This week, we’re hosting our first ever black-tie function, and you’re all invited! Nathan’s scoffing all the canapés, Brendan keeps being mistaken for the waiter, and somewhere upstairs is a roaring and slavering Colin Neal, who will join us later — we hope — to discuss The Lazarus Experiment.
Guga Mbatha-Raw appeared in the Series 3 Black Mirror episode San Junipero. She also played Ophelia to Jude Law’s Hamlet in a production in the West End and on Broadway in 2009 — she is interviewed about it here.
This week, we discuss human nature, animatronic willies, easily avoidable deaths, and the ethics of cooking pork. Which is probably all just a way of distracting ourselves from the Evolution of the Daleks.
Notes and links
The script for this episode is clever enough to borrow from David Whitaker, the Doctor Who script editor who wrote the cleverest Dalek stories from the 1960s. To find out more about him, have a listen to our episode on Evil of the Daleks, which is Episode 13: Airwick Gatport.
James identifies one of the influences on this story as a period-appropriate adaptation of The Island of Dr Moreau called Island of Lost Souls (1932), starring Charles Laughton as Dr Moreau.
And last of all, our founder and dear friend Brendan has revived his YouTube channel and is producing huge quantities of fantastic content every day now. Please like and subscribe.
Picks of the week
James
James wants you to watch James Whale’s classic Universal film Frankenstein (1931), which is undoubtedly an influence on this story. After that, you should immediately go and watch Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Finally, you can round all that off with a read through Paul Magrs’s series of novels, the Brenda and Effie Mysteries, in which the Bride of Frankenstein, who now runs a B & B in Whitby, solves supernatural mysteries with her friend Effie. Audiobook versions are also available, some of which are brought to life by our very own Anne Reid, (Audible US) (Audible UK) (Audible AU)
Peter
Peter wants us to curl up on the sofa and re-visit Blood Harvest, a Virgin New Adventures novel by Terrance Dicks, and a sequel to his TV story State of Decay.
Richard
Richard wants only what’s best for us, and so he thinks we should all pour a small glass of whisky, draw the curtains, switch on the turntable and listen to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Because we should.
Nathan
Nathan was not allowed to pick Russell T Davies Years and Years again, even though it screens in Australia on SBS starting on 6 November. Instead, he wants you to read Eric Saward’s novelisation of Resurrection of the Daleks, which is every bit as good as you might expect.
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 force you to read our lengthy post on Gallifrey Base which explains in leaden detail that this episode has no idea about how DNA actually works.
This week, we learn that the mortal enemy of showtunes is capitalism, that the mortal enemy of some Doctor Who fans is fun, and that the mortal enemy of the Doctor has descended upon Depression-Era New York in an exciting new thematic guise. The show must go on, in spite of the Daleks in Manhattan.
Notes and links
The idea of the City as a hostile, inhuman place is found in Fritz Lang’s masterpiece of German expressionist cinema Metropolis (1927) and the terrifying version of 1980 depicted in Just Imagine (1930). Both of these are inspired by the looming monuments of architect Hugh Ferriss’s cityscapes.
On a lighter note, Busby Berkeley choreographed lavish dance number for both Broadway and Hollywood during the era of the earliest move musical. Take a look at some examples here.
Andrew Garfield’s big break wasn’t that superhero film at all: it was his film début, Boy A (2007).
It’s been some time since we did this, so here’s a link to El Sandifer’s discussion of this entire story on TARDIS Eruditorum.
This week, Brendan’s high on Honesty, James is driving naked, and Nathan can’t stop scratching himself for some reason, while special guest star Erik Stadnik brings some philosophy and literary criticism to our discussion of Gridlock.
Notes and links
Fans of David Tennant massively overplaying the Doctor’s enthusiasm will also enjoy his audiobook reading of The Stone Rose by Jacqueline Rayner. (Audible US) (Audible UK) (Audible AU)
The actor who plays Valerie in Gridlock and Bill’s foster mother Moira in Series 10 also had a small part in RTD’s series The Second Coming, which stars Christoper Eccleston in the title role and which is very definitely worth watching.
This week, we’re joined by Pete Lambert and Conrad Westmaas for a social history of Elizabethan England, a whirlwind tour of the life and works of Shakespeare, and some serious criticism of Martha’s taste in men. It’s Tuesday, so this must be Hamlet — it’s The Shakespeare Code.
Notes and links
Conrad has two recommendations for you. For a straightforward guide to Shakespeare’s life and works, see Emma Smith’s This is Shakespeare.
And we’re back! It’s a new year for Doctor Who, and there’s a new companion, with a new mother who will at some point slap him in the face. But until then, it’s all about a bunch of rhinos menacing a hospital on the moon, which is just the kind of premise literally any TV show would come up with. Welcome aboard, Smith and Jones.
Notes and links
It’s a scientific fact that San Junipero is the only episode of Black Mirror in existence which won’t reinforce your hatred of humanity in general and everyone in the world in particular. And Gugu Mbatha-Raw is spectacular in it. Watch it.
We will be mentioning Years and Years every week until we finally get to The Eleventh Hour. Anne Reid stars.
(Our Australian listeners should keep an eye on SBS, which has reportedly bought the series. Maybe.)
An exhaustive search has unearthed a copy of one of the Zovirax ads referenced in this episode.
The Judoon will return in The Sarah Jane Adventures Series 3 story Prisoner of the Judoon. They fit right in. (I miss that show. It’s great.)
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or you’ll never see your daughter in Florida again. Unless you actually have a daughter in Florida, in which case please give her our love.
It’s Christmas in July and an apocalyptically hot day in London. Still, Nathan, James, Todd and Peter have been cordially invited to attend the wedding of that guy off EastEnders and the incomparable Catherine Tate. Things don’t go quite according to plan. It’s The Runaway Bride.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Peter still can’t be persuaded to open a Twitter account. Very wise. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam, and the strings performance was by Jane Aubourg. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
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.
This week, we head back to the planet Necros to revisit Doctor Who’s most entertaining funeral: we’re joined by healers, cosmeticians, mercenaries and a great, big bomb — but you should definitely avoid the canapés at the wake. This one’s certainly a revelation, a Revelation of the Daleks.
Buy the story!
Revelation of the Daleks was released on DVD in 2005/2006. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
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.
It’s the end of twenty-first century Doctor Who’s difficult second album, and the end of the entirety of the Piper Era, so we’ve decided to do this whole episode in our best fake London accents. Will we find more to talk about than just the Battle of the Teeth?
Notes and links
Late last year, Nathan and Todd were generously invited by David and Rob to appear on an episode of The Doctor Who Show called The Podcast of Decision, for some reason. Check it out.
Nathan mentions Johnny Spandrell’s reservations about School Reunion, but you can read about them yourself in his blog post on the episode. And while you’re on his blog Randomwhoness, you can also read his take on just about every other Doctor Who story as well.
Nathan appears with JR Southall on Starburst’s now-defunct podcast The Blue Box Podcast, which you can still find on Apple Podcasts. In that particular episode, Steven Moffat Versus the Antipodes, JR and his guests fail to talk about their favourite era of Doctor Who, and talk instead about the pros and cons of the Stephen Moffat era.
And for the second week in a row, James gushes about Big Finish’s Torchwood One series, starring Tracy-Ann Oberman and Gareth David-Lloyd.
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 storm into your favourite show and become more sexy and popular than anyone has ever been before. That’ll teach you.
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.
This week, the whole world will soon end in a fiery cataclysm, which has nothing much to do with the podcast, but is probably worth mentioning at this point. Meanwhile, robots from the 1960s are wrangling about something, while an iconic love story comes to a final end. For now. Welcome to Doomsday.
Notes and links
You can find Tracy-Ann Oberman on Twitter at @TracyAnnO. She’s fabulous.
We’ve mentioned Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials before: Russell borrows from it liberally for this season’s arc. It’s an incredible series of books, soon to become a BBC television series, starring James McAvoy and Lin-Manuel Miranda. There’s even a trailer for you to enjoy.
And, of course, our regular reminder that you should read RTD’s The Writer’s Tale, which is Russell’s own account of his time running Doctor Who. Amazingly honest and insightful. A must read.
Todd is firing up his Blu-Ray player to remind himself of his childhood fear of the Cybermen. It’s Revenge of the Cybermen, which we cover in Episode 36: A Sociopathic Child.
Richard
Richard’s characteristically highbrow suggestion is The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), directed by Michael Powell and starring Roger Livesey and Deborah Kerr, who plays no less than three separate love interests throughout the film. Winston Churchill hated it, so it is definitely well worth a look.
James
James suggests the two Big Finish box sets in the Torchwood One series — Before the Fall and Machines, starring Tracy-Ann Oberman and Gareth David-Lloyd.
Nathan
Nathan wants you to spend a few hours catching up on Randomwhoness — a blog in which our friend Johnny Spandrell watches the entirety of Doctor Who in a random order, managing to find exciting new takes on each story.
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 snatch you from your everyday life, whisk you around time and space, fall in love with you, and abandon you in a parallel universe with no one to care for you apart from a vastly improved version of your entire family. We’re kind of bastards really.
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.
This week, Nathan’s hiding in a sarcophagus, James is transfixed by a giant ball, Todd keeps trying to lure his workmates into the next office, and Richard just wishes Tracy-Ann Oberman would do a better job with her hair — while all around them, Cybermen are busily pressing themselves into the skin of the universe. Our flight through Series 2 is nearly at an end, so it’s time to face an entire Army of Ghosts.
Notes and links
As often happens, Nathan mentions El Sandifer’s blog, so it’s probably time we linked to it again. It’s at Eruditorum Press, where you can find her takes on the history of Doctor Who from the very beginning — she’s currently working her way through Series 10.
Doctor Who Meets Scratchman was a Doctor Who movie idea developed in the 1970s by Tom Baker: it would have guest starred Vincent Price and Twiggy. Last year it was released as a novelisation written by James Goss.
This will undoubtedly come up again, but Big Finish has released a series of stories set in the London branch of Torchwood before it was destroyed by the Cybermen. The first box set is called Torchwood One: Before the Fall.
Russell T Davies’s new series is currently screening on BBC One. It’s called Years and Years, it’s funny and heartwarming, and it deftly captures the daily feelings of impending catastrophe experienced by anyone unfortunate enough to have survived this far into late capitalism. Highly recommended.
Richard makes reference to the alarming fact that in Colony in Space, the head of IMC was originally going to be a leather-clad Susan Jameson, before this idea was vetoed by the BBC Head of Serials.
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 come around to your workplace and applaud condescendingly at you while your trying to catch a quick mid-afternoon nap.
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. We’re now out of James Bond films to comment on, we’re planning to keep going with other stuff, for some reason.
This week, children are disappearing from the streets, while the people at number 20 are taking delivery of huge numbers of Derwent Lakeland pencils. It’s no wonder, really, that everyone around here seems to Fear Her.
Ghostwatch was a mockumentary about a haunted suburban house which was screened on Halloween 1992 to 11 million credulous BBC viewers. It led to thousands of complaints, and was blamed for the death of a teenage viewer. You can watch screenwriter Stephen Volk’s TEDx talk about it.
While we were recording this episode, Doctor Who fans were angry that the creators of the animated version of The Macra Terror had omitted a hilarious scene where the Doctor (Patrick Troughton) was neated up and re-shevelled by one of the Colony’s refreshment machines. For the record, we are now angry about a Judoon with a mohawk, and we plan to move on to something new next week.
Nathan mentions a film about a fevered child who finds herself trapped in fever dreams created by her own drawings. That film is Paperhouse (1988), and it’s available in HD on YouTube. So go and watch it — it’s terrifying. (It’s based on a somewhat less terrifying book called Marianne Dreams (1958) by Catherine Storr.
Daniel is one of the hosts of the New to Who podcast, which discusses Classic Doctor Who stories and introduces the Classic series to new fans. You can follow New to Who on Twitter at @NewToWhoPodcast.
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. We’re now out of James Bond films to comment on, we’re planning to keep going with other stuff: in fact, there will definitely be a new episode in the next day or two.
So we’d all meet up, every week, and we’d talk about the Doctor for a bit. But after a while, Bridget started cooking. Next thing you know, Mister Skinner started his readings, because he was writing his own novel. As time went on, we got to know each other better and better. Then it turned out that Bridget could play the piano, and I confessed my love of ELO. Next thing you know —
In this week’s Doctor Who–lite episode of Flight Through Entirety, Nathan, Brendan and Max Jelbart reminisce about our own experiences as members of LINDA, before tackling one of Doctor Who’s stranger, darker and madder episodes: Love & Monsters.
Notes and links
Watch Peter Capaldi writhe in embarrassment as Graham Norton confronts him with the evidence of his horrifically geeky past. Sigh. We don’t deserve him.
Capaldi also sends some fan art to Doctor Who comic artist Rachael Stott, who takes to Twitter to squee to the heavens, as well she might.
Nathan mentions his favourite Doctor Who commentary, in which RTD, Steven Moffat and David Tennant geek out about Forest of the Dead. I’m sure you’ll be able to find it lying around somewhere.
David Tennant takes a week off gurning to create one of the best episodes ever of Doctor Who Confidential — Do you remember the first time? — in which he interviews members of the cast and crew about their earliest experiences of Doctor Who. You can probably find a cut-down version of this on the Series 3 box set: it originally aired alongside fan favourite Blink.
As a child, Brendan read and re-read Cornell, Day and Topping’s Discontinuity Guide, which now forms part of the old BBC Cult Doctor Who website.
As a child, Max read and re-read Russell T Davies’s The Writer’s Tale, which inspired him to study screenwriting at university.
Way back in 2006, Brendan created two videos to play at the Doctor Who Club of Australia’s fan events celebrating Series 2. You can find them here and here. You can subscribe to Brendan’s YouTube channel here.
Star Trek: The Next Generation was a bit less generous and affectionate in its depiction of fans. Exhibit A: the Pakleds, and Exhibit B: Reg Barclay (who everyone secretly loves).
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. We’re now out of James Bond films to comment on, we’re planning to keep going with other stuff: in fact, there’s every chance of a new episode some time next week.
In this week’s earnest Radio National podcast episode, Nathan, Peter and Todd discuss religion, the concept of Satan, the nature of human evil, and a proposed Marxist reading of the plight of the Ood. Plus, an episode of a children’s science fiction series called The Satan Pit.
Notes and links
We mention a lot of tropes from the Hinchcliffe Era of Doctor Who, and so to brush up on this, you will probably want to listen to New to Who’s recent Hinchcliffe overview.
Further Hinchcliffe tropes are discussed in our episode on Pyramids of Mars, which also features a star turn from Gabriel Woolf as the Devil. Take a listen: it’s Episode 39: He’s Always a Villain.
And still more Hinchcliffe shenanigans abound in our Hand of Fear episode, which is called — fairly appropriately — Not Sufficiently Executed Enough.
And I found the video of that Very Special Episode of The Weakest Link which screened just before the début of Series 3 and starred David Tennant, John Barrowman, Camille Coduri, Noel Clarke and a bunch of guest stars from Series 2. You must watch this.
Peter recommends a satirical science fiction series on YouTube Premium — Weird City.
Nathan
And finally, Nathan recommends the Netflix series Russian Doll, which stars and was co-created by Natasha Lyonne from Orange is the New Black.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Peter is too busy fomenting war against God to read any of your tweets. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam, and the strings performance was by Jane Aubourg. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
This week, we’re orbiting around a black hole talking about flat-pack furniture and making lewd comments about security guards, while all around us the kitchen staff are gearing up for a massive attack on God himself. I suppose that’s why they call it The Impossible Planet.
Notes and links
You can find James Moran, the writer of The Fires of Pompeii on Twitter at @JamesMoran. He seems nice.
Tat Wood’s About Time 7 discusses all of the stories of Series 1 and 2 of Doctor Who, and has many negative things to say about this story. On the other hand, if you read it, you can safely skip about 30 episodes of Flight Through Entirety, including this one. So there’s that.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Peter is strictly only available in meatspace. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam, and the strings performance was by Jane Aubourg. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
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 hire Gabriel Woolf to broadcast terrifying threats into your room of an evening when you’re just trying to get on with your work.
It’s Coronation Day, and so Nathan, James and Richard have invited TV’s Adam Richard over to join us on the sofa, so that we can watch the festivities in comfort while Maureen Lipman slowly pulls our faces off. God save the Queen, everyone — it’s The Idiot’s Lantern.
Notes and links
Maureen Lipman is perhaps most famous for her play Re-Joyce!, in which she plays Joyce Grenfell, a famous writer and performer in British film and television in the middle of the twentieth century. You can see Lipman playing Greenfell here.
Muffin the Mule was broadcast live by the BBC from Alexandra Palace from 1946 to 1952. It looks miserable.
Nathan and Adam both have fond memories of Maureen Lipman’s ITV sitcom Agony, which ran for three seasons 1979 to 1981. Nathan has since found the box set on Amazon (US) (UK). The BBC brought the show back in 1995 as Agony Again.
James likes to imagine a sentient version of Billie Piper’s Day and Night chasing people to their doom in an earlier version of this episode’s script. And why not?
Jackie O and Kyle Sandilands are fairly regrettable morning DJs at Sydney radio station KIIS 1065. Probably best not to follow the link, really.
In a deleted scene from this episode, which will be included in a future Blu-ray box set, Adam mentions Outland, a sitcom about gay Doctor Who fans, which Adam co-created and starred in. We all loved it to death — we felt very represented. Plus it was really funny.
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 sneak into your how and upgrade all your phone apps so that you will no longer be able to find the Facebook angry react button.
This week, we’re all marching into Battersea Power Station to be sawn into pieces and to have our firmware upgraded. Which is just business as usual for Britain in The Age of Steel.
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 sneak into your how and upgrade all your phone apps so that you will no longer be able to find the Facebook angry react button.
Picks of the week
Brendan
Fans of the Cybermen — and that’s everyone, isn’t it? — will also enjoy the Big Finish range Cyberman, which consists of a rapidly-multiplying series of box sets, as usual.
Richard
Richard recommends Connie Willis’s Oxford Time Travel series, which consists of four books set in Oxford in the 2060s, where historians travel back in time to research the past.
Nathan
Nathan recommends Netflix original series Sex Education, starring Gillian Anderson: a high-school comedy-drama about sex and relationships. Really funny and warm and clever, and surprisingly sex-positive.
This week, Nathan and Richard argue fruitlessly about which one of them Brendan likes the most, before heading off to one of those parties where the champagne is warm, the canapés are disappointing, and the guests are being casually slaughtered by art deco cyborgs. It’s time for the Rise of the Cybermen.
Notes and links
Richard mentions Sir Carol Reed, who was a English film director in the mid-twentieth century, most famous for his adaptations of Graham Greene novels, who co-directed the film that won the 1946 Best Documentary Oscar, The True Glory (1945).
We talk about this story’s debt to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2003), which is partly set in a parallel universe where rich people fly around in zeppelins. It’s brilliant. Pullman himself writes the foreward to RTD’s book The Writer’s Tale: he’s an excellent sport, and talks about how much he enjoyed being ripped off by Davies throughout this season. The first part of Pullman’s sequel trilogy, La Belle Sauvage was released in 2017.
Here’s El Sandifer’s take on Doctor Who’s previous attempt at a parallel universe: “It’s possibly the most cynical piece of padding we’ve seen yet in Doctor Who — an excuse to interrupt one story by telling the exact same story in the middle.”
This story is indebted to Marc Platt’s Big Finish audio Spare Parts, which must be one of the best Cyberman stories ever and one of the best things Big Finish has ever done.
Fans of parallel universes with find a lovely one towards the end of Star Trek: Discovery Series 1. Well worth watching.
This week, we’re mostly hiding behind the curtain and under the bed, watching French aristocrats getting attacked by clockwork robots. Which is fun, but not quite in the way you might expect. Also, we’re joined by friend-of-the-podcast Simon Moore, the culmination of a nearly five-year masterplan to trick him into saying the word trope. It’s The Girl in the Fireplace.
Notes and link
You can find our anxious fanboy discussion about the Doctor and Rose’s kiss in The Parting of the Ways in Flight Through Entirety Episode 144, Fostering Tagging.
James has the very good taste to mention Matthew Waterhouse’s autobiography, Blue Box Boy, which is intelligent, moving and quite revealing. Worth a read.
The slightly upsetting scene where the Doctor meets a very young Clara was the prequel episode to The Bells of Saint John. You can watch it here.
This episode’s podcast commentary with Steven Moffat and Noel Clarke can be found on the BBC website, but it’s only available if you’re in the UK, you have Flash installed and you’re signed in at the BBC website. I don’t know, maybe if I rummage around for a bit, I might find a copy lying around somewhere.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, and on Apple Podcasts. We just released a new episode yesterday, in which we watch and comment on an episode of The Avengers called The Girl from Auntie, starring our very own Sir Bernard Cribbins and the World Ecology Bureau’s very own Amelia Ducat.
This week, Nathan, James and New to Who’s Steven B spend most of the time trying to make Todd cry; the rest of the time, we’re trying to avoid bats in the Deffry Vale High School computer room and listening carefully while Sarah Jane Smith explains the moral of the story. It’s School Reunion.
Steven B is one of the hosts of the New to Who podcast, which discusses Classic Doctor Who stories and introduces the Classic series to new fans. More about that later. Meanwhile, you can follow New to Who on Twitter at @NewToWhoPodcast.