel that’s the repository of the previous residents’ secret fears is Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). The AV Club review of this episode identifies it as an influence straightaway.
During the Hinchcliffe Era, nearly every story featured the Doctor and Sarah being menaced by an evil from the dawn of time who had not been sufficiently executed enough. We discuss the issue in our The Hand of Fear episode, Not Sufficiently Executed Enough.
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or the gaps between my worship are getting shorter. This is what happened to the others. It’s all so clear now. I’m so happy. Praise him. Praise him.
And more
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’re currently covering Series 13, releasing a new episode the Tuesday after Doctor Who airs.
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’re also involved in the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which is nearing the end of Series A and releasing Episode 11 today. We’ll be covering the rest of the series over the next few weeks.
And finally, there’s our new 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 beautiful Star Trek: Discovery episode from last year called Forget Me Not.
Episode 226: Something Really Different on Screen
· Recorded on Sunday 5 September 2021 · Duration 1:04:03
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This week, Simon Moore joins us again for a quick jaunt to the planet Apalapucia, where we visit a medical facility so staggeringly baffling and inept that it’s even terrifying to an audience living in the English-speaking world. It’s going to be quite a while before we get to see a doctor — that’s why it’s called The Girl Who Waited.
Notes and links
All of us think that this episode is very Star Trek, Star Trek: Voyager in particular. Nathan compares it to Blink of an Eye, in which the Voyager crew interacts with a planet where time passes incredibly quickly, and they watch the planet develop technologically from the Bronze Age through to becoming a spacefaring civilisation. (It guest stars Daniel Dae Kim, amazingly.) This is not to be confused with the Original Series episode Wink of an Eye, in which hyper-accelerated aliens invisibly take over the Enterprise for some reason.
Richard compares the direction of this episode to the Louis Malle film Elevator to the Gallows (1958), in which a man murders his mistress’s husband with hilarious results. It’s French, after all.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’re currently covering Series 13, releasing a new episode the Tuesday after Doctor Who airs.
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’re also involved in the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which is releasing Episode 10 today. We’ll be covering the rest of Series A over the next few weeks.
And finally, there’s our new Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our third episode, we’re stranded in the Delta Quadrant and unexpectedly pregnant in the Voyager episode Lineage.
Episode 225: The Word Elegant
· Recorded on Sunday 29 August 2021 · Duration 0:44:35
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This week we’re joined by Corey McMahon for an hour of blinking and quivering under the bedclothes in the scariest bedroom in human history, before learning a Very Important Lesson about the power of a father’s love. (There’s a plot about dollies in there, but it doesn’t really go anywhere.) Hey-ho, it’s Night Terrors.
Notes and links
You probably all know this already, but The League of Gentlemen was a surreal and upsetting sketch comedy series from around the turn of the millennium (gulp), written by and starring Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith (Sleep No More) and Steve Pemberton (Silence in the Library).
Corey is alluding to Jeffrey Smart’s paintings “Study for Holiday” and “Holiday”, which both depict a small human figure dwarfed by a brightly coloured wall of balconies. You can learn more about Smart from his obituary in The Guardian.
Sapphire & Steel was a Doctor Who-like science fantasy show in the 1980s, starring David McCallum and Joanna Lumley. In the absence of much of a budget, it relied heavily on sound, atmosphere and strange conceptual horror. It’s slow-moving, but it’s definitely worth a look if you’ve never seen it.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’re currently covering Series 13, releasing a new episode the Tuesday after Doctor Who airs.
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’re also involved in the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which is releasing Episode 9 today. We’ll be covering the rest of Series A over the next few weeks.
And finally, there’s our new Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our second episode, we find a lot to say and a lot of laugh about as we watch the Deep Space Nine episode House of Quark.
Episode 224: Fix the Kippers
· Recorded on Sunday 29 August 2021 · Duration 0:55:14
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This week, perhaps inevitably, James and Nathan invite Simon Moore and Kevin Burnard to join them in 1930s Berlin for a gay Gypsy barmitzvah for the disabled. It’s fun, but we can’t help wondering if it’s in the best possible taste. But, what the hell, Let’s Kill Hitler.
Notes and links
Nathan compares the school flashbacks at the start of the episode to a similar scene in Iso Tank, Series 1 Episode 4 of Absolutely Fabulous, which you can actually watch in its entirety here.
The Brilliant Book was published in 2011 and 2012 as a Doctor Who Annual-style guide to Series 5 and 6, full of articles and short stories riffing on events and characters from the series, including Mels, Amy and Rory’s report cards from school. You might still be able to get a copy by searching on your country’s version of Amazon.
Amy and Rory’s final appearance in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip was in a story about them and Mels in issue 455 called Imaginary Enemies.
Kevin’s short story will be published by Obverse Books, in an anthology in their Faction Paradox series. Keep an eye out.
Professor Candy, who appears in a scene at the end of Let’s Kill Hitler appears in Steven Moffat’s short story Continuity Errors, which appeared in Decalog 3: Consequences. It was Moffat’s first official piece of Doctor Who writing, and he would reuse its central conceit as the basis of A Christmas Carol.
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’re currently covering Series 13, releasing a new episode the Tuesday after Doctor Who airs.
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’re also involved in the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which is releasing Episode 8 today. We’ll be continuing to cover Series A of Blakes 7 in the weeks to come.
And finally, this week saw the launch of a new Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our first episode, we watch and comment on fan favourite Yesterday’s Enterprise, and we’ll be releasing a new episode from a different series every week.
Episode 223: Tried and True Tropes
· Recorded on Sunday 22 August 2021 · Duration 0:54:17
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It’s the last episode of the first half of the season, and to celebrate, Nathan, James, Peter and Adam Richard have invited literally everyone they’ve ever met to join them at Demons’ Run for a bloodless victory swiftly followed by a painful death. Oh, and the baby shower has been cancelled. Which is just the sort of thing that happens when A Good Man Goes to War.
Notes and links
If you want to hear more about the challenges of directing a Moffat script, you should head over to Rachel Talalay’s Tumblr, which is a fascinating and very telling read.
Nathan mentions (again) The Writer’s Tale, which is the place to go to find out about how difficult RTD found the workload on Doctor Who during his first stint as showrunner of the programme. Pray for him.
Upsettingly, Lesbian Spank Inferno was the title of the fourth episode of Steven Moffat’s breakout sitcom Coupling, in which we learn that it was also the title of series lead Steven Taylor’s favourite pornographic video.
James and Adam both comment on a Big Finish sequel to Inferno called Primord, in which a recast Liz Shaw (Caroline John’s daughter Daisy Ashford) gets turned into a Primord or something. It’s in the name, people!
You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on 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 to cover Series 13 at the very start of 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.
Today sees the release of Episode 6 of Maximum Power, a Blakes 7 podcast featuring some of our regulars and guests and some of the regulars from the Trap One podcast. We’ll be continuing to cover Series A of Blakes 7 every week over the next few months.
Episode 222: Lesbian Spank Inferno
· Recorded on Sunday 22 August 2021 · Duration 0:54:31
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