Timewyrm: Exodus

Our tribute to the great Terrance Dicks concludes this week with a discussion of his first original Doctor Who novel, but we also take the opportunity to talk about what he achieved and how much we all owe him. Kate Orman and Adam Richard join us for Timewyrm: Exodus.

Notes and links

First, some background.

The Virgin New Adventures launched in 1991, as an “official” continuation of our cancelled show. It comprised 61 novels over nearly six years, including books by Classic Series writers Terrance Dicks, Marc Platt, Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel, as well as New Series writers Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts and Russell T Davies — not to mention five-and-a-half novels by our very own Kate Orman. Virgin lost the rights to Doctor Who in the middle of 1997, but the range continued until the end of 1999, with twenty-one novels featuring Benny Summerfield, a companion created by Paul Cornell for his 1992 novel Love and War.

Terrance Dicks didn’t get to launch the Virgin New Adventures: Timewyrm: Genesys is the second novel in the range. The 28th novel, Terrance’s sequel to State of Decay, was called Blood Harvest, which — together with Paul Cornell’s Goth Opera — was used to launch a second series of original novels, the Virgin Missing Adventures. Finally, when BBC Books acquired the rights to publish original Doctor Who fiction, they launched their series with a novel by Terrance — The Eight Doctors, which is not very highly regarded, sadly.

There are many dystopian novels set in an alternative timeline where the Nazis won World War II. Adam mentions Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), which depicts life in a United States partitioned between two mutually hostile Axis powers, Germany and Japan.

In an episode of the dreadful British science-fiction series The Tomorrow People (1973–1979), Hitler’s Last Secret, Part 2, Michael Sheard plays a revived Hitler, who is in reality a galactic criminal called Neebor from the planet Vashig. Here’s Neebor’s gruesome (and alarmingly cheap) unmasking for your viewing pleasure. Or not.

Blackout (2010) and All Clear (2010) are two novels in the Oxford Time Travel series by Connie Willis. The premise: In 2060, it’s possible to send students and historians back in time, confident in the theory that it’s impossible to change the past. But now three people find themselves trapped in World War II and start to find discrepancies that might change the outcome of the War.

Perhaps unwisely, Peter consults some reviews of Timewyrm: Genesys that he finds on the Time Scales website.

And finally, here’s the text of Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, just to remind us all that one day even our most impressive achievements will come to nothing.

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Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Adam is @adamrichard.com.au and Kate is @kateorman.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll keep going on and on and on at you about this amazing documentary we saw on the History Channel last week.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Mere hours after the release of this episode of 500 Year Diary, over on Maximum Power, we’ll be releasing an epic retrospective of the whole damn show, featuring hosts from every hemisphere, discussing how Blake’s 7 has thrilled, delighted, titillated and enraged us over the years. So until then, keep an eye on the website or on your podcatcher of choice.

Last week, we released a new episode of our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, Startling Barbara Bain. In it, we watch an episode called The Infernal Machine, guest starring Leo McKern and his massive scary robot spaceship husband, who turns up on the Moon and starts menacing the base in what is now the traditional fashion.

Instead of taking Christmas off, Untitled Star Trek Project released one more episode for 2025, in which Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watch another highlight of the franchise, the season premiere of Season 4 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Way of the Warrior. This is one of our favourite episodes of the franchise and of the podcast: you won’t want to miss it.

The Five Doctors

Well, our ridiculous show has just turned twenty, and so it’s time for everyone both alive and available to celebrate the occasion by reporting first to North Wales and then to the BBC Television Centre. But only one man can give them all exactly the right things to say and do — and that’s the man who knows what colour monsters are.

Notes and links

As Peter observes, 1983 was a big year for Australia’s Doctor Who fans. First of all, Peter Davison visited us for the first time during April, signing books at some shopping centres and presenting at the TV Week Logie awards (don’t ask). Then in May, ABC-TV started a run of Pertwee repeats that included six stories broadcast for the first time in colour in Australia: Claws of Axos, Colony in Space, The Sea Devils, The Mutants, The Time Monster and Frontier in Space. And then, of course, there was The Five Doctors…

Nathan recently recorded another podcast episode on The Five Doctors, this time for The Maran Chess Club, a Doctor Who podcast by Luke Sims-Jenkins which focuses on the Davison Era on TV and in books and audios. Nathan’s episode will be available at Christmas, so like and subscribe now.

We mention that Robert Holmes was the first writer given the opportunity to write the twentieth anniversary story. His treatment was called The Six Doctors. I’m fairly certain that this is the discussion document outlining Holmes’s ideas for the story.

Simon gives pi to thirty decimal places as 3.141592653589793237462643383279, but as he correctly points out, the second 7 there should be an 8. If you feel like outdoing Simon, you can find the first million digits of pi here.

One version of Susan Foreman’s life story was presented on Radio 4 in 1994, in the radio mockumentary Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman?, starring Jane Asher as Susan. Spoiler alert: sick of living on a dystopian post-holocaust Earth, Susan contacts her godfather’s brother Terry, who takes her back in time to the 1960s, where she gets a civil service job and ends up becoming the EC Commissioner for Education.

Terrance Dicks is the author of the best, most influential description of the Doctor’s character, quoted by the Doctor himself in both The Day of the Doctor and Twice Upon a Time. It first appeared in the second 1976 edition of The Making of Doctor Who by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke. Here’s the quote in full: “He is impulsive, idealistic, ready to risk his life for a worthy cause. He hates tyranny and oppression and anything that is anti-life. He never gives in and he never gives up, however overwhelming the odds against him. The Doctor believes in good and fights evil. Though often caught up in violent situations, he is a man of peace. He is never cruel or cowardly. In fact, to put it simply, the Doctor is a hero. These days there aren’t so many of them around…”

Peter Haining’s book Doctor Who: A Celebration — Two Decades Through Time and Space (1983) was hugely influential in shaping fan opinion throughout the last few years of the show’s original run. It’s been said that a lot of fannish discourse during the 90s was a reaction against the capsule reviews of each story that Haining wrote for this book.

The Doctor Who Exhibition at Longleat House ran for nearly thirty years, starting in 1974. Longleat House was also the site of the Twentieth Anniversary Event, which took place on the 3rd and 4th of April 1983. Fifty thousand people were expected to attend over the two days, but thirty-five thousand turned up on the first day. You can get your commemorative programme here.

Simon introduces his theory that the 20th and 50th anniversaries both signal that start of some kind of decline in the show’s popularity in Flight Through Entirety’s second episode on The Day of the Doctor, Episode 249: It’s No Arc of Infinity.

Flight Through Entirety commented on The Five Doctors in Episode 90: Great Balls of Commentary!, released on Sunday 16 October 2016.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Brendan is @retrobrendo.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll keep telling you that story about everyone wearing eyepatches on the set of Inferno over and over again.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Just yesterday, we released a new episode of our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, Startling Barbara Bain. In it, we watch an episode called The Infernal Machine, guest starring Leo McKern and his massive scary robot spaceship husband, who turns up on the Moon and starts menacing the base in what is now the traditional fashion.

And last of all, on Untitled Star Trek Project, we’ve just released our Christmas Special, in which Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford are joined by Todd himself to watch the 1989 film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier — a film that manages to be heartwarming and fitfully entertaining, despite its many, many obvious flaws.

State of Decay

This week, on a planet where evil carnivorous overlords oppress and prey on a helpless populace, we decide to watch and discuss State of Decay.

Notes and links

As we said last week, Horror of Fang Rock was a hurried replacement for a Terrance Dicks script called The Vampire Mutation, after the Head of Serials Graeme McDonald asked them not to proceed with the script because of a high-profile BBC telemovie called Count Dracula (1977), which was to screen later that year. Doctor Who researcher Paul Scoones has the full story…

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was first published in 1985. Particularly emphasised in the book is the fact that Offred is forbidden to read, and is left alone for hours in her room with nothing to do. This is an echo of the South’s anti-literacy laws, which were used to suppress the education of enslaved people, or black people more generally, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In Marxism, mystification is the process by which the ruling class attempts to obscure the true nature of their power and control over society. And so Aukon, Camilla and Zargo invent the Wasting to position themselves as the people’s saviours rather than their oppressors.

Inevitably, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) comes up again as a possible source of inspiration for this story. We talked about it last week as well.

And then, as so often in the 1970s, Doctor Who takes its inspiration from the Hammer Horror films of the 50s, 60s and 70s — particularly the nine Dracula films, the first of which, Dracula (1958), starred Christopher Lee as Dracula and our very own Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. In 1972, a very young Lalla Ward appeared in a Hammer Horror film, Vampire Circus, which also starred Adrienne Corri, who played Mena in The Leisure Hive.

Hammer House of Horror (1980) was a short-lived anthology television series created by Hammer Film Productions. Its final episode, The Mark of Satan, aired on ITV on 6 December 1980, the same night as Part 3 of State of Decay. Emrys James, who is Aukon in this story, appeared in both.

Lalla Ward and Emrys James both appeared in the BBC’s production of Hamlet (1980), part of its full set of Shakespeare plays broadcast between 1978 and 1985. Ward played Ophelia, while James played the Player King. (Hamlet was our very own Derek Jacobi, his mother was Doctor Who’s own mother Claire Bloom, and his murderous stepfather Claudius was played by Patrick Stewart.)

Nathan alludes to the Flight Through Entirety episode on The Hand of Fear, whose title encapsulates the typical Hinchcliffe-Era Doctor Who monster: Episode 45: Not Sufficiently Executed Enough.

William Lindsay, who plays Zargo here, also appears in the Blake’s 7 Series D classic Animals, where he plays the Captain, a young Federation officer who joins Servalan in the moderately expensive hotel room bar that she drives around the galaxy during that final season.

By 1981, Terrance was script editing BBC Classic Serials, miniseries adaptations of classic novels, including The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982, starring Tom Baker and Caroline John) and The Invisible Man (1984, inevitably featuring Michael Sheard). By 1985, he was producing them. His career is described in detail in Toby Hadoke’s obituary of Terrance, published in The Guardian in September 2019.

Flight Through Entirety discussed State of Decay in Episode 71: Why is E-Space Green?, released on Sunday 24 April 2016.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Richard is @moggywrangler.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll pop up behind you the next time you’re making a speech and create alarming and ridiculous tableaux to amuse your audience.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

We’ve just released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched the Star Trek: Voyager episode Memorial. Keep an eye out for our next episode — our Christmas special, where we’ll be discussing William Shatner’s towering directorial début, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

Horror of Fang Rock

Terrance’s planned vampire story has been unexpectedly cancelled, and he has only a few weeks to come up with a replacement. Fortunately, he’s brilliant. Melvin Peña joins us to discuss Horror of Fang Rock.

Notes and links

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was an Irish writer best known for his gothic stories, including the short story Carmilla (1872), which is a foundational vampire story, predating Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years. It’s likely that Terrance Dicks named his vampire queen Camilla after Le Fanu’s character (more of which next week).

The Forsyte Saga is a collection of three novels by John Galsworthy (1867–1933), originally published between 1906 and 1921, and published together in 1922. It chronicles the lives of three generations of the upper-middle-class Forsyte family, starting in the 1880s. Millie Gibson recently appeared in a TV adaptation, The Forsytes, which screened on Channel 5 in late 2025.

Among many other things, Andrew Orton creates digital models of the sets of Classic Doctor Who stories.

If you want to hear more of Peter and Simon in furious disagreement about the quality of The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People, here are the relevant episodes of Flight Through Entirety — Episode 220: Centuries of Embittered Religiosity, and Episode 221: Generic Potato Person.

When Season 22 of Doctor Who was first broadcast in Australia in 1985/86, its 45-minute episodes were split in half and broadcast from Monday to Thursdays at 6:30 PM. As a result, we got to experience some pretty terrible cliffhangers. Simon quotes the cliffhanger to our Part 3 of The Two Doctors:

DOCTOR: Perhaps you can lead us to this hacienda?
ANITA: Of course. It’s this way.
[sting]

The Tales of Ratiocination refers to three short stories by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), which are sometimes considered to be the first examples of detective fiction. In each of these stories, a mystery is solved by C. Auguste Dupin is an amateur detective from Paris. They are The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842), and The Purloined Letter (1844).

The Willem Dafoe/Robert Pattinson movie Melvin mentions is The Lighthouse (2019), in which two nineteenth-century lighthouse keepers are isolated in a lighthouse by a storm, alternately making out and hitting each other with axes, apparently.

Here’s an adorable image of Peter, aged about 8, with a small subset of his collection of Target novelisations.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Horror of Fang Rock in Episode 50: The Practical Problem with Leaving Someone Alive, released on Sunday 25 October 2015.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Melvin is @melvinpena.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll hide in your basement flicking the lights on and off until you come downstairs and ask us politely to stop.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Last week, Maximum Power returned with its field report into the release of the Series 2 blu-ray box set at the British Film Institute.

And we also released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched The Best of Both Worlds and The Best of Both Worlds, Part II, perhaps two of the most well-known and significant episodes not just of Star Trek: The Next Generation but of the entire Star Trek franchise. We thought they were a bit slow.

Robot

This week, Terrance gives up the script editor’s seat to Bob Holmes — but not before adding a final flourish to his era (and scoring one more paycheque) as the writer of Tom Baker’s first story, Robot.

Notes and links

Donkey Kong Bananza is the latest game in the Donkey Kong series, released on 17 July 2025 alongside the new Nintendo Switch 2. Nathan really likes it, describing it as “like eating a whole bunch of red food colouring and then watching a Japanese game show”.

Nathan mentions the BBC’s 1980 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice whose exteriors were shot on film in Lincolnshire and whose interiors were shot on videotape in tiny, tiny studios. It’s not great, but it does feature some familiar faces, including Moray Watson (Black Orchid) as Mr Bennet, Barbara Shelley (Planet of Fire) as Mrs Gardiner and Clare Higgins (Night of the Doctor, The Magician’s Apprentice) as Kitty. Horrifyingly, the vastly superior 1995 adaptation of the book is now 30 years old.

Richard mentions Susan Jameson in Colony in Space. She had originally been cast by Michael E. Briant as the villainous Morgan, but the casting was vetoed by BBC’s Head of Drama Serials Ronnie Marsh, on the grounds that a sadistic female villain would have been too sexualised for a family audience.

Robot first aired in Australia in April 1976. At about that time, ABC-TV decided to stop buying the series, and so on 24 August 1976 a group of fans decided to picket its Sydney office, which is how the Doctor Who Club of Australia was born. Henry Bland had been appointed Chairman of the ABC in July that year.

Here’s a link to the TARDIS Wikia page of Terrance Dicks’s novelisation Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, where you can see both versions of the cover.

Brendan suggests that one inspiration for Dicks’s script might be a script written by him and Malcolm Hulke for a 1962 episode of The Avengers — The Mauritius Penny. We released a commentary on The Mauritius Penny for Bondfinger back in 2020; of course, many more commentaries on The Avengers are available on The Three-Handed Game.

Here’s the TARDIS Wikia page for Short/Robinson; delightfully, TARDIS Wikia just accepts it as established canon that the two of them are the same person.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Robot in Episode 32: Quentin Crisp Duck Face, released on Saturday 20 June 2015.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Brendan is @retrobrendo.bsky.social, Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social, and Richard is @moggywrangler.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll tease your Roomba until it turns on you.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Last week, Brendan, Steven and Richard released the latest episode of their Avengers commentary podcast The Three-Handed Game. In The End of Empire #3, they watch and discuss Love All (1969), in which a hefty cleaning lady tricks some misogynist civil servants into falling in love with her and revealing all their most important secrets.

At the start of November, the Blake’s 7 Series 2 blu-ray box set was launched at the British Film institute, and Maximum Power was there to check it out. And to their surprise, they ran into some of the people responsible for the box set’s exciting new modelwork. Check out their latest field report.

And finally, we released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched a perhaps justifiably unloved episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Up the Long Ladder, finding much more to enjoy in it than they expected.

The War Games

This week, 500 Year Diary begins its six-week hagiography of Doctor Who writer, script editor and raconteur Terrance Dicks, with a discussion of his first on-screen script credit The War Games. Ten monster-free episodes culminating in a series-ruining revelation about the Doctor’s backstory — can Terrance make it work?

Notes and links

Nathan was born in Sydney on Sunday 27 April 1969. According to the invaluable BroaDWCast, that was the day of the first screening of The Wheel in Space Part 3 in Australia. (In Sydney, in fact. It was screened later in less important Australian cities.)

Peter and Todd are both right about the World War I location, which was a rubbish dump in Brighton that had previously been used in Richard Attenborough’s 1969 film Oh! What a Lovely War.

The Mighty 200 was a fan poll of the first 200 Doctor Who stories published in Doctor Who Magazine Issue 413 in October 2009. The results of the Doctor Who Magazine 60th anniversary poll, which included the Capaldi and Whittaker eras for the first time, were published in 2023 across Issues 589 to 594.

Vernon Dobtcheff plays the Scientist here, but he also plays the Terra Nostra Chairman in the Blake’s 7 episode Shadow (1979); on film, he was murdered by Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). He has had a prolific career: his most recent IMDb credit is from 2023, when he was 89 years old.

Inevitably, here’s El Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum essay on The War Games.

Peter Bryant and Derrick Sherwin left Doctor Who to work on Paul Temple (1969–1971), a series about a crime-solving detective fiction writer and his wife, based on popular radio plays from the 1940s. It was a co-production between the BBC and ZDF in Germany, and it featured many many actors and crew members that would be familiar to fans of classic Doctor Who.

Nathan had been thinking about The Power of Kroll recently because he appeared on the Season 16 episode of Strictly Come Hamster alongside its host Joe Ford, as well as Toby Hadoke and Ioan Morris.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The War Games in Episode 19: Hipster Klingon, released on Sunday 28 December 2014.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social, and Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll sneak into the judges’ robing room at your trial and tell them you’ve chosen the one who’s too thin.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Last week, we released another episode of our Space: 1999 commentary podcast Startling Barbara Bain, in which some mysterious immortal beings troll the crew of Moonbase Alpha by giving them everything they ever wanted.

A couple of days ago, we also released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called Waltz, in which Gul Dukat finally becomes the crazed space opera villain his mother always hoped he would be.

And just today, Brendan, Steven and Richard release the latest episode of their Avengers commentary podcast The Three-Handed Game. In The End of Empire #3, they watch and discuss Love All (1969), in which a hefty cleaning lady tricks some misogynist civil servants into falling in love with her and revealing all their most important secrets.

The Well

The surprising return of a decades-old monster leads not only to the urgent revision of a long-dormant TARDIS Wikia page, but also to an unexpected addition to the current season of 500 Year Diary. So join us, as we join Steven B for one more visit to a diamond planet called Midnight — it’s The Well.

Notes and links

In Midnight, Sky Sylvestry was played Lesley Sharp, who had worked with Russell in The Second Coming (2003), where she played the best friend of Christopher Eccleston’s character Stephen Baxter, who (it turns out) was the Second Coming of Christ.

This video on the BBC’s official YouTube channel explains how the Midnight Entity™ ended up in this episode. As Russell himself explains, the Doctor and Belinda were to have met the Orisha, divine spirits who are part of the Yoruba religion, but Russell was concerned that it would be impossible to turn them into Doctor Who monsters while still being respectful of the religious tradition.

Our Doctor Who flashcast The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire recorded our first impressions of The Well just a few weeks ago in Episode 15.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Steven is @steedstylin.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or when you’re not looking we’ll stick a post-it note on your back that says KICK ME.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Keen on more Steven B–based content? Well, you’re in luck: today sees the release of the latest episode of Brendan, Steven and Richard’s Avengers podcast The Three-Handed Game. It’s the first episode of a new triptych called The End of Empire: the boys watch The Gilded Cage, in which Honor Blackman gears up for the next stage of her career by staging a gold robbery in order to trap a criminal mastermind.

Finally, we also released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called To the Death, which contained levels of latex content hazardous to human health.

Enemy of the Bane

We return to Bannerman Road this week for the second coming of Samantha Bond as Mrs Wormwood, and she’s just as wonderful as you would expect. We also get the second coming of Kaagh the Slayer as well, at no extra charge.

Notes and links

We discussed this story’s predecessor Invasion of the Bane in Season 1, Episode 6: Where Kelsey Went.

Not Sufficiently Executed Enough is the title of Flight Through Entirety, Episode 45 on The Hand of Fear. It’s a riff on the Hinchcliffe-Era trope of the villain being an Evil from the Dawn of Time. (See also Sutekh, Morbius and the Master.)

When this episode airs, Anjli Mohindra is 18 years old and Gita Anwar is 39. Nicholas Courtney is 78.

Mrs Wormwood returns in the second box set of the series Rani Takes on the World, The Revenge of Wormwood, released in December 2023. A wonderful six-minute interview with Samantha Bond accompanied the release.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Adam is @adamrichard.com.au, Brendan is @retrobrendo.bsky.social, and James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

If you want to hear more of Adam’s theories about the world of Doctor Who, you can tune into his daily Doctor Who podcast Adam Richard Has a Theory.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll open up an unconvincing CGI portal in the middle of Milbury and ruin one of your formative childhood experiences.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Last week, we released another episode of our Space: 1999 podcast Startling Barbara Bain. Christopher Lee makes a terrifying visit to Moonbase Alpha, but it’s terrifying mostly because he’s so unexpectedly nice, and one of the Alphans is keen to be awfully mean to him.

And this week, we released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched an episode of Star Trek: Picard with an incredible musical number in the middle, which is, for that reason, immune to any kind of criticism. It’s Two of One.

Boom Town

This week, a New Series villain returns for the first time just six weeks after her first appearance — it’s Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen, wonderfully played by Annette Badland. Hannah Cooper and Pete Lambert join us.

Notes and links

The entire UK bans smoking in pubs and restaurants from the middle of 2007, but the ban is announced just a couple of months after Boom Town airs, in October 2005.

Cordelia’s “it’s all about me!” realisation comes in the Series 1 Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode Out of Mind, Out of Sight way back in 1997.

Annette Badland plays Hazel Woolley on The Archers. She’s known as Poisonous Hazel, and she visited Ambridge in summer 2005, perhaps watching Boom Town on BBC1 while she was there.

The dialogue Nathan tries to remember from The Parting of the Ways is actually Rose responding to the Doctor’s claim that this new race of Daleks was made from dead human beings. Rose says, “That makes them half human,” to which the Dalek Emperor replies, “That is blasphemy.”

Flight Through Entirety discussed Boom Town in Episode 142: Going One-on-One, released on Sunday 4 November 2018.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social, Hannah is @hannahcooper.bsky.social, and Pete is @quiteamess.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll invite you to join us for some ice-skating. In a very suspicious way.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Yesterday, we released another episode of Startling Barbara Bain. Christopher Lee makes a terrifying visit to Moonbase Alpha, but it’s terrifying mostly because he’s so unexpectedly nice, and one of the Alphans is keen to be awfully mean to him.

And this week, we released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched a funny and likeable episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — The Forsaken.

Time and the Rani

Another classic 80s villain makes her first reappearance on Doctor Who this week. But what will four serious teenage fanboys make of the fact that she has decided to dress up as Bonnie Langford?

Notes and links

In Dynasty, Kate O’Mara’s character Caress Morrell is the younger sister of Joan Collins’s Alexis Colby. She was in 19 episodes of Dynasty in 1986.

Mel’s delightfully overplayed line in The Reality War comes in just before the Rani beams into UNIT HQ: “She’s ruthless. Worse than ruthless. She’s indifferent to any pain or morality or humanity. The whole universe is just an experiment to her.”

Bonnie Langford’s interview with Benjamin Cook in Doctor Who Magazine appears in Issue 595 from October 2023. Here she is talking about her performance as Mel in the 1980s: “I read Russell’s scripts and thought, ahh, glorious! It is glorious, isn’t it?” says Bonnie. “I just feel really personally grateful, and delighted, and lucky to be able to revisit something that I didn’t necessarily think I did very well before.” Did she really not? “I just thought, oh God, I was really awful in it back in the day. I tried too hard.”

Bondfinger’s short series of commentaries on some of Kate O’Mara’s television performances can be found here.

Just a few days before the broadcast of The Reality War (and the recording of this episode), Russell T Davies posted on Instagram an introduction to the Rani and an explanation of the elements of her character he thought it was important to bring back.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Time and the Rani in Episode 116: Terrified of Tinsel, released on Sunday 25 June 2017.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll hang you upside down from the ceiling until your face is really, really puffy.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

This week, we released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched a top-tier episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation — Tapestry. There will be a new episode released next Friday.

Mindwarp

This week, the 1980s brings back its most iconic original villain (possibly) to face off against the Sixth Doctor for the second time. But is the reunion a success? Kate Orman joins us again, to discuss Mindwarp.

Notes and links

Sigourney Weaver in Aliens (1986) and Linda Hamilton in The Terminator (1984) are both mid-80s female leads who are strong and independent without being primarily sex objects.

Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping’s The Discontinuity Guide has this to say about Mindwarp: “Crozier’s sip of tea before saving Kiv is way-cool.”

The music for Mindwarp was composed by Richard Hartley, who had a long career composing film scores, including the incidental music for The Rocky Horror Picture Show (and its much less well-known sequel).

Dudley Simpson used a gong to herald the appearance of Ginka, one of Servalan’s henchmen, played by Malaysian-born Ric Young, in the Blake’s 7 episode Children of Auron. We discuss it on Maximum Power, in Episode 38: The Ginka Show.

During the production of Trial of a Time Lord, Eric Saward quit as script editor, taking with him his script for Part 14. However, the script exists online, and it was performed as a radio drama by the Flight Through Entirety team in Episode 112: Time Inc.

Trials and Tribulations is a documentary on the history of the Colin Baker era, focusing on the cancellation and the hiatus. It can be found on the DVD of The Ultimate Foe and in the Season 23 box set.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Mindwarp in Episode 109: Dark Colours, released on Sunday 7 May 2017.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Kate is @kateorman.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll do a very slipshod job of planning your next surprise party.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

The final episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire (perhaps) was out on Monday, discussing the last Doctor Who story of this entire era The Reality War.

Last week saw the release of the latest episode of Brendan, Steven and Richard’s Avengers podcast The Three-Handed Game. It’s the final episode of their triptych This Green Unpleasant Land, Wish You Were Here, in which Tara King finds herself in a parody of The Prisoner featuring a number of Doctor Who guest actors from the 60s and 70s.

And there’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. We’ll be returning this week — God willing — with a random episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Spoiler alert: it’s Tapestry.)

And that’s exactly the word. This has been an absolute joy.

It’s time to say goodbye to another Doctor, and to another era, with no real idea of what’s coming next. Just like life, really.

Here’s the link to the BBC press release about this episode.

Warriors of the Deep

This week, the Earth’s original inhabitants wake up from hibernation after about a decade, put on their best fibreglass vests and samurai outfits, and invade an undersea base at 0.5× speed. The Silurians and Sea Devils are back — but why?

Notes and links

In the first season of Space: 1999, Moonbase Alpha’s operations were run from Main Mission, a spectacularly huge and beautiful set at Pinewood Studios. Seabase 4’s bridge is similar (but smaller and cheaper).

The actor who plays Bulic, Nigel Humphries, appeared in an episode of Blake’s 7 called Mission to Destiny, which we discuss in Maximum Power Episode 7: Jeopardy Space Meteorites.

The memory cheats. The book Doctor Who Special Effects by Mat Irvine (1986) features an extreme close up of a Silurian mask from 1970’s Doctor Who and the Silurians.

Room 101 (1994–2018) was a talk show in which a celebrity guest would discuss the things they hated most. In the episode broadcast on 15 April 2002, former Controller of BBC One Michael Grade appeared and nominated Doctor Who. You can see the relevent clip from the episode here. (He also nominated Shirley Bassey, so he’s clearly a monster.)

These days we think of the Cold War taking place in the 50s and 60s, but it was still going strong in 1984. We mention a few relevant films. We already talked about Threads (1984) in our discussion of The Dalek Invasion of Earth: it was a British TV movie depicting Sheffield in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. The Day After (1983) was an American TV movie depicting a nuclear strike on the United States. And WarGames (1983) was a popular Hollywood movie about a teenage computer enthusiast whose hacking nearly kicks off World War III.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Warriors of the Deep in Episode 92: Is Ichtar Okdel?, released on Sunday 20 November 2016.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Todd is is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll enter your house uninvited and very very slowly and fill your bed with goannas.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

The final episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire (perhaps) will be out on Monday: we’ll be supplying you with our urgent hot takes on the season finale The Reality War.

Today sees the release of the latest episode of Brendan, Steven and Richard’s Avengers podcast The Three-Handed Game. It’s the final episode of their triptych This Green Unpleasant Land, Wish You Were Here, in which Tara King finds herself in a parody of The Prisoner featuring a number of Doctor Who guest actors from the 60s and 70s.

And there’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we roared with laughter watching the astonishingly boring Season 6 Star Trek: Voyager episode Alice.

Snakedance

This week, the people of the planet Manussa are about to discover that all their ancient myths are true, and that their own thirst and dissatisfaction are rearing up to strike them in rubbery serpentine form. Kate Orman joins us to discuss the second coming of the Mara.

Notes and links

Tanha is the Pali word for thirst or craving. It is associated with dukkha, (“dissatisfaction”), which is the subject of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths.

The bhavachakra is the Wheel of Life. In Tibetan Buddhism, depictions of the wheel are used as a focus of meditation; the wheel itself is an image of samsara, the cyclic nature of existence. Hence the visually striking imagery at the end of Part 3 of Kinda.

According to the readership of Doctor Who Magazine (Issue 69, October 1982), Kinda was the least popular story of Season 19. From best to worst, the results were Earthshock, The Visitation, Black Orchid, Time-Flight, Castrovalva, Four to Doomsday and Kinda.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Snakedance in Episode 85: Tiny Little Petty Flaws, released on Tuesday 9 August 2016.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Kate is is @kateorman.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll start making rude remarks about how fat you look in that distorting funhouse mirror.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

The next episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be out on Monday: we’ll be supplying you with our urgent hot takes on Wish World.

Last week, we released an episode of our Space: 1999 commentary podcast Startling Barbara Bain, in which Helena’s zombie husband turned up on the base to warn everyone not to settle on the poisonous planet nearby that everyone was so excited 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 said a heartfelt farewell to Star Trek: Lower Decks as we watched its finale The New Next Generation.

Here’s the link to Simon’s interview with Eurovision runner-up Michael Ball on his weekly podcast In Conversation.

The Sontaran Experiment

It’s cold and rainy this weekend, and so we’ve decided to catch up with Mark McManus and spend the day larking around Devonshire, falling down holes, and generally hiding from Kevin Lindsay while he brings the Sontarans to the screen for the second time.

Notes and links

As we discuss right off the bat, much of the TV of this period was shot on videotape in the studio and on film on location, giving it a very distinctive look. This look is remarked on by Graham Chapman in this sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Naturally, Nathan mentions El Sandifer about fifteen mintues in. This time, it’s her essay on The Time Warrior, surprisingly. (And although Nathan doesn’t mention it, her essay on The Sontaran Experiment has a lot to say about the use of video cameras on location in this story.)

Every imaginable detail of the history of the screening of Doctor Who on ABC-TV is recorded on the BroadDWCast website, which chronicles the history of the broadcast of Doctor Who round the world. Go to this page to learn about the airdates that were so formative for Simon, Peter, Todd, Richard, Nathan during the 1970s and 80s.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Sontaran Experiment in Episode 34: Choc Bit Breast Plates, released on Saturday 4 July 2015.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Mark is @quarkmcmalus.bsky.social, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X (for now) and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll call up your boss and tell him about all the Balatro you’ve been playing during work hours.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

The next episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be out on Monday: we’ll be trying keep it together as we discuss The Interstellar Song Contest.

Yesterday we released an episode of our Space: 1999 commentary podcast Startling Barbara Bain, in which Helena’s long-dead husband returned to life to warn the crew not to settle on that nearby idyllic planet and start eating all its antimatter vegetables. With only moderate success.

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 gentle and hilarious Star Trek: Lower Decks episode called Fully Dilated.

Here’s a link to Inua Ellam’s story What I Did On My Holidays By Omo Esosa on the BBC website.

The Seeds of Death

It’s Invaders from Mars this week, as the terrifying monsters we thawed out in 5000 AD last year make an early appearance on the Moon just sixteen years after the visit of the Cybermen. Their goal: to cement their position somewhere on the top ten list of recurring Doctor Who monsters. Jeremy Radick joins us as we try to work out exactly where.

Notes and links

Peter mentions that the 2003 DVD release of The Seeds of Death was the first DVD release to use VidFire, a technology that uses frame interpolation to restore the videotape look to episodes that now only exist as film recordings.

Nathan is thinking of Gary Russell’s 1994 Virgin New Adventures novel Legacy, a sequel to the two Peladon stories that heavily features the Ice Warriors.

Of course, we mention H G Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) again, particularly the red weed, which is a Martian plant that starts spreading across the countryside after the invasion.

Jeremy suggests that the first transporter-focused Star Trek story might be James Blish’s Spock Must Die! (1970), in which an evil Mr Spock is created when an experiment with the transporter goes horribly wrong.

Inevitably, Nathan mentions El Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum essay on The Seeds of Death.

In March 2021, the container ship Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Canal, blocking it completely for six days. The BBC reported that it was holding up USD 9.6 billion worth of goods each day.

Toby Hadoke can be heard praising Ronald Leigh-Hunt’s performance in the Blakes 7 episode Children of Auron in Maximum Power Episode 59: Snogging & Nihilism.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Seeds of Death in Episode 18: Sideburn Trouble, released on Tuesday 23 December 2014.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com and Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X (for now) and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll break into your house, fiddle with the settings on the air conditioner, and make off with all your woolly jumpers.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

The next episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be out on Monday: we’ll be trying to work out what we thought about The Story & the Engine.

Last weekend, Brendan, Steven and Richard’s Avengers podcast The Three-Handed Game released their take on the New Avengers episode Emily, Part 2 of their triptych This Green Unpleasant Land.

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 bafflingly undercooked Star Trek: The Original Series episode called The Empath.

The Moonbase

We’re walking on eggshells this week as we await the arrival of an army of marching Cybermen, approaching the Moonbase with a dastardly plan to change Doctor Who for ever. For the better, on the whole.

Notes and links

The Moonbase was novelised by Gerry Davis as Doctor Who and the Cybermen, published in 1975. The audiobook is read by Anneke Wills and was released in 2009.

The article Peter cites as a source for the phrase “behind the sofa” was called “The metamorphoses of Who”, written by Stanley Reynolds and published in The Times on 9 April 1973.

If you want to hear more of Adam’s theories about the world of Doctor Who, and of course you do, you can tune into his daily Doctor Who podcast Adam Richard Has a Theory.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Moonbase in Episode 12: Comedy Accents, released on Sunday 26 October 2014.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social, and Adam is @adamrichard.com.au. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X (for now) and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll go through all your cupboards and drink everything with even a hint of hydrocarbons.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

The next episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be out on Monday: we’ll be offering our lukewarm takes on Lucky Day.

Brendan, Steven and Richard’s Avengers podcast The Three-Handed Game has just released their take on the New Avengers episode Emily, Part 2 of their triptych This Green Unpleasant Land.

Our Space: 1999 commentary podcast Startling Barbara Bain has reached Episode 12, End of Eternity. Plans are underway to record Episode 13 some time this month.

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 classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode from the show’s imperial phase, The Drumhead, guest starring Jean Simmons.

The Dalek Invasion of Earth

This week, we launch the second season of 500 Year Diary with the first of our Second Comings — Doctor Who’s second ever Dalek story, The Dalek Invasion of Earth. How will the Daleks survive leaving their city on Skaro and subjecting themselves to the public gaze just before Christmas?

Notes and links

Nathan mentions guesting on a podcast to discuss The Chase. That podcast was the All of Time and Space podcast, and the episode was called Scooby Who. It was released in June 2021.

The only way you could buy a copy of Remembrance of the Daleks on VHS back in 1993 was in the Dalek Tin, which included a VHS copy of The Chase and a commemorative booklet by Andrew Pixley called Daleks: A Brief History.

Simon remembers being shown an episode of Homicide when he was at university. This was a well-known Australian police procedural on the Seven Network, which ran from 1964 to 1977, and which featured somewhere on the resumés of most Australian actors of the period.

In The Reign of Terror, the role of Doctor Who on Location was played by Brian Proudfoot.

We mention a number of post-apocalyptic dystopias relevant to this story: Threads (1984) is a terrifying TV movie depicting the effects of a nuclear holocaust on Sheffield. On the Beach (1957) is a novel by Neville Shute, depicting the lives of a few survivors of a nuclear holocaust living in southern Australia, waiting for the fallout to reach them; a film adaptation was released in 1959. The Day of the Triffids (1951) is a novel by John Wyndham set in England after an accident blinds most of the population and lethally venomous walking plants start wandering around killing people. And The War of the Worlds (1898) is a novel by our very own H G Wells, depicts a temporary successful Martian invasion which results in the collapse of human civilisation.

Later on, Terry Nation will get to create his own post-pandemic apocalyptic dystopia, Survivors (1975), which ran for three seasons, even though Terry himself left the show after Season 1. It was mostly about how great lovely middle-class people would be at mucking in after the entirety of civilisation collapses.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Dalek Invasion of Earth in Episode 3: Bernard Cribbins in Vinyl, released on Sunday 20 July 2014.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social, and Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X (for now) and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll sell you out for a few root vegetables and (hopefully) a bar or two of soap.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

The next episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be out on Monday: we’ll be offering our lukewarm take on The Well.

Since we last met, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast Startling Barbara Bain has reached Episode 12, End of Eternity, in which an aggressively upper-middle-class Peter Bowles plays the Devil, who (understandably) offers the crew of Moonbase Alpha an eternity of conscious torment.

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 the second last episode of the Xindi arc from Series 3 of Star Trek: Enterprise, Countdown.

Notes and links

Thank you to those of you who sent us questions: Kate Orman, Doctor What and General Witchfinders.

In our discussion of Sleep No More, Brendan reaches for the name of Bethany Black’s love interest in the episode, but goes slightly astray. The name he’s after is Chopra, played by the astoundingly beautiful Neet Mohan.

In Episode 2 of Flight Through Entirety, Richard famously compares Hartnell’s performance style to Marlene Dietrich’s. This week, he bookends that beautifully with a comparison of Peter Capaldi’s style to Maggie Smith’s, particularly her Oscar-winning performance in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Richard alludes to this story from 2015, in which a team consisting of Peter Capaldi, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss came third in a Doctor Who pub trivia competition at a Doctor Who convention in Sydney.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Brendan is at @retrobrendo.bsky.social, Todd is at @toddbeilby.bsky.social, James is at @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social and Simon is at @simonmoore.bsky.social. Richard is on X at @RichardLStone. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Bluesky, as well as on Mastodon, X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll abandon you for a few years, leaving you with only a couple of Flight Through Entirety-style Doctor Who podcasts to keep you entertained in the meantime.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

Now that Flight Through Entirety is taking a break, you should all go and subscribe to 500 Year Diary, our latest new Doctor Who podcast, in which we go back through the history of the show and examine new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early in 2024, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season, The Second Coming, early in 2025.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire recently released our hot take on Ncuti Gatwa’s second Christmas Special (and Steven Moffat’s ninth), Joy to the World. And we’ll be back again in 2025 to talk about Season 2.

Last week, The Three-Handed Game released their first Christmas Special, discussing the 1966 Avengers episode Too Many Christmas Trees, in which Steed’s weird Christmas nightmares start to become reality. The boys will be back in 2025 for the third episode in their triptych The Pop Explosion.

Maximum Power is back at last with its long-awaited coverage of the 1981 season of Blakes 7. Last weekend we released our discussion on the season’s controversial second episode — Power.

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 notoriously silly early episode of Deep Space Nine, the widely reviled but never forgotten Move Along Home.

Thank you very much for listening: we’ll see you again in a few years. And on all of our other podcasts, of course.

Notes and links

For the kids: Morecambe and Wise were an incredibly successful and famous British comedy duo throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s, and their Christmas specials were insanely popular — running from 1969 to 1977 on the BBC, and then on ITV from 1978 to 1983. Their 1977 show was watched by 28 million people in the UK.

Inevitably, Richard mentions some antecedents to this story. A Christmas Carol (1843), in which Charles Dickens calls out his era’s brutal social inequalities and essentially creates Christmas as we know it. All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), a vivid story of some young German soldiers fighting in France during the Great War. And, closer to home, A B Facey’s A Fortunate Life (1981), the autobiography of a Australian man who experienced extraordinary suffering and loss — growing up in Western Australia, surviving the Gallipoli campaign, losing his son in World War II — before the publication of the book when he was 87 years old. (“I have lived a very good life, it has been very rich and full. I have been very fortunate and I am thrilled by it when I look back.”)

If you want to know what Susan was up to instead of appearing in this episode, the adventures of the War Susan now encompass three Big Finish box sets, one of which is due for release some time next year.

Simon identifies a nod in Murray’s soundtrack to Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel (1978). You can hear it performed here.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, James is at @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social and Simon is at @simonmoore.bsky.social. Richard is on X at @RichardLStone. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Bluesky, as well as on Mastodon, X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll arrive uninvited at your place for Christmas dinner, sit at the table being miserable to everyone for an hour, and only cheer up when it’s finally time for us to leave.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will back in a couple of days’ time with our hot take on Ncuti Gatwa’s second Christmas Special (and Steven Moffat’s ninth), Joy to the World. And we’ll be back again in 2025 to talk about Season 2.

Today, The Three-Handed Game is back for their first Christmas Special, discussing the 1966 Avengers episode Too Many Christmas Trees, in which Steed’s weird Christmas nightmares start to become reality. The boys will be back in 2025 for the third episode in their triptych The Pop Explosion.

Maximum Power is back at last with its long-awaited coverage of the 1981 series of Blakes 7, starting with the season première Rescue. We’ll be back again on this Sunday to talk about the second episode, Power.

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 celebrated Christmas by catching up with friend-of-the-podcast Frazer Gregory to watch what might be the best of all the Star Trek films, Star Trek: First Contact.

Notes and links

Thank you to the people who contributed their questions: Luke Hobbs, Si Hart and David Kitchen. And remember that we have a shiny new-ish Bluesky account, which is the best way to follow us online these days.

And for the very last time, probably, we reference Friend from the Future, a promotional short designed to introduce Bill Potts, first broadcast during Match of the Day on 23 April 2016, nearly a year before this season began. You can see the entire short here.

And just as a reminder, the Jenny Laird Award goes to a season or era’s most puzzling creative choice, and the Bonnie Langford goes to someone or something that is surprisingly and delightfully good.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Todd is at @toddbeilby.bsky.social and James is at @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Bluesky, as well as on Mastodon, X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll think of the right words later.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.

The Three-Handed Game makes a triumphant return to your podcatcher with Part 2 of its The Pop Explosion triptych, Build a Better Mousetrap, in which Cathy Gale joins a motorcycle gang which is threatened by witches, which is a thing that basically happened all the time in the 1960s.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. Nathan and Joe took the week off this week, but last week, we enjoyed a widely-reviled episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called Ferengi Love Songs.

I’m not trying to win. I’m not doing this because I want to beat someone, or because I hate someone, or because I want to blame someone. It’s not because it’s fun and God knows it’s not because it’s easy. It’s not even because it works, because it hardly ever does. I do what I do because it’s right! Because it’s decent! And above all, it’s kind. It’s just that. Just kind.

On a quiet farm on a distant spaceship, the Doctor makes his last stand. Because that’s what he always does. It’s The Doctor Falls.

Notes and links

Nathan compares the Missy/Master dynamic to a similar situation found in the late Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Second Chances, in which we meet a transporter clone of Commander Riker who is still in love with Deanna Troi, while his original version has long since moved on from that relationship. (We are yet to cover this one on Untitled Star Trek Project.)

He also compares the Missy/Master hug to a similar one from the Blakes 7 episode Traitor, in which Servalan snogs a character called Leitz, who is blackmailing her, and then stabs him in the back of the neck with a plastic crystal thing. We will talk more about this during our coverage of Blakes 7 Series D on Maximum Power, which starts just three weeks from today.

In The World Shapers (1987), a Doctor Who Magazine comic strip written by Grant Morrison, it is established that the Mondasian Cybermen were descended from the Voord from The Keys of Marinus.

Bill’s final speech to the unconscious Doctor at the end of this episode seems to allude to a similar speech from Moffat’s first Doctor Who story, The Curse of Fatal Death (1999), in which the Doctor’s companion Emma (Julia Sawalha) says “Doctor, listen to me. You can’t die, you’re too nice, too brave, too kind and far, far too silly. You’re like Father Christmas, the Wizard of Oz, Scooby Doo. And I love you very much. And we all need you, and you simply cannot die.” You can — and should — watch The Curse of Fatal Death on YouTube.

Picks of the Week

Todd

Todd recommends the Special Edition of The Happiness Patrol, which restores many deleted scenes and adds some clever and sympathetically designed new special effects. It’s available on the Season 25 box set of Doctor Who: The Collection. (Amazon UK) (Amazon US) (Amazon AU)

Peter

Peter recommends the Surgeons of Horror podcast series on Doctor Who, The Horror of Who, which has featured Brendan, Peter and Nathan. In the episode Hartnell’s Horror Part 4: The Cybermen, Peter explains what makes the Cybermen from The Tenth Planet so brilliant and effective.

Brendan

Brendan recommends George Sheard’s reimagining of these two episodes as a 1960s Doctor Who story as Genesis of the Cybermen: World Enough and Time Noir. Check out the trailer here.

Nathan

Nathan recommends our other Doctor Who podcast, 500 Year Diary, which will be taking over from Flight Through Entirety for a few years while FTE takes a well-earned break. In our first season, New Beginnings, we discussed six episodes in Doctor Who and its spinoffs, where a show is making a new or fresh start. We’ll be back with a second season early in 2025. Like and subscribe.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Brendan is at @retrobrendo.bsky.social and Todd is at @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Bluesky, as well as on Mastodon, X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll break your heart, but in a funny way.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.

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 enjoyed a widely-reviled episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called Ferengi Love Songs.

Notes and links

For all four of us, the special effect shot of the hole in Bill’s chest is familiar from the Robert Zemeckis film Death Becomes Her (1992), in which Meryl Streep makes a similar hole in Goldie Hawn, which is for several reasons more hilarious and enjoyable.

Until this point, the canonical version of the Genesis of the Cyberman had been the Big Finish audio play Spare Parts (2002), written by Marc Platt and starring Peter Davison and Sarah Sutton. It’s really brilliant, and not very expensive, which means you should definitely put it on your list.

And finally, the title of this story comes from Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress” (1681), in which the poet imagines how he would love his mistress if their time was unlimited, and then describes the alacrity with which they should love each other, given that time is fleeting.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com and Todd is at @toddbeilby.bsky.social; Simon is on X as @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Bluesky, as well as on Mastodon, X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll make you wait years and years for Episode 298.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.

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 enjoyed a dumb and action-packed episode of Star Trek: Enterprise called Azati Prime.

Notes and links

Crash (2004) starts with a voiceover by Don Cheadle, laying out the terms of the metaphorical link between car crashes and human interactions generally. It’s not a very popular movie, not only because of its superficial approach to issues of race, but also because it won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Picture instead of Brokeback Mountain.

Richard mentions American YA fiction writer Scott Westerfield, particularly the Uglies series with its teenage protagonist. He also mentions William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, where a group of schoolchildren stranded without adults on a deserted island quickly revert to savagery.

Brian Vernel was born in 1990, so he was 26 or 27 when he played Lucius in this episode, and 32 when he played far-right extremist Curly in the first season of Slow Horses in 2022.

Kar’s speech about the depredations of the Roman Army is taken from the Agricola by Tacitus, a short biography of his father-in-law, chronicling, among other things his campaigns in northern Britain. Tacitus depicts the Caledonian leader Calgacus making the speech just before the Battle of Mount Graupius, in which his forces were defeated by the Romans. You can read the speech in translation here.

This week’s monster is based on very common depictions found in Pictish carvings of an animal called the Pictish Beast. Some depictions are found among the carvings seen in this episode.

Tania Bell is a companion to the Eighth Doctor, first appearing in Big Finish’s Stranded in 2020 — the first transgender companion to appear in Doctor Who. She is played by Rebecca Root. John has written five stories for Tania: her second story Wild Animals, as well as The Long Way Round, What Just Happened?, Best Year Ever and Flatpack (in which she meets Christopher Ecclston’s Ninth Doctor).

John writes for Michelle Gomez as Missy in Divorced, Beheaded, Regenerated and in Too Many Masters.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com and Brendan is at @retrobrendo.bsky.social; Richard is on X as @RichardLStone. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll unleash the scary puppy the next time you come over for a coffee.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.

In the most recent episode of Maximum Power, Pete and Si interviewed two of the people involved in the creation of the new Blakes 7 Series 1 blu-ray box set — filmmakers Chris Chapman and Chris Thompson. We’ll be back to cover Series D next month.

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 marvelled at a clever and enjoyable episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in which a new Emissary turns up and Miles welcomes Keiko back to the station — Accession.

Notes and links

Lucifer Box is the protagonist of three spy novels by Mark Gatiss set in the early twentieth century, The Vesuvius Club (2004), The Devil in Amber (2006) and Black Butterfly (2008).

Empress of Mars first aired on 10 June 2017. Two days earlier, there was a general election, in which Theresa May’s Conservative government was returned to power with a slightly reduced majority. May had become prime minister of the UK in July 2016 and had begun the process of leaving the EU by triggering Article 50 in March 2017. The UK formally left the EU on 31 January 2020, just two days before Praxeus aired.

One of the clear inspirations for the premise here is H G Wells’s novel The First Men in the Moon (1901), in which a penniless writer and his eccentric inventor neighbour travel to the moon and meet its indigenous inhabitants, who are unimpressed with what they hear about our social and political systems on earth. A film adaptation First Men in the Moon (1969) was co-written by Quatermass’s Nigel Kneale and featured music by Laurie Johnson, who will be familiar to fans of The Three Handed Game. There was also a television adaptation in 2010, written by Mark Gatiss and starring both him and Rory Kinnear.

Other inspirations include Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter novels, starting with A Princess of Mars in 1912, in which a Civil War veteran from Virginia is transported to Mars and becomes involved in various wars and areopolitical struggles. There are eleven books in the series, culminating in John Carter of Mars in 1964.

And just one more possible inspiration: She (1887), by H Rider Haggard, about the search for a white sorceress who rules a tribe in a remote part of Africa.

Katy Manning played an Ice Warrior queen for Big Finish, in a box set called The Second Doctor Adventures: Beyond the War Games, released in 2020.

According to Toby, Anthony Calf, who plays Godsacre here, was also in The Visitation. He played Charles, the son of John Savident’s Squire in the opening scenes of Part 1, and it was indeed his first television role.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.bsky.social and Todd is at @toddbeilby.bsky.social; Richard is on X as @RichardLStone, and Toby is @TobyHadoke. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

You can find out everything about Toby Hadoke at his website tobyhadoke.com, and you can catch up with his podcasts at Toby Hadoke’s Time Travels. A publication date for the first volume of Toby’s book series on Quatermass will be announced very soon.

You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll invade your backyard, set up some tents, and start insistently ordering you to make us cups of tea.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.

Last weekend, a new episode of Maximum Power was released, in which Pete and Si interviewed two of the people involved in the creation of the new Blakes 7 Series 1 blu-ray box set — filmmakers Chris Chapman and Chris Thompson. We’ll be back to cover Series D next month.

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 raised the occasional eyebrow as a shapeshifting red octopus ran amok on the Enterprise in an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series called The Survivor.

Notes and links

Simon quotes from the Yes, Prime Minister episode The Bishop’s Gambit (1986), which discusses the Church of England’s dual roles as a religion and as “part of the rich social fabric of this country”.

The Doctor’s broadcasts from a ship somewhere outside the five-mile limit inevitably remind several of us of an episode of The Goodies called Radio Goodies (1970), in which the trio broadcast a pirate radio station into the UK from international waters, satirising real-world events chronicled in the Richard Curtis film The Boat That Rocked (2009).

We’ve mentioned it before: Doctor Who: The Complete History is a ninety-volume book series covering the series from 1963 to 2017, which means that this episode comes up in Volume 88. The books themselves were beautifully produced, but the series is also available digitally.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.bsky.social, Brendan is at @retrobrendo.bsky.social, and James is at @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social. Simon is on X at @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll keep goading you until you shoot us with a big gun, and then — yeah, I’ve got nothing. I was hoping something would develop.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.

Last week, Brendan and Bjay’s gaming podcast The Bjay BJ Game Show released their latest episode, in which they discuss Lost in Play (2022), a point-and-click adventure set in the imagination of two young children.

Brendan, Richard and Steven also recently released another episode of their Avengers podcast The Three Handed Game. It’s the first episode of their triptych The Pop Explosion, covering a monochrome Emma Peel episode called Death at Bargain Prices, in which Steed and Mrs Peel go undercover in a London department store and discover a plot to blow up much of the city.

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 roared with laughter as Marina Sirtis turned fabulously evil in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Man of the People.

Notes and links

Brendan compares Extremis to Star Trek: Voyager’s Course: Oblivion, which also kills its entire regular cast. Nathan and Joe were not kind to this episode when they watched if for Untitled Star Trek Project.

Tom refers to his own less-than-enthusiastic review of Extremis in a blog post from way back in 2017.

Joe 90 was a Gerry and Sylvia Anderson supermarionation show from 1968–69, which stars a nine-year-old super spy who wears special glasses which contain the brain patterns of expert adults and enable him to do all of his spy stuff.

James refers to Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Commander William T Riker as someone who, like the monks, has a real fetish for consent. This deep cut is a reference to the Star Trek podcast The Greatest Generation, which you are only allowed to listen to after you’ve finished all of Untitled Star Trek Project.

The Andromeda Strain is a 1969 book by Michael Crichton and a 1971 film directed by Robert Wise (The Sound of Music, Star Trek: The Motion Picture). In it, an extraterrestrial microbe gets loose in a research station and the staff need to prevent the station’s nuclear self-destruct system from releasing an irradiated version of the the microbe into the environment.

The Tralfamadorians are time-aware aliens who appear in a couple of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, most notably Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.bsky.social, Brendan is at @retrobrendo.bsky.social, and James is at @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

Tom Salinsky’s blog includes his reviews of Doctor Who from Season 5 onwards, as well as his reviews of all the 60s and 90s Star Trek series. His most recent book, Star Trek: Discovering the TV Series, covers The Original Series, The Animated Series and The Next Generation, and is available in all good book stores, as well as on Amazon. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK) (Amazon AU)

You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll save you from a crisis we created and demand your eternal adoration in return.

At the time that this episode was released, the Doomsday Clock was at 90 seconds to midnight, mostly thanks to the climate disaster and the involvement of nuclear powers in wars in Ukraine and Gaza. So sleep well, everyone.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.

Brendan and Bjay’s gaming podcast The Bjay BJ Game Show has just released a new episode today, in which they discuss Lost in Play (2022), a point-and-click adventure set in the imagination of two young children.

Brendan, Richard and Steven have also just released another episode of their Avengers podcast The Three Handed Game. It’s the first episode of their triptych The Pop Explosion, covering a monochrome Emma Peel episode called Death at Bargain Prices, in which Steed and Mrs Peel go undercover in a London department store and discover a plot to blow up much of the city.

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 laughed and clapped as the crew of the USS Protostar saved the Federation in the two-part Season 1 finale of Star Trek: Prodigy.

Notes and links

The most important inspiration here is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), a massively popular and widely-panned thriller about a dark secret that threatens the credibility of the Catholic Church itself (but probably not the one you’re thinking of). Perhaps this review of the book will give you a good sense of its style.

It turns out that the dark secret in The Da Vinci code was originally revealed in 1982 in a best-selling book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (or in the US, more pithily, Holy Blood, Holy Grail). This book was, terrifyingly but unsurprisingly, co-written by our very own Henry Lincoln, co-writer of The Abominable Snowmen, The Web of Fear and The Dominators.

Steven remembers the first Doctor talking about his religious beliefs in a passage from The Empire of Glass (1995) by Andy Lane. Here, in Chapter 6, the Doctor is talking to Galileo. “In short, sir, I am currently an agnostic, and by the time my life draws to its close, and I have travelled from one side of the universe to the other and seen every sight there is to see, I firmly expect to be an atheist. Does that answer your question?”

In a recent episode of The Bjay BJ Game Show, Brendan and Bjay review a game called The Talos Principle, a video game set in a computer simulation which deals with questions of identity and religion.

Nathan has a website called the Randomiser at therandomiser.net, which can help you pick a random Doctor Who story to watch, but which can also (more importantly, perhaps) reassure you that you’re not living in a computer simulation.

The properly randomised Doctor Who podcast which Nathan appeared on is called Pull to Open, with Pete Pachal and Chris Taylor.

As a kind of public service, Steven alerts us to a 2015 article by Charlie Brooker about a group of German researchers created a version of Super Mario World in which Mario was self-aware and emotionally affected by his experiences in the game.

Steven also draws our attention to a branch of philosophy concerned with the possibility that we might all be living in a computer simulation. This 2020 article in Scientific American sums up the state of play.

Johnny refers to Kit Pedler’s original conception of the Cybermen as a race of Star Monks — an idea that El Sandifer runs with in a productive and interesting way in her essay on The Tenth Planet.

Johnny Spandrell takes aim at this story in an entertaining and insightful blog post on Extremis, written in 2018.

Here’s a link to the Character Options Series 10 action figure set, featuring the Doctor, Bill and a heavily made up Missy, for those of you who enjoy that kind of thing.

And finally, here’s Donna Summer singing about this story forty years early in Once Upon a Time….

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.bsky.social and Brendan is at @retrobrendo.bsky.social, while Steven is on X at @steedstylin and Johnny is @JohnnySpandrell. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll basically just blurt out in your hearing that Santa isn’t real.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.

Just two weeks ago, on Startling Barbara Bain, we faced what is perhaps the most memorable and terrifying episode of Space: 1999 ever with our usual mix of valour and prosecco. It’s Dragon’s Domain.

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 visited a holographic jazz bar in Vegas in 1962 for a surpassingly brilliant episode of Deep Space Nine called His Way.

Notes and links

A clear inspiration for this episode, and for the opening scene in particular, is Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013), which was a film about George Clooney and Sandra Bullock tumbling through space while discussing their relationship or something. It was huge at the time but it seems to have vanished without a trace. So it goes.

Simon alludes to a rogue AI that turns the whole world into paperclips in a scenario known as the paperclip apocalypse. This isn’t a million miles away from the grey goo problem we identified three weeks ago in our episode on Smile — Episode 284: Happy to Be There.

The script for this episode is available from the Doctor Who script library on the BBC website. Quite a few scripts have been available online for a while, but a much larger number were made available on the BBC Writers page in February this year, thanks to RTD’s launch of the Whoniverse, we think.

Nathan’s recent podcast appearance was on Dave Rennie’s Doctor Who podcast A Kettle and Some String, in which they did a deep dive on The Waters of Mars.

At the end of the episode, when Nardole joins Bill and the Doctor in a hug, he signals his intention (delightfully), by saying ‘Cuddle’. The Blu-ray subtitles incorrectly render this as ‘Glad though. [Chuckles]’. Neither line is in Mathieson’s script.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.bsky.social and Kate is at @kateorman.bsky.social, while Simon is on X at @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll send you out in this thunderstorm without a hat.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.

On 5 October, Blakes 7 came to BFI Southbank for a screening of the newly remastered HD versions of Seek–Locate–Destroy and Orac and a Q & A with Jan Chappell and Sally Knyvette. And Maximum Power was there. So check out the latest episode with our hot takes on the new versions of these beloved fan classics; we’ll be back with another hot take when the new Series 1 box set is released.

Last weekend, on Startling Barbara Bain, we faced what is perhaps the most memorable and terrifying episode of Space: 1999 ever with our usual mix of valour and prosecco. It’s Dragon’s Domain.

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 went back in time to watch the crew of Star Trek: Discovery start off their second season in the far, far future in Kobayashi Maru.

Notes and links

Brendan quickly identifies two of the film antecedents of this story: The Evil Dead (1981), with its demonically possessed trees, and Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), whose antagonist has a complex relationship with his mother.

Nathan first encounters David Suchet as Blott in Blott on the Landscape (1985), a BBC adaptation of Tom Sharpe’s 1975 satirical novel of the same name.

Knock Knock was written by Mike Bartlett, who was famous for a TV series called Dr Foster (2015), starring Suranne Jones as a woman who starts to suspect her husband of infidelity.

David Suchet’s first appearance in a Poirot property starring Peter Ustinov as Poirot — the 1985 made-for-TV movie Thirteen at Dinner (1985), an adaptation of Christie’s Lord Edgeware Dies (1933), in which Suchet played Inspector Japp.

Simon refers to the vault-related theorising of Whovians, a comedy aftershow that accompanied Series 10, 11 and 12 of Doctor Who on ABC-TV in Australia. Our very own Adam Richard was a regular in the show’s first two seasons.

And finally, Brendan recklessly introduces us to another possible inspiration for this episode, the 1977 film Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, which we would all have been better off not knowing about.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.bsky.social, Brendan is at @retrobrendo.bsky.social, and Simon is on X at @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll take advantage of the no-fact-checking rule to try and convince you that we’re actually your real parents.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.

On 5 October, Blakes 7 came to BFI Southbank for a screening of the newly remastered HD versions of Seek–Locate–Destroy and Orac and a Q & A with Jan Chappell and Sally Knyvette. And Maximum Power was there. So check out today’s newly released episode with our hot takes on the new versions of these beloved fan classics.

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 went back in time to see the origin story of breakout character Peanut Hamper in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s The Quality of Life.

Notes and links

Once again, Friend from the Future was a promotional short designed to introduce Bill Potts. Nathan makes fun of the fact that at the end of the short, the on-screen caption reads Introducing Pearl Mackie asBill. You can see the entire short, including that unfortunate typo, here.

Like Martha before her and Ruby after her, Bill is concerned that treading on a butterfly in the past will change the present in terrible ways. That concern comes from Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder, which you should really just go off and read right now.

In Bong Joon-ho’s post-apocalyptic film Snowpiercer (2013), the poor people who live in the back of the train are fed on glistening black protein bars, which we discover are made from ground-up cockroaches.

Flight Through Entirety only occasionally advocates for political violence (see Episode 182: The Icy Moral High Ground), but this week we are pleased to bring you this clip of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer being punched in the head during an interview on ABC-TV in January 2017.

Melvin alludes to the Slave Compensation Act 1837, which authorised the payment of about £20 million in compensation to slave owners in the British colonies. This sum was finally paid off when the British Government restructured its debt in 2015. (The people who had been enslaved didn’t receive any compensation, of course.)

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.bsky.social, Todd is on X at @toddbeilby, and here’s Melvin’s profile on about.me. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we won’t tell you what’s in those fish pies that you’re so looking forward to for dinner this evening.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.

Brendan and Bjay’s gaming poscast is called The Bjay BJ Game Show. In the most recent episode, they discuss The Talos Principle (2014), a puzzle-based game with a sentient robot protagonist, which raises questions about identity, consciousness and religion.

Brendan, Richard and Steven have released another episode of their Avengers podcast The Three Handed Game. It’s the third episode of their triptych The Cool War, covering an early Season 2 episode called The Decapod, featuring Julie Stevens as Venus Smith.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. Last week, they dropped in on the Q Continuum in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager called Death Wish.

Notes and links

Anticipating with relish the final demise of X, we have decided to preserve here for posterity the Twitter exchange between Nathan and Mina Anwar that he mentions early this episode.

Nathan suggests taking a look at this — an aerial view of the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia in Spain.

Brendan admits that he is a regular reader of Lance Parkin’s AHistory: An Unauthorised History of the Doctor Who Universe, which is an impressively quixotic attempt to harmonise all the televised stories, spinoffs and deuterocanonical material into one vast, sprawling ridiculous chronology. We thank him for his service.

James mentions how the phenomenon of social contagion was observed in a large-scale study conducted on Facebook in 2012. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published an article describing the results of the experiment in 2014, which makes it a plausible influence on this episode. Here’s a contemporary news article discussing the ethical problems with this experiment.

Grey goo is a kind of technical term for the possibility that everything on Earth might be consumed by rogue nanotechnology. The term was first coined in 1986 by Kim Eric Drexler in his book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. It’s also the basis of Michael Crichton’s 2002 novel Prey.

Erewhon: or, Over the Range (1872) by Samuel Butler is a satirical description of a utopian society, which bans machines for fear that they might become conscious and self-replicating.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.bsky.social, James is at @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social, and Brendan is at @retrobrendo.bsky.social. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll sneak over to your house next time you’re on holiday and replace all the walls with angry clockwork lego bricks.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.

This week’s guest on Flight Through Entirety is Bjay Hobbs, who can be heard regularly discussing indie games with our very own Brendan Jones on The Bjay BJ Game Show. In their most recent episode, they discuss The Talos Principle (2014), a puzzle-based game that raises questions about identity, consciousness and religion. The episode Brendan mentions on Lost in Play will actually be out in a couple of weeks.

Brendan, Richard and Steven have just released another episode of their Avengers podcast The Three Handed Game. It’s the third episode of their triptych The Cool War, covering an early Season 2 episode called The Decapod, featuring Julie Stevens as Venus Smith, with a guest appearance by Philip Madoc, (probably) not in fishnets.

The Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power started recording its Series D coverage yesterday; new episodes will be released in December.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. Last week, they paid a visit to an idyllic bird person planet with deranged exocomp Peanut Hamper in an episode of Lower Decks called A Mathematically Perfect Redemption.

Notes and links

Friend from the Future was a promotional short designed to introduce Bill Potts, first broadcast during Match of the Day on 23 April 2016, nearly a year before this episode aired. You can see the entire short here.

Unsurprisingly, Nathan is wrong about the music cue that greets Bill when she arrives in the TARDIS. It’s not River Song’s theme at all: it’s Murray Gold’s iconic A Madman with a Box, which you should listen to immediately.

Peter mentions the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Skin of Evil as another TV episode containing a high-concept puddle. It’s famously not very good, as Joe and Nathan discovered in this episode of Untitled Star Trek Project.

And you’ll be unsurprised to learn, again, that Nathan is wrong about John Peel: he doesn’t claim that Genesis of the Daleks took place in 1831. However, TARDIS Wikia dates it as set in the 15th or 16th centuries, probably because in The Daleks, one of the Daleks claims that there were two races on Skaro 500 years ago. But the whole idea is absolutely enervating, don’t you think?

The squishy thing Todd mentions as a possible companion for the Doctor is, of course, Mr Huffle from The Return of Doctor Mysterio. The Doctor does apparently take it with him at the end of the story.

And Pearl Mackie married her wife Kam Chhokar on 4 May this year. Here’s a wedding photo from Tumblr.

Douglas is Cancelled is Steven Moffat’s most recent TV show — a four-part miniseries starring Hugh Bonneville, Karen Gillan and Alex Kingston, about a middle-aged male TV personality who is overheard making a sexist joke at a friend’s wedding. Worth a look.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.bsky.social and James is at @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social; Todd is on X as @toddbeilby. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll invent a massively high-concept backstory for you which prevents you from ever truly realising yourself as a person.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We’ve covered the first six episodes of Series 1; Episode 7 should be out some times in the next couple of weeks.

The Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power has been on hiatus for a while, but arrangements for the recording of Series D are well underway, and we will definitely have some new episodes for you before the end of the year.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. Last week, they took a trip with Kirk, Spock and McCoy to the Planet of Space Ancient Rome in Bread and Circuses.

Notes and links

Steven Moffat’s clear inspiration here is Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie (1978), an astonishingly well-made and entertaining superhero movie starring Christopher Reeve as Clark and the wonderful Margot Kidder as Lois. If you haven’t seen it, put your phone down at once and go and find a copy.

In Episode 271: Eels with Jazz Hands, we mentioned the previous life of director Ed Bazalgette as a member of 1980s one-hit wonder The Vapors. The one hit in question was called Turning Japanese, and it was a massive thing at the time.

The CW superhero shows Peter mentions are collectively called the Arrowverse, which started just a few years before this episode aired, and which included shows like Arrow (2012), The Flash (2014), Supergirl (2015) and Legends of Tomorrow (2016), featuring our very own Arthur Darvill.

Ang Lee’s unloved film Hulk (2003) liberally used comic book panels to transition between scenes (in a way far more sophisticated than what’s attempted in this Doctor Who episode). This brief video will give you the idea.

It was Adam’s job to watch Series 10 of Doctor Who as a regular on the ABC’s Doctor Who aftershow Whovians, which covered Series 10 to 12 and screened a day or so after each episode aired.

Brendan mentions the Matt Fleischer animated Superman films from the 1940s, particularly the kinds of villains this version of Superman routinely fought. In the second film, The Mechanical Monsters (1941), Superman confronts a group of giant robots who rob banks and museums and inspire artists and filmmakers for generations. Go and watch it at once.

Attractive Coal Hill Academy student Ram loses a leg in the first episode of the Doctor Who spin-off Class, which screened over eight weeks leading up to the start of December 2016. And then no one ever mentioned it or even thought about it ever again.

Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993) was an insanely popular television show in the 1990s, starring Teri Hatcher as Lois Lane and featuring the incredibly beautiful Dean Cain as Clark. (He’s a horrid alt-right nutcase these days, which is a grim warning to all of us, I suppose.)

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, and Adam is @adamrichard. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

Adam Richard’s daily Doctor Who podcast is called Adam Richard Has a Theory: it’s the place to find Adam’s hot-to-lukewarm takes and wild-to-really-quite-sensible theories about everything Doctor Who.

You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll sneak into your bedroom and torture your favourite stuffed toy. Wait, no we won’t. That would be awful. Sorry.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We’ve covered the first five episodes of Series 1; Episode 6 should be out in the next couple of weeks.

The Three Handed Game is a podcast on The Avengers and The New Avengers. In the most recent episode, Brendan, Richard and Steven watched an episode from Diana Rigg’s first series, Two’s a Crowd.

Brendan’s gaming podcast is called The Bjay BJ Game Show, and in its most recent episode, Brendan and Bjay visited some tilt-shifted Minecraft-inspired holiday destinations in The Touryst.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. Last week, we visited the centre of the galaxy and met up with the Devil (who seemed nice) in an inexpensively produced episode of The Animated Series called The Magicks of Megas-Tu.

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Invasion of the Bane

We bring our first season to a close with the new beginning of Doctor Who’s most successful spinoff, in which a beloved TV heroine from our childhood was given one last chance (or twenty-seven last chances) to save the world.

Notes and links

Kelsey Hooper is played by fifteen-year-old Porsha Lawrence-Mavour, who had been in Stars in Their Eyes Kids at the age of nine. You can see her in action here.

Nathan mentions a couple of children’s TV shows which are formal influences on The Sarah Jane Adventures, including Chocky (1984) and Children of the Stones.

Adam alludes to a theory by friend-of-the-podcast Gary Russell, which he outlined in a tweet in 2022: the third bedroom was actually locked, bolted and then the door bricked over, making it airtight. Behind it was Kelsey. “I wonder whatever happened to her?” SJ would ask - and Luke and Maria would look at each other knowingly… and say nothing. It was “the pact”.

Wētā Workshop in Wellington, New Zealand, were the design studio for the gorgeous miniatures in Thunderbirds Are Go (2015) (among countless other things).

Flight Through Entirety did its first commentary on the first Doctor Who spinoff K9 and Company (Episode 76: K9 and Commentary), in which Todd first notes writer Terence Dudley’s relentless obsession with phones and doors.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, Richard is @RichardLStone, and Adam is @adamrichard. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll be weirdly cold to you for no reason the first time we meet in person.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio; after that, we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The next episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be out on Monday. In it, we talk about Steven Moffat’s return to the show in Boom. We’ll be doing weekly episodes until the end of Season 1 of the new era.

Last week saw the release of Episode 3 of the new Avengers commentary podcast, The Three Handed Game, featuring our very own Brendan and Richard, as well as frequent-guest-of-the-podcast, Steven B. In Episode 3, they conclude their Reach for the Stars triptych, with a Cathy Gale episode called The White Dwarf.

In news just to hand, Brendan and Bjay have just dropped another episode of The Bjay BJ Game Show. This month, they played Cat Quest, a cheerful and cartoony action RPG featuring an alarming number of cat-based puns.

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 one of Nathan’s all-time favourites, a relaxed and genuinely funny episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Disaster.

Torchwood: Everything Changes

It’s 2006, which is just the time to launch a gritty and adult Doctor Who spinoff — Torchwood, a show with an immortal lead character which is basically about the finality of death. But has Torchwood learned anything from its parent show’s many, many launches and re-launches?

Notes and links

James compares Torchwood to the Virgin New Adventures, a series of original Doctor Who novels launched in 1991, after the cancellation in 1989 and once the full set of novelisations had been all but completed. Like Torchwood, the VNAs initially featured lots of sex and swearing, before settling down a bit and discovering that there were other ways of being adult.

Joseph Campbell was a writer and narratologist who codified the main features of what he called the Hero’s Journey, a narrative framework which is exemplified (he believed) in heroic myths across a range of cultures. He’s a big source of inspiration for George Lucas’s Star Wars films.

One we missed: India Varma played Tala Durith in Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022), blowing herself up (inevitably) in her third episode. (Spoilers, sorry.)

Cucumber was a 2015 drama by Russell T Davies about a gay man in his forties who discovers, after the breakup of his long-term relationship, what gay life is like for young people in their twenties. Its sixth episode focuses on the brutal murder of one of the main characters.

Flight Through Entirety hasn’t covered any Torchwood at all, but for a fresh take on this episode, take a look at this review by friend-of-the-podcast Michael O Sullivan. His blog, Angst and Death and Random Shoes, will be covering as much of the show as he can tolerate watching.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, James is @ohjamessellwood and Todd is @toddbeilby. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll break into your house and use your flatbed scanner to create PDF copies of the complete works of Herman Melville.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The latest episode of The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire is probably out by now, or if you’re a particularly keen 500 Year Diary listener, it will be out in just a couple of hours. In it, we talk about the two new episodes released on 11 May — Space Babies and The Devil’s Chord. The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be covering the whole of the new series, releasing an episode a couple of days after each new Doctor Who episode comes out. Like and subscribe.

Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.

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 marvelled at the superb Roxann Dawson, as B’Elanna went for another round of overwrought self-examination in Voyager’s Barge of the Dead.

The Christmas Invasion

Just nine months after Doctor Who’s twenty-first century iteration burst triumphantly onto our screens, we all get together with Steven B to watch as the BBC’s flagship drama introduces its exciting new lead to nearly 10 million viewers on Christmas Day on BBC One. It ends up going pretty well.

Notes and links

We were all more or less certain that David Tennant would get the Doctor Who gig on the strength of his charismatic performance in Russell T Davies’s Casanova (2005). It’s worth a look — it definitely feels like an audition piece for Doctor Who.

Christopher Eccleston’s audition piece for Doctor Who was probably not his performance as cat theatre proprietor Dougal Siepp, which you can get a sense of here (if you can tolerate a terrible racial stereotype played by Steve Pemberton). In fact, Eccleston’s real audition piece is role as Steve Baxter in RTD’s The Second Coming (2003), where he plays a 40-year-old man working in a video shop who discovers that he is (really) the Second Coming of Christ.

Here’s the Dead Ringers sketch Christmas at Doctor Who’s (2005).

If you’re not sure what we mean by the Doctor Who theme’s “middle eight”, here’s the description from the TARDIS Fandom site. And here’s what it sounds like in Murray’s first version of the Doctor Who theme.

On 2 May 1982, during the Falklands War, the Argentinian cruiser ARA General Belgrano was sunk by a British submarine outside a declared exclusion zone and while Peru was trying to negotiate peace between the two sides. 323 people died.

Flight Through Entirety’s commentary on The Christmas Invasion was Episode 147: The Commentary Invasion, released on Monday 24 December 2018.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Steven B is @steedstylin, and Brendan is @brandybongos. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll sneak into your house and leave fruit in your bed.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be back in just over a week, soon after the screening of the first two episodes of the 2024 season on 11 May. In the meantime, you can hear our hot takes on the four episodes we’ve seen of Doctor Who’s second RTD era.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We just released Episode 5, in which you can hear us talking about the first of Sir Brian Blessed’s appearances on the show in Death’s Other Dominion.

Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.

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 cheered on Star Trek: The Next Generation as it took its first confident steps into its imperial phase, with The Survivors.

Terror of the Autons

It feels like only a year ago that Doctor Who underwent a strange and cataclysmic soft reboot, and it looks like it’s happening again this week. Or is it?

Notes and links

Paul Cornell’s negative review of Terror of the Autons was originally published in DWB Issue 112, way back in April 1993. Here it is republished in the old Usenet forum rec.arts.drwho (or at least the version of it to be found on Google Groups right now).

Jeremy Bentham (yes, a relation) was the co-founder of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society back in the 70s. To us, he was more famous for contributing a section to Peter Haining’s 1983 coffee-table book Doctor Who: A Celebration, a section which briefly covered every Doctor Who story up to the final story of Season 20, The King’s Demons. We mentioned it last week; it wasn’t just a source of information about the history of the show, but a massive influence on received fan wisdom for years afterwards.

There exists a three-minute training video from 1972 in which Doctor Who producer Barry Letts talks about how CSO works. It can be found on the Carnival of Monsters DVD release and on the more recent Doctor Who: The Collection Season 10 blu-ray box set.

According to this story’s TARDIS Fandom page, stuntman Terry Walsh was actually hit by one of the cars during the scene in the quarry, but he just got up and continued with the scene, so it made it into the finished episode. Barry Letts’s recollection is somewhat different, however.

And inevitably, we end up talking about the eccentric way the Pertwee Era was shown in Australia in the late 1970s, so you might want to jog your memory by re-reading the shownotes for last week.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Terror of the Autons in Episode 23: Increasingly Baroque and Stupid, released on Sunday 15 February 2015.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Simon is @simonmoore72, and James is @ohjamessellwood. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll put on big plastic masks and leap out at you from behind a fixture the next time you’re test-driving couches at IKEA.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be back in just over two weeks, soon after the screening of the first two episodes of the 2024 season on 11 May. In the meantime, you can hear our hot takes on the four episodes we’ve seen of Doctor Who’s second RTD era.

Last week, Brendan and his friend Bjay returned to the mic for another episode of their gaming podcast, The Bjay BJ Game Show. This month, they enjoyed There is No Game: Wrong Dimension, a surreal and metatextual point-and-click adventure with a surprising amount of heart.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We should have Episode 5 to you in about a week, so you can prepare by watching the first of Sir Brian Blessed’s appearances on the show in Death’s Other Dominion.

Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.

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 cheered ourselves up by watching a scary episode of Strange New Worlds called All Those Who Wander.

Spearhead from Space

In the first week of the 1970s, Doctor Who is back, with a new Doctor, a new alien threat, new companions and a new earthbound premise. So what makes it the same show?

Notes and links

Jon Pertwee’s Doctor is well known for regularly going into a coma to heal himself. He does that in this story, in The Dæmons, in Planet of the Daleks, in The Monster of Peladon and in Planet of the Spiders. (I’ve probably left some out.) This phenomenon is so well known that is has a name — the Pertwee death pose — characterised by Pertwee lying flat on his back with one knee bent. Flight Through Entirety named its Jon Pertwee retrospective after this — Episode 31: One Knee up for Pertwee.

When Peter and Simon refer to “625-line Pertwees”, what they mean is the episodes that still existed in their original PAL format, as opposed to episodes that only existed as film transfers. The 625-line Pertwees were the only episodes repeated by ABC-TV in Australia in the late 70s, which meant, roughly speaking, that we would go from Spearhead from Space straight to Day of the Daleks, and then to Seasons 10 and 11, skipping Planet of the Daleks and Invasion of the Dinosaurs, each of which had one episode that only existed as a film transfer. You can find an account of the history of Doctor Who repeats in Australia on this page from BroaDWcast, and you can find details of the state of our collection of colour Pertwee episodes on this page from The Destruction of Time.

Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation of the Season 8 story Colony in Space was called Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (1974). Colony in Space was Jo Grant’s fourth story on TV, but the novelisation describes her arrival at UNIT and her boredom in the job until she is whisked away by the Doctor to an alien planet. It’s not until the following year that we get the novelisation of Jo’s actual first story in Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons.

The sting is the screaming sound that leads into the music of the closing credits of the Classic Series, starting with The Ambassadors of Death, two stories after this. (It can now be heard at the beginning of the opening credits as well.)

Startling Barbara Bain is our commentary podcast on Space: 1999, a lavishly expensive British TV show from the mid-70s shot entirely on 35mm film, with lots of visual effects done in-camera (including the famous model sequences).

ADR is part of the post-production process: actors are brought into a recording studio to record dialogue for scenes that have already been shot.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Spearhead from Space in Episode 21: They’ve Cancelled My Show, released on Sunday 18 January 2015.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Simon is @simonmoore72, and Todd is @ToddBeilby. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we will bring this dirty old box into your clean house.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be back soon after the screening of the first two episodes of the 2024 season on 11 May. In the meantime, you can hear our hot takes on the four episodes we’ve seen of Doctor Who’s second RTD era.

Last week saw the release of Episode 2 of the new Avengers commentary podcast, The Three Handed Game, featuring our very own Brendan and Richard, as well as frequent-guest-of-the-podcast, Steven B. In Episode 2, they continue their Reach for the Stars theme, with a Tara King episode called Invasion of the Earthmen.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We’ve covered the first four episodes of Series 1; Episode 5 should be out in the next couple of weeks.

Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.

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 what Nathan believes to be the worst ever episode of Star Trek: Voyager — Course: Oblivion. You won’t believe how shrill his ranting gets.

Notes and links

The most recent Blu-ray release of The Power of the Daleks was the Special Edition in 2020, which includes a compilation of all the surviving footage, including material shot on an 8mm film camera pointing at a TV screen. This material was also included on the Lost in Time DVD release way back in 2004.

Simon also mentions a site which chronicles the upsetting history of Doctor Who’s missing episodes. It’s called The Destruction of Time, and it’s well worth reading, if a bit dispiriting at times.

The Omnirumour was a series of rumours arising during 2013 that as many as 90 missing Doctor Who episodes had been found and were ready for return to the BBC Archives, possibly as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations. This didn’t happen, obviously, but we did at least get nine episodes: five episodes of The Enemy of the World and four of The Web of Fear.

Let’s continue the tradition: here is Elizabeth Sandifer’s essay on this story, which (inevitably) discusses the importance of mercury to the new Doctor’s character.

Nathan and Brendan refer to Kieran Hodgson’s Bad Doctor Who Impressions version of The Daleks, which is something you should go and watch immediately.

James very thoughtfully plugs Brendan and Richard’s new podcast about The Avengers, called The Three-Handed Game, in which they are joined by old friend of the podcast Steven B to discuss episodes from different eras in the history of the show.

At the end of the episode, Simon recounts the story of the gradual revelation of The Power of the Daleks throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s. Among the things he mentions are Peter Haining’s Doctor Who: A Celebration (1983), the Radio Times Doctor Who 20th Anniversary Special (also 1983), The Making of Doctor Who by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks (2nd edition, 1976), an edition of DreamWatch Bulletin (possibly issue 121 in December 1993) announcing the upcoming publication of the telesnaps in Doctor Who Magazine, and the discovery of some clips from this story in an Australian TV Show called Perspective: C for Computer.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Power of the Daleks in Episode 11: Bum Wetting.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Simon is @simonmoore72. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll write next week’s shownotes in a completely incomprehensible acrostic code.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be back a couple of days after the screening of the first two episodes of Season 1 of the Ncuti Gatwa Era on 11 May. In the meantime, you can hear our hot takes on the four episodes we’ve seen of Doctor Who’s second RTD era.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We’ve covered the first four episodes of Series 1; Episode 5 should be out in the next couple of weeks.

Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.

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 said farewell to Star Trek: Enterprise by watching that universally acknowledged Star Trek war crime, These Are the Voyages….

The Power of the Daleks

A big week for beginnings this week, with a new Doctor, a new origin story for the Daleks, and a whole new approach to defeating the bad guys. Oh, and a new podcast to discuss them all on. So let’s welcome Patrick Troughton to the studio floor, as we discuss The Power of the Daleks.

Notes and links

The most recent Blu-ray release of The Power of the Daleks was the Special Edition in 2020, which includes a compilation of all the surviving footage, including material shot on an 8mm film camera pointing at a TV screen. This material was also included on the Lost in Time DVD release way back in 2004.

Simon also mentions a site which chronicles the upsetting history of Doctor Who’s missing episodes. It’s called The Destruction of Time, and it’s well worth reading, if a bit dispiriting at times.

The Omnirumour was a series of rumours arising during 2013 that as many as 90 missing Doctor Who episodes had been found and were ready for return to the BBC Archives, possibly as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations. This didn’t happen, obviously, but we did at least get nine episodes: five episodes of The Enemy of the World and four of The Web of Fear.

Let’s continue the tradition: here is Elizabeth Sandifer’s essay on this story, which (inevitably) discusses the importance of mercury to the new Doctor’s character.

Nathan and Brendan refer to Kieran Hodgson’s Bad Doctor Who Impressions version of The Daleks, which is something you should go and watch immediately.

James very thoughtfully plugs Brendan and Richard’s new podcast about The Avengers, called The Three-Handed Game, in which they are joined by old friend of the podcast Steven B to discuss episodes from different eras in the history of the show.

At the end of the episode, Simon recounts the story of the gradual revelation of The Power of the Daleks throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s. Among the things he mentions are Peter Haining’s Doctor Who: A Celebration (1983), the Radio Times Doctor Who 20th Anniversary Special (also 1983), The Making of Doctor Who by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks (2nd edition, 1976), an edition of DreamWatch Bulletin (possibly issue 121 in December 1993) announcing the upcoming publication of the telesnaps in Doctor Who Magazine, and the discovery of some clips from this story in an Australian TV Show called Perspective: C for Computer.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Power of the Daleks in Episode 11: Bum Wetting, released on Saturday 18 October 2014.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Simon is @simonmoore72. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

For now at least, 500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety. So you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll write next week’s shownotes in a completely incomprehensible acrostic code.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.

Flight Through Entirety will be back at Christmas in July to discuss The Return of Doctor Mysterio, and we’ll be covering Peter Capaldi’s final year on the show after that, concluding with Twice Upon a Time at Christmas.

The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will be back a couple of days after the screening of the first two episodes of Season 1 of the Ncuti Gatwa Era on 11 May. In the meantime, you can hear our hot takes on the four episodes we’ve seen of Doctor Who’s second RTD era.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We’ve covered the first four episodes of Series 1; Episode 5 should be out in the next couple of weeks.

Maximum Power will be back later in the year to talk about the final series of Blakes 7.

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 said farewell to Star Trek: Enterprise by watching that universally acknowledged Star Trek war crime, These Are the Voyages….

Ncuti Gatwa introduces us to his BBC press-on moustache in this official Doctor Who video released a couple of days before Christmas.

No, you can’t. They’ve been there for millions of years, through storms and floods and wars and time. Nobody really understands where the music comes from. It’s probably something to do with the precise positions, the distance between both towers. Even the locals aren’t sure. All anyone will ever tell you is that when the wind stands fair and the night is perfect, when you least expect it but always when you need it the most… there is a Song.

This week, the Doctor and River live happily ever after, and Jack Shanahan joins us to discuss The Husbands of River Song.

Notes and links

Brendan mentions that this story was recorded after Alex Kingston started working with Big Finish on her long-running series The Diary of River Song. In fact, the first volume of that series is, like The Husbands of River Song, released in December 2015.

We get our first sight of Peter Capaldi’s wedding ring on 4 August 2013, during a close-up of his right hand in Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor, the thirty-minute live broadcast in which Peter Capaldi is unveiled to the world as the Twelfth Doctor.

Night and the Doctor is a series of five minisodes released on the Blu-ray box set of Series 6 — Bad Night, Good Night, First Night, and the completely unrelated Up All Night. In Last Night, the Doctor runs into a future version of himself, with a new haircut and a suit, about to take River to their last date on the planet Darillium.

Speaking of Moffat recycling his own ideas, Sally Sparrow is first featured in a short story in the 2006 Doctor Who Annual called What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow, in which Sally receives messages from the Ninth Doctor, who is trapped without the TARDIS in 1985. Here’s a link to the story itself.

Jack mentions that he has just recorded an episode of A Hamster with a Blunt Penknife with Joe Ford in which they watched Wild Blue Yonder.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, and Jack is @shackjanahan. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on X at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook, Mastodon, and Bluesky, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll keep forgetting to tell you how much we love you.

And more

Our new podcast, The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, is your number-one source for our ill-considered takes on the Second RTD Era. Here’s our take on The Star Beast, our take on Wild Blue Yonder, and our take on The Giggle. Our Christmassy take on The Church on Ruby Road will be out on 27 December. Like and subscribe.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. Two episodes have been released so far: our commentary on the pilot episode Breakaway, and our commentary on the episode Force of Life. We’re planning to release the next episode, Collision Course, just before the start of the new year.

Maximum Power continues its journey through Series C of Blakes 7. This week, a proper science fiction writer takes hold of the show — with remarkable results — in Sarcophagus.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. It’s taking a well-earned break during the holidays right now, but it brought in the festive season with a commentary on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, featuring friend-of-the-podcast Tom Salinsky.

Notes and links

Thanks to Bob Gilbey (@bobgilbey), Bryan says… (@bryan1981) and DJ Alpha-T (@DJ_AlphaT) for contributing their questions to this episode.

As we well know, an anthology of short stories about the life of Ashildr was indeed published in 2015. It was called Doctor Who: Legends of Ashildr, and it includes stories by Justin Richards and James Goss.

In the shownotes for last week’s episode we discussed the fact that Heaven Sent was nominated for a Hugo Award in 2016, Doctor Who didn’t receive any awards at all for its 2015 season.

And, since we properly failed to mention it (or even remember it, you might say with some justification), the Jenny Laird Award goes to a season or era’s most puzzling creative choice, and the Bonnie Langford goes to someone or something that is surprisingly and delightfully good.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Richard is @RichardLStone. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on X at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook, Mastodon, and Bluesky, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll bore you rigid talking about ourselves for the next twelve weeks.

And more

Our new podcast, The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, is your number-one source for our ill-considered opinions on the Second RTD Era. Here’s our take on The Star Beast, and here’s our take on Wild Blue Yonder. Our take on The Giggle will be out on Monday.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. Two episodes have been released so far: our commentary on the pilot episode Breakaway, and our commentary on the episode Force of Life. We’re still planning to release the next episode after Christmas.

Maximum Power continues its journey through Series C of Blakes 7. This week, Servalan kills a bunch of people in Children of Auron.

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 were joined by Tom Salinsky to watch all-time fan favourite Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

Here’s the behind-the-scenes Xwitter thread about the making of this episode by the director of Wild Blue Yonder, Tom Kingsley.

Notes and links

According to Todd, the old woman in the barn is either Leela or Aunt Adah from the Star Trek: Voyager pilot episode Caretaker — a hologram created by a vast pan-dimensional being to make the crew of Voyager feel at home by offering them lemonade, sugar cookies and corn.

Magic or magical realism is a genre closely associated with Latin America, and particularly the writers Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges, although the genre has influenced other writers like China Miéville (who got a mention in the shownotes a couple of weeks ago). Here’s an article about the genre published by Vox in 2014, just after Márquez’s death.

We speculate about awards which Heaven Sent might have won. It was nominated in 2016 for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), but it lost to the Jessica Jones episode AKA Smile. (The Saturn Awards don’t include an award for an individual television episode.)

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Simon is @simonmoore72, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Richard is @RichardLStone. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on X at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook, Mastodon, and Bluesky, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll pull a surprising number of weird faces the next time we give you a hug.

And more

We’ve just launched a new podcast called The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, which broadcasts to the world our ill-considered first impressions of each new episode of the new RTD era. Here’s our take on The Star Beast; our take on Wild Blue Yonder will be out on Monday.

Our second newest podcast is Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, whose second episode was released a week ago. In that episode, we talked over the show’s second story, Force of Life. We’re planning to release the next episode after Christmas.

Maximum Power is continuing its journey through Series C of Blakes 7. This week, Vila gets his end away in City at the Edge of the World.

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 an aggressively mediocre episode of the Original Series called Whom Gods Destroy.

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.

Notes and links

Here is the full text of the Brothers Grimm fairytale The Shepherd Boy. It’s very short.

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Simon is @simonmoore72, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Rob is @MrRobValentine. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on X at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook, Mastodon, and Bluesky, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll go to heroically embarrassing lengths just to tell you how much we love you.

And more

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.

And here’s a link to Simon’s recent interview with Katy Manning.

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.

You can find links to the videos shot by Rufus Hound during the shooting of The Woman Who Lived in the shownotes for Flight Through Entirety Episode 272: John Scott Martin in a Zarbi Suit.

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.

And here’s a story in Entertainment Weekly about the controversy surrounding Letitia Wright’s weird tweet about the Covid vaccine.

And if you’re feeling down, you should cheer yourself up with this 2015 story from The Guardian about Jeremy Clarkson’s cancellation.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, Simon is @simonmoore72, and Johnny is @JohnnySpandrell. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on X at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook, Mastodon, and Bluesky, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll hack Google Maps and render your entire street completely fictional.

And more

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.

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, Simon is @simonmoore72, and Jeremy is @JeremyRadick. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on X at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook, Mastodon, and Bluesky, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll start monetising your toilet breaks, thereby creating one of the most horrific Doctor Who monsters imaginable.

And more

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.

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 to Star Trek: Lower Decks for a violent and extremely cathartic holodeck episode called Crisis Point.

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.

Nathan

Nathan suggests watching Heartstopper (2022), a terribly sweet gay high-school romance on Netflix. It’s based on Alice Oseman’s webcomic, and is also a series of graphic novels.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Simon is @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on X at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook, Mastodon, and Bluesky, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll apply for you to appear on The Chase without telling you about it first.

And more

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.

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.

I thought I would probably regret researching this, but here’s a link to the Scottish Falsetto Sockpuppet Theatre’s YouTube playlist, and here’s another link to a video where they announce the casting of Peter Capaldi as the next Doctor Who. (Brendan’s impression of them is actually pretty good.)

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, Richard is @RichardLStone, and Todd is @toddbeilby. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on X at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook, Mastodon, and Bluesky, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll record a really smug and irritating voicemail greeting before going off on holiday for a few weeks.

And more

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.

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 podcast If Books Could Kill.

Richard mentions the Sydney Theatre Company’s 2020 production of The Picture of Dorian Gray, directed by Kip Williams and starring Eryn Jean Norvill as the only cast member, playing no less than 26 characters. Williams is bringing that production to London’s West End in 2024, starring Succession’s Sarah Snook.

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Richard is @RichardLStone, Todd is @toddbeilby,and Simon is @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on X at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook, Mastodon, and Bluesky, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll forget we ever met you and get cross with you when you turn up on our doorstep with flowers and champagne.

And more

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.

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on ex-Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood,and Brendan is @brandybongos. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on X at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook, Mastodon, and Bluesky, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll blast Yakety Sax on a boom box during your upcoming wedding ceremony.

And more

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.

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 Simpsons Das 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.

Follow us

Nathan is on ex-Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood,and Frazer is @FelixFrazer. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on X at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook, Mastodon, and Bluesky, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll turn up at your place in the middle of the night with a Fender Stratocaster to explain the paradox of entailment.

And more

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.

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).

Nathan mentions an outstanding performance in Toby Whithouse’s previous episode A Town Called Mercy. He’s either referring to Adrian Scarborough as Kahler-Jex or Ben Browder as Isaac.

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on ex-Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos,and Simon is @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook, Mastodon, and Bluesky, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll cast you as Second Tree in your next local amateur theatre production.

And more

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.

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.

Nathan

Nathan recommends the second series of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which is available to stream on Paramount+. He makes particular mention (a) of the musical episode and (b) of our podcast Untitled Star Trek Project, which has already covered three episodes of the series.

Follow us

Nathan is on the-Dalek-sewer-formerly-known-as-Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, Richard is @RichardLStone,and Simon is @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook and Mastodon, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll trick you into sitting in this comfortable chair over here.

And more

You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November. 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.

Notes and Links

Nathan compares the hand mines in this episode to the terrifying Gloom Spawn from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

Tom and Peter mention two videos that accompany this episode. The first one is a deleted scene on Karn starring Clare Higgins as Ohila; the second one is a six-minute skit by Steven Moffat called The Doctor’s Meditation, in which the Doctor’s attempts to meditate fail because of the poor quality of the water he’s drinking and so he spends days and days getting the townsfolk to dig wells instead.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter (not calling it X) as @nathanbottomley, and James is @ohjamessellwood. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook and Mastodon, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll fail to invite you to our next massive shindig in medieval Essex.

And more

You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November. Stay tuned for more details: it’s not long now.

Our James Bond (et al.) commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Stay tuned for news about the release of our coverage of Series C.

There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watch a top-tier episode from Deep Space Nine’s sixth season, Rocks and Shoals.

Notes and Links

We often use an episode’s show notes to enumerate a story’s influences, but Mr Moffat has already done it for us. Towards the end of the episode, Shona picks up a piece of paper which outlines her Christmas Day itinerary, including DVD (Alien), DVD (The Thing from Another World), and DVD (Miracle on 34th Street). She also plans to forgive Dave, which is nice.

Brendan mentions the long-forgotten Doctor Who spin-off Class, whose only season aired towards the end of 2016. Peter Capaldi’s Doctor appears in the first episode, which is his only onscreen appearance between the 2015 Christmas Special The Husbands of River Song and the 2016 Christmas Special The Return of Doctor Mysterio.

Before Last Christmas there was, of course, Inception (2010): Christopher Nolan’s film about people making a journey through nested dreamscapes.

Yes, James, we’ve already done the Star Trek: Generations podcast on Untitled Star Trek Project. But thank you for asking.

Brendan mentions the Futurama episode called The Sting, which is full of nested dreamscapes in which it’s unclear who is doing the actual dreaming. Clever, moving and ridiculous — you could almost say Moffaty. (Futurama is back right now with a new series. Exciting.)

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos and Max is @max_jelbart. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook and Mastodon, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll invite you round to our flat next Christmas only to answer the door in some very threadbare sweatpants.

And more

You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November. (We also hint at another untitled Doctor Who project this episode, but you’ll find out more about that later in the year.)

Our James Bond (et al.) commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. We’re determined to bring you our coverage of Series C later this year.

There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watch a terrible episode of the Animated Series called Bem and spend a lot of time laughing.

Notes and links

Thank you to Steven B for his question about the ratings during the Capaldi era.

Fans of tables of numbers (like Todd) will also enjoy the Doctor Who Guide’s ratings page, which has information on the ratings and audience appreciation data for every Doctor Who episode since An Unearthly Child.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @ToddBeilby and Simon is @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook and Mastodon, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll bore you with a lot of unnecessary soul-searching.

And more

You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November. (We also hint at another untitled Doctor Who project this episode, but you’ll find out more about that later in the year.)

Our James Bond (et al.) commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. We’re determined to bring you our coverage of Series C later this year.

There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watch an episode of Voyager with Kazons and Seska and things. Just like the old days.

Notes and links

Nathan alludes to discovering during the week of recording some of the terrible consequences of Australia’s presence in Afghanistan. This is upsetting reading, so content warnings apply.

We mention Doctor Who and the Silurians as a previous story where the Doctor comes into conflict with soldiers, and we refer to El Sandifer’s take on the end of that story, a scene which presents this conflict explicitly but which is never followed up in any satisfactory way.

Richard brings up Chris Addison’s Radio 4 comedy series Civilisation, which co-stars the original Ford Prefect, Geoffrey McGivern.

And, finally, the Doctor plummeting to his death from a plane inevitably reminds us of Roger Moore in a similar situation as James Bond in Moonraker (1979).

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, Richard is @RichardLStone, and Todd is @ToddBeilby. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook and Mastodon, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or next birthday we’ll give you a bafflingly expensive and impractical gift.

And more

You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.

Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Recording of our coverage of Series C is nearing its conclusion: it will be ready for you later in the year.

There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watch an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Genesis, in which the crew devolve into various types of monsters and animals, upsetting fans who have the (baffling) expectation that their franchise will take itself more seriously.

Notes and links

This week’s evil corporation is 3W, which gets it’s name from the three words Don’t cremate me. But, as Brendan points out, it’s also the production code for Invasion of the Dinosaurs. We explain about production codes in unnecessary detail in the shownotes for Episode 237.

The Black Orchid problem is that a two-part story has its climax at the halfway point instead of somewhere more appropriate. It’s identified by El Sandifer in her essay on that story.

Well, we found the clip for the shownotes: Brendan mentions Chris Addison’s appearance on an episode of Have I Got News for You? hosted by Tom Baker. The whole episode is worth a watch, but the incident that Brendan refers to starts here.

Once again, we allude to the Troops to Teachers programme, which gave veterans the chance to fast-track their teacher training so that they could work in schools. The Guardian reports on the scheme here.

Fans of Missy’s (other) gay sidekick Dr Chang can see much more of Andrew Leung in Lilting (2014), where his lover is played by Ben Whishaw.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, Todd is @ToddBeilby and Simon is @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook and Mastodon, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll turn up unexpectedly on your next trip to London and reveal to your surprise that we’re actually the Vardans, from the beloved Doctor Who classic, The Invasion of Time (4Z).

And more

You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.

Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Recording is continuing on schedule, and our coverage of Series C will be ready for you later in the year.

There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watch an episode of the kids’ show Star Trek: Prodigy, and have a really good time.

Notes and links

Here’s an article on William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, from which this episode gets its name (and its tiger, I guess). Delightfully, as well as providing a short analysis of the poem, it reproduces Blake’s full version of the poem in its original form as a text on a watercolour painting. [Sadly, a cyberattack on the British Library in October 2023 has caused the loss of this article and a good deal of its digital collection.]

Bubble Shock is the extremely unhealthy soft drink created and marketed by the alien Bane in the first story of the first season of The Sarah Jane Adventures.

The Gaia Hypothesis proposes that living organisms and the environment in which they evolved form a complex, self-regulating system that keeps the Earth habitable. It was developed in the 1970s and has generally recieved a fair degree of criticism ever since.

This episode was recorded well before New York’s recent air-quality problems; New South Wales experienced its own version of this in the summer of 2019/2020, just before the pandemic hit. Here’s The Walkley Foundation’s digital exhibition of the most astounding press photographs from that terrible summer.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, Matthew Hounsell is @MathewHounsell and Kevin is @scriptsscribbles. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook and Mastodon, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll sneak into your shed one night and replace all your weedkiller with industrial strength fertiliser.

And more

We’ve got an exciting new Doctor Who project to launch at the start of 2024, but — annoyingly — we’re not going to tell you anything more about it until later in the year. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, you can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.

Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Recording is continuing on schedule, and our coverage of Series C will be ready for you later in the year.

There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watched in stunned horror as Enterprise chief engineer Trip Tucker got unexpectedly pregnant, with predictable results.

Notes and links

Brendan mentions Jamie Mathieson’s film Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel (2009), a film starring Chris O’Dowd, Dean Lennox Kelly and Marc Wootton as three friends in a pub coping with a weird Moffat-y time travel thing. Nathan mentions Toby Whithouse’s series Being Human (2008–2013), originally about a ghost, a vampire and a werewolf flat-sharing in Bristol, and eventually about a completely different ghost, vampire and werewolf flat-sharing on Barry Island: Jamie Mathieson wrote four scripts, one for each of the last four seasons of the show.

The idea of beings living in a two-dimensional world was explored as early as 1884 in Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, written by an English schoolmaster, which combines a lightly comic critique of Victorian social hierarchy with imaginative speculation about the weird experience of living in a two-dimensional world.

Steven’s description of Series 8’s gradual development of the Doctor’s character as a magic trick is explicitly based on The Prestige (2006), an early Christopher Nolan film in which two Victorian magicians, Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman, are pitted against one another in a quest for the ultimate illusion.

In For Your Eyes Only (1981), Roger Moore’s Bond tries to protect a young woman by dissuading her from killing the people who murdered her parents. That woman was Carole Bouquet, whose bottom and alarmingly long legs adorned the film’s poster, six years before the first release of Adobe Photoshop.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, and Steven B is @steedstylin. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook and Mastodon, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll recommend to you a weight loss plan with some potentially disastrous side effects.

And more

We’ve got an exciting new Doctor Who project to launch at the start of 2024, but — annoyingly — we’re not going to tell you anything more about it until later in the year. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, you can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.

Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Recording is continuing on schedule, and our coverage of Series C will be ready for you later in the year.

There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we say goodbye to Star Trek: Picard Series 2, before it returns in 2023 as a massive television event.

Notes and links

Mummy on the Orient Express marks the triumphant return of Janet Henfrey to Doctor Who after about twenty-five years: she plays Miss Hardaker in The Curse of Fenric. She will come back some time after that to play the Adjudicator in Sil and the Seven Seeds of Arodor.

David Bamber is in charge of this version of the Orient Express: Nathan recognises him immediately as Cicero in Rome and as Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice. Richard notes that he plays Adolf Hitler in Valkyrie (2008), and perhaps more terrifyingly Noel in Camping, a sitcom created by Julia Davis. Si saw him turn up in an episode of Endeavour, the Inspector Morse prequel set in the late 1960s.

Meanwhile, Christopher Villiers returns to Doctor Who as Professor Moorhouse; thirty years earlier he was young Hugh Fitzwilliam in The King’s Demons. Alarmingly, Richard is right to suggest that he is a descendant of the aristocracy.

And finally, Frank Skinner is a famous standup comedian and radio presenter. The show Richard is thinking of may be The Rest is History on Radio 4, but he has been in many, many radio shows over the years.

You can see John Sessions’s 1994 audition to play the Doctor in the TV movie here on YouTube. He plays the terrifying General Tannis in the BBC webcast Death Comes to Time (2001).

In 2018, Jenna Coleman starred in a TV miniseries called The Cry, which was shot in Australia.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, Si is @Si_Hart, and Richard is @RichardLStone. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook and Mastodon, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll gush effusively at you about how wonderful your terrible new haircut looks.

And more

We’ve got an exciting new Doctor Who project to launch at the start of 2024, but — annoyingly — we’re not going to tell you anything more about it yet. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, you can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.

Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Recording is continuing on schedule, and our coverage of Series C will be ready for you later in the year.

There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watched a massive soap opera event two-parter from Deep Space Nine, complete with long-lost children and scheming lookalikes — In Purgatory’s Shadow and By Inferno’s Light.

Notes and links

Brendan suggests that Kill the Moon addresses the Guns versus Frocks, um, disagreement, which reached its peak during the heyday of the Virgin New Adventures. Nathan wrote an essay about his take on the debate many, many years ago.

El Sandifer’s essay on TARDIS Eruditorum contains, as you might expect, a clever reading of this episode, and both Brendan and Nathan find reasons to refer to it here.

Colin and Brendan mention science fiction shows called The Expanse and Babylon 5, but I absolutely refuse to do any research into them at all.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, Simon is @simonmoore72, and Colin is @colin_neal. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook and Mastodon, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll make such a fun and ambitious episode of your favourite TV show that you die of embarrassment whenever your friends mention it.

And more

We’ve got an exciting new Doctor Who project to launch at the start of 2024, but — annoyingly — we’re not going to tell you anything more about it yet. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, you can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.

Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Recording is continuing on schedule, and our coverage of Series C should be ready for you later in the year.

There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we were bored rigid as the crew of the Enterprise completely dismantled a horrible authoritarian human colony in The Masterpiece Society. Back to Deep Space Nine next week.

Notes and links

Pete has a dim memory of something similar happening during his childhood, but mere months before Series 8 aired, the Troops to Teachers programme was introduced, giving veterans the chance to fast-track their teacher training so that they could work in schools. The Guardian reports on the scheme here.

Vasquez Rocks is a park not far from Hollywood, and was famously used in the original Star Trek episode Arena (the one with the lizard man in a skimpy cocktail dress). A particular famous rock formation, nicknamed Kirk’s rock is recreated in the opening shot of this episode.

Nathan alludes to the fact that Barbara is absent from Episodes 4 and 5 of The Sensorites because Jacqueline Hill was on holiday, and that she returns from her time on the Sensorite spaceship with a spectacular tan in Episode 6.

In the Press Gang episode UnXpected, Mmoloki Chrystie’s character Frazer Davis encounters the fictional Colonel X, who was the main character in a cheesy spy-fi show he watched as a child. Michael Jayston is magnificent as Colonel X. (You might be able to find it on YouTube if you look hard enough. It’s worth the effort.)

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, Hannah is @MrsSimonTemplar, and Pete is @Prof_Quiteamess. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook and Mastodon, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll turn up at your workplace with a mop and bucket and make snide remarks about your ability to do your job.

And more

We’ve got an exciting new Doctor Who project to launch at the start of 2024, but — annoyingly — we’re not going to tell you anything more about it yet. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, you can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.

Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Recording is continuing on schedule, and our coverage of Series C should be ready for you later in the year.

There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watched a barely competent episode of the Original Series called Wolf in the Fold.

Notes and links

In a discussion of this very straightforward episode, there’s nothing specifically intertextual or in need of explanatory notes. So you get the week off this week. Or, if you like, you could listen to Untitled Star Trek Project’s take on Star Trek’s take on the heist movie, Deep Space Nine’s Badda-Bing Badda-Bang.

It’s just possible that the Doctor’s “shutetty up up up” owes more than a little to Malcolm Tucker’s famous farewell in In the Loop (2009).

About all those baffling Blake’s 7 references ten minutes from the end: a pivotal Blake’s 7 episode, Pressure Point, featured a long descent into a space base where each level was identical apart from the colour of the gel used in the lighting of the set. You can hear more about that in the episode of Maximum Power which deals with it — Project Managing His Adventures.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Simon is @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook and Mastodon, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll menace you with a Dyson handheld for lying to us about your bank balance.

And more

You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.

Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Recording is continuing on schedule, and our coverage of Series C should be ready for you later in the year.

There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we welcomed Seven of Nine to the Voyager family in the two-part season finale/season opener, Scorpion.

Notes and links

We don’t actually talk about the Missy Reveal in our episode on The Time Meddler. The Missy Reveal at the end of Dark Water was first broadcast the day before the release of Flight Through Entirety Episode 13, Airwick Gatport, which means that the Capaldi Era was broadcast into a world where Flight Through Entirety was still discussing Doctor Who from the 1960s.

The Blair Witch Project (1999) was a found-footage style horror movie that was absolutely huge at the time of its release. Like Listen, it hints at the monster repeatedly without ever really showing it on screen.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, and Simon is @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook and Mastodon, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll literally never move out from the comfy spot we’ve found under your bed.

And more

You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.

Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show. Plans are already well underway for our coverage of Series C later in the year, probably.

There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we tracked the terrifying personal journey of Kira Nerys from beloved terrorist to hidebound administrator in the Series 1 Deep Space Nine episode Progress.

Notes and links

There have been any number of film versions of Robin Hood, which is part of the point, but Richard is mostly reminded of the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn as Robin, directed by Michael Curtiz, with an Oscar-winning score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Errol Flynn didn’t go to Scots College in Sydney, Nathan: it was Sydney Church of England Grammar School, commonly known as Shore. He claimed to have been expelled from Shore for having sex with one of the ladies who worked in the laundry.

Star Trek: The Next Generation did its fantasy Robin Hood episode in its triumphant fourth season. It guest starred John DeLancie as Q and was called Qpid.

Here is an article in The Guardian from 2014, reporting the cuts made to this episode because of the beheading of two American journalists by members of Islamic State.

We spend some time talking about Ben Miller’s career. He’s one half of Armstrong and Miller, of course, as well as doing two series of Death in Paradise. Paul Cornell’s Primeval episode which featured Miller hunting a dinosaur was called Traitor Revealed.

When this was shot, Tom Riley was also playing a young Leonardo Da Vinci in Da Vinci’s Demons. He was also in St Trinian’s 2: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold (2009) with David Tennant and Jodie Whittaker.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, Richard is @RichardLStone, and Adrian is @the_iphoon. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook and Mastodon, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll assault you with cutlery until you do.

And more

You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.

Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show. Plans are already well underway for our coverage of Series C later in the year, probably.

There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watched another episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — this time, the delightful fantasy romp The Elysian Kingdom. There are new episodes out every Friday.

And finally, Brendan and his friend Bjay have joined forces to play and review videogames on The Bjay BJ Game Show. Take a listen: it’s funny, well-informed and completely enjoyable.

Notes and links

Some of us are old enough to remember the constant television repeats of Fantastic Voyage (1966), in which a small submarine and its crew are shrunk to microscopic size to remove a blood clot from the brain of a scientist who is defecting to the West. The glamorous catsuited assistant to the crew’s chief scientist is played by a young Raquel Welch.

Richard identifies as the chief influences on this episode Fantastic Voyage and Rob Shearman’s Doctor Who episode Dalek. (Which we discuss on Episode 137, To Mainsplain Aliens.)

Of course, Peter Capaldi was most well known for his role in Armando Ianucci’s political comedy series The Thick of It, in which he played Malcolm Tucker, the Prime Minister’s sweary and frankly terrifying political enforcer. Ianucci will go on to create Veep, in which Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays the hapless Vice President of the United States, and Avenue 5, starring Hugh Laurie as the captain of a luxury space cruiser which goes catastrophically off course.

Moffat’s first sitcom Joking Apart has been mentioned before on the podcast. Its main character also discovers how terrible he is as a person during the course of the first series.

Class was a short-lived and ill-fated Doctor Who spinoff, written by Patrick Ness and set at Coal Hill Academy. Peter Capaldi appears as the Doctor in Episode 1, and the season itself is broadcast between Series 9 and Series 10 of Doctor Who. It is cancelled after the first eight-episode run.

Trinity Wells, the American newsreader during the first RTD era, does have her very own Big Finish story: Driving Miss Wells by James Goss, which is part of the second Lives of Captain Jack box set, released in 2019.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Richard is @RichardLStone. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

Adam is @adamrichard on Twitter, adamrichard on Instagram and Fabulous Adam Richard on Facebook. His website is at www.adamrichard.com.au. He can currently be found theorising about Doctor Who on his own podcast Adam Richard Has a Theory. And there’s also his other podcast Me. I Am. A Memoir. The Meaning of ‘The Meaning of Mariah Carey’, which is a deep dive into all of the most illuminating details of the entire Carey œuvre.

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 we’ll continue to make almost no effort at all to learn any of your names.

And more

You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.

Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show. Plans are already well underway for our coverage of Series C later in the year, probably.

And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. We’ll be back with a new episode this coming Friday, but while you’re waiting for that, you can still catch our most recent episode, in which Joe and Nathan got together in person for the first time ever to watch the notorious Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Justice.

Notes and links

The new “bees in a theremin” theme music reminds Simon uncomfortably of the EP Doctor Who: Variations on a Theme, which was released in 1989 and contained four different versions of the Doctor Who theme: the Mood Version and the Regeneration Mix by Mark Ayers, the Terror Version by Dominic Glynn and the Latin Version by Keff McCulloch.

The Series 9 episode Before the Flood features a version of this new theme with Peter Capaldi himself playing electric guitar. Todd likes this version much better.

The new title sequence was based closely on a concept created in 2013 by digital artist Billy Hanshaw, which quickly garnered hundreds of thousands of views and was spotted by Steven Moffat, who said it was the “only new title idea I’d seen since 1963”. You can read the story of its creation in Connor Johnston’s interview with Billy Hanshaw at Doctor Who TV.

So. Elizabeth Tower, which houses Big Ben, is 97.5 metres tall, while a Tyrannosaurus rex standing upright is, we think, only about 5 metres tall. But in November 2022, paleontologists Jordan Mallon and David Hone suggested that the largest T. rex could have been 70% larger than the largest specimen we have now, and it could have weighed about 15 tonnes. Which suggests that Madam Vastra knew what she was talking about.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @ToddBeilby, and Simon is @simonmoore72. The new Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll have to start insisting that you all wear name tags.

And more

You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November.

Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show. We’ll be back again for Series C later in the year, probably.

And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. We’ve been taking a break for the last few weeks, but in our most recent episode, Joe and Nathan got together in person for the first time ever to watch the notorious Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Justice.

Notes and links

Thank you very much to the listeners who contributed their questions to this episode: DJ Alpha-T, Frazer Gregory and Nathan Bottomley.

Nathan claims to enjoy the idea that the Doctor is a somewhat problematic figure rather than just a traveller or a simple hero. Not everyone agrees, however. In this article in The Atlantic, Ted B Kissell complains that Matt Smith’s Doctor, is in many ways, a fairly terrible person.

As we said last week, Steven Moffat’s actual quote was that Matt Smith is like “Patrick Moore in the body of an underwear model”.

None of us seem to know anything about the ratings here, but The Day of the Doctor was apparently the highest rated drama for the year on the BBC, with 12.8 million viewers and an additional 3.2 million views on iPlayer. On BBC America, it had an audience of 2.8 million viewers, which was the highest rating ever received on the channel. (This, and more information about the special can be found on its TARDIS Fandom page.)

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @ToddBeilby, and Richard is @RichardLStone. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll look ridiculously young and innocent while lying to you about keeping your most pressing personal information to ourselves.

And more

You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November 2023.

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. In our most recent episode we watched a very silly film called Bullseye!, starring Roger Moore and Michael Cain.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which is currently covering Series B of the show. In this week’s episode, Terry Nation makes a triumphant return to the show in Countdown.

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 an episode of the Star Trek cartoon Lower Decks called Mugato, Gumato, in which the crew of the USS Cerritos rescue some rightly unloved space animals from the Original Series who have been captured by Ferengi criminals.

Doctor, listen to me. You can’t die, you’re too — you’re too nice, too brave, too kind and far, far too silly. You’re like Father Christmas, the Wizard of Oz, Scooby Doo. And I love you very much. And we all need you, and you simply cannot die.

While Clara undergoes a gruelling Christmas lunch with her family, on Trenzalore, in a town called Christmas, the Doctor is doing what he has always done — protecting, defending and being far, far too silly. Goodbye, Matt Smith — it’s The Time of the Doctor.

Notes and links

The Doctor’s longest running companion, faithful Cyberhead Handles, is voiced by Kayvan Novak, an English comedian who plays ancient vampire Nandor the Relentless in What We Do in the Shadows. Worth a watch.

Even before the fiftieth anniversary, it was widely reported that Matt Smith would be wearing a wig in his final episode as the Doctor. Here’s an article from September 2013 on Digital Spy.

Steven Moffat’s exact quote was that Matt Smith is like “Patrick Moore in the body of an underwear model”.

And finally, it’s Matt Smith’s Doctor who tells Clyde Langer that Time Lords can regenerate 507 times in the Sarah Jane Adventures story Death of the Doctor.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @ToddBeilby, and James is @ohjamessellwood. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll turn up naked at your next Christmas lunch and distract your grandma while she’s pouring the custard.

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’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November 2023.

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. In our most recent episode we watched a very silly film called Bullseye!, starring Roger Moore and Michael Cain.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which is currently covering Series B of the show. In this week’s episode, we find ourselves staring lovingly into the eyes of our cousins in Hostage.

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 tackle Star Trek’s only Christmas movie ever, Star Trek: Generations.

Watch the episode!

The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot was a special feature on various DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Day of the Doctor, of course, but it’s still available to watch on the BBC website. So have at it!

Notes and links

Peter Davison’s first foray into Doctor Who-related sketch comedy formed part of BBC Two’s Doctor Who night in 1999: a sketch called The Kidnappers, in which he starred with Doctor Who’s very own Mark Gatiss and David Walliams. It’s a special feature on the DVD release of An Unearthly Child, and it’s still available to watch on YouTube.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Richard is @RichardLStone, and Simon is @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll leave you hourly voicemail messages demanding dinner invitations and stuff.

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’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November 2023.

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 a few weeks ago started its coverage of Series B of the show. In this week’s episode, we find ourselves on the very esge of the Galaxy in Horizon.

And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, Nathan isn’t angry so much as disappointed with perennial Deep Space Nine fan favourite The Siege of AR-558.

Notes and links

You’ve already had your fair share of notes and links today, so we’re just doing one this episode — the 1976 edition of Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke’s book The Making of Doctor Who, which was the source for Terrance’s famous description of the Doctor, a description that is quoted in this episode — “He is impulsive, idealistic, ready to risk his life for a worthy cause. He hates tyranny and oppression and anything that is anti-life. He never gives in and he never gives up, however overwhelming the odds against him. The Doctor believes in good and fights evil. Though often caught up in violent situations, he is a man of peace. He is never cruel or cowardly. In fact, to put it simply, the Doctor is a hero.” Happy birthday, Doctor!

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Simon is @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll fail to mention you in our Very Special 250th Episode Celebration this Sunday.

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’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November 2023.

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 a few weeks ago started its coverage of Series B of the show. This week’s episode: Chris Boucher’s Weapon.

And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. We’ve been having a short break to give us the chance to rest on our laurels after our first year of podcasting. Today, we’re recommending our coverage of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Notes and links

First off, a special anniversary mention of El Sandifer, whose essay on The Day of the Doctor discusses its role on healing the breach between the Classic and New Series of Doctor Who.

Perhaps inevitably, John Hurt reprises his role as the War Doctor for Big Finish, recording four box sets of three stories each before his death in 2017.

Two Doctor Who novelisations alluded to this week: firstly, again, Steven Moffat’s novelisation of The Day of the Doctor (2018), and Russell T Davies’s novelistaion of Rose (also 2018), which depicts the Last Great Time War in weird and unfilmable ways.

As a man dedicated to recycling, Moffat has used the resolution of The Day of the Doctor in a Children in Need special in 2007 called Time Crash. We discussed it (of course) in Episode 178, Remember Who We Were.

Nathan’s vague memory of a French ambassador visiting a 65-year-old Queen Elizabeth I and remarking on the poor state of her teeth is largely correct. You can read about this meeting here.

This is Ingrid Oliver’s first appearance on the show as Dr Petronella Osgood, and so we spend a lot of time talking about how great she is. Richard mentions her role as Penthesilea in ElvenQuest, a Radio 4 comedy series starring Stephen Mangan, as well as her roles in another Radio 4 comedy series, The Penny Dreadfuls Present…. Brendan mentions her appearance as Osgood in The Lonely Assassins, a videogame featuring the Weeping Angels, first released in 2021 and available on just about every platform imaginable. And, for our viewers who are in the UK or who know how to operate a VPN, you can see a brief excerpt from the episode of Watson & Oliver where Ingrid learns that she’s been shortlisted to play the next James Bond.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, Richard is @RichardLStone and Todd is @toddbeilby. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll spend the next fifty years making fun of your dreadfully unconvincing London accent.

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’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November 2023.

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. In our most recent episode, we watched in awe as Roger Moore and Tony Curtis solved the mystery of The Long Goodbye.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which a few weeks ago started its coverage of Series B of the show. This week’s episode: Chris Boucher’s Weapon, starring The Talons of Weng-Chiang’s John Bennett in a largely non-racist role.

And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. We’ve been having a short break to give us the chance to rest on our laurels after our first year of podcasting. Today, we’re recommending our coverage of Star Trek: Discovery.

Watch the story!

The Night of the Doctor was originally released on BBC iPlayer on 14 November 2013. It is included as a special feature on the DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Day of the Doctor, which means you probably have it on a shelf somewhere. Failing that, it is also available on YouTube.

Notes and links

The second, completely unmemorable prequel to The Day of the Doctor is called The Last Day, and can also be found on YouTube. It’s included here merely for the sake of completeness: you don’t have to go and watch it or anything.

There will be a lot of talk this week about Steven Moffat’s novelisation of The Day of the Doctor (2018), so let’s start by admitting that Nathan gives the wrong chronological order here. From our point of view, it goes Tennant, Smith, Hurt, but from the Doctor’s point of view it goes Hurt, Tennant, Smith. Which is just the sort of nonsense that you either love/hate about Moffat.

For Conrad — and for the rest of us too, really — this episode is the sequel to The Brain of Morbius, which we discussed way back in Episode 41: Philip Madoc in Fishnets.

For fans of a certain age, Paul McGann will always be I in Withnail & I (1987), alongside titular Doctor Who villain Richard E Grant. Every weekend was very much like that film in the late 80s and early 90s, apparently.

River Song snogs Colin Baker’s Doctor (spoilers!) in a Big Finish story called World Enough and Time, part of The Diary of River Song, Series 2. Brendan says that it’s proper romantic.

And finally, Conrad sent us this photo of Ohila’s costume alongside the Eighth Doctor’s costume for this episode. The hat that forms part of Ohila’s costume is just the sort of magnificent nonsense an accomplished actress might refuse to wear on set.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, James is @ohjamessellwood and Conrad is @HairoftheHound_. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll subject you to a proper legitimate actor tantrum when you tell us we have to wear that gorgeous hat that you spent so much time creating.

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’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November 2023.

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. In our most recent episode, we watched in awe as Roger Moore and Tony Curtis solved the mystery of The Long Goodbye.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which a few weeks ago started its coverage of Series B of the show. This week’s episode: Chris Boucher’s Weapon, starring The Talons of Weng-Chiang’s John Bennett in a largely non-racist role.

And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. We’ve been having a short break to give us the chance to rest on our laurels after our first year of podcasting. Today, we’re recommending our coverage of Star Trek: Discovery.

Notes and links

Coronation Street got here first, with its dramatisation of the creation of the show — The Road to Coronation Street (2010), featuring our very own Celia Imrie and Shaun Dooley, as well as real-life Doctor Who villain Steven Berkoff.

As is now well known, the first Doctor Who novelisation Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (1965) invents a different meet-cute for the Doctor and its narrator Ian Chesterton: Ian meets the Doctor, Barbara and Susan after being involved in a car crash on Barnes Common, which is the location of the first scene of An Adventure in Space and Time.

The TV interview we mention with Bill Hartnell in 1967 can be found on YouTube, and as a special feature on the DVD release of The Tenth Planet. The story of the rediscovery of this interview can be found in this article in The Guardian from 2013.

Australian journalist Annabel Crabb created a four-part documentary called Ms Represented (2021) about the ugly truth of how female politicians have been treated in the Australian Parliament.

Here is the incredible story of Underground (1958), a live television drama in which the main actor died during broadcast, and which was partly saved by the intervention of Verity Lambert.

And finally, William Russell played an RAF pilot in The Man Who Never Was (1956), and was the lead in the television series The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956–1957) alongside Ronald Leigh-Hunt from The Seeds of Death and Revenge of the Cybermen.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Richard is @RichardLStone, and Simon is @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll elide your character with Jackie Lane in upcoming Flight Through Entirety biopic.

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’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November 2023.

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. In our most recent episode, we watched in awe as Roger Moore and Tony Curtis solved the mystery of The Long Goodbye.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which a few weeks ago started its coverage of Series B of the show. In today’s episode we will be discussing Series B, Episode 3, Weapon, by Doctor Who’s very own Chris Boucher.

And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. We’ve been having a short break to give us the chance to rest on our laurels after our first year of podcasting. Today, we’re recommending our coverage of Star Trek: The Original Series.

Notes and links

Thank you to all the lovely people who sent us questions, particularly Rod Who (@who_rod), Frazer Gregory (@FelixFrazer), Joe Ford (@docoho) Steven Alexander (@stealalexanderuk), Bob Gilbey (@bobgilbey), Erik Stadnik (@sjcAustenite), Nathan Bottomley (@nathanbottomley) and Richard Stone (@RichardLStone).

Downtime (1995) was an officially licensed Doctor Who fan film written by Marc Platt (Ghost Light) and featuring Nick Courtney, Lis Sladen, Deborah Watling and various other Doctor Who guest stars. Plus some Yeti.

Here’s Brendan standing alongside a portrait of what seems to be his Spanish monk great-great-great-great-great-great-(etc.)-grandfather in the National Art Museum of Catalonia.

John and Gillian were child companions of the First and Second Doctors in many, many Doctor Who comics. They don’t get space syphilis, but evil fictional versions of them do turn up in the Virgin New Adventure Conundrum.

Alex Kingston has continued to play River Song for Big Finish opposite a range of different Doctors and at least one Master in The Diary of River Song.

And last of all, in 2012, the BBC released a sort of animated version of an unfilmed scene written by Chris Chibnall, which would have seen the Doctor tell Brian Williams about the fate of his son and daughter-in-law. It’s called PS.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, and Todd is @toddbeilby. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll never stop dropping unnecessary jokes at your expense into our conversations.

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 releasesed our final episode this week — a long conversation over champagne about The Power of the Doctor.

We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November 2023.

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: this week it continues its interview with Michael E Briant, who directed five episodes of Blakes 7 Season A, as well as Colony in Space, The Sea Devils, The Green Death, Death to the Daleks, Revenge of the Cybermen and The Robots of Death. Our Season B coverage will start next week.

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 an episode of Series 4 of Star Trek: Discovery called The Examples.

“That’s the only sad thing. I want to know what happens next.”

It’s the end of an era and the end of this podcast: time for us to get together on folding chairs in a church hall somewhere with everyone we ever met to talk about our adventures with The Power of the Doctor.

And time for a last farewell. Thank you all.

Notes and links

Nathan’s rant about giving the Doctor unnecessary backstory in The War Games Part 10 can be heard on the Jodie into Terror episode on The Timeless Children.

Earlier this year, Nathan appeared on a podcast called Pull to Open, with Pete Pachal and Chris Taylor, and in every episode they theorise about where you might find Clara in this Doctor Who story. You can hear Nathan’s theory about Clara’s role in The Claws of Axos here.

Here’s El Sandifer’s essay on The Name of the Doctor, and this is how she describes Richard E Grant as the Great Intelligence: “But Grant is putting no effort into the part, playing him as a cliched bit of leering smugness. Which is, of course, exactly what the part calls for – a big name actor basically phoning it in.”

And finally: Nathan has a habit of making fun of Chris Chibnall’s minimalist approach to publicising Doctor Who by repeatedly posting a screencap of Art Malik from the exciting trailer at the end of The Woman Who Fell to Earth. You can see him in action here.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, Todd is @toddbeilby and Simon is @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll leap into your timeline and keep bombarding you with a lot of gratuitous advice.

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’ll be releasing our final episode on The Power of the Doctor this week.

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 is back to kick off its Season B coverage today with the first part of a two-part interview with Michael E Briant, who directed five episodes of Blakes 7 Season A, as well as Colony in Space, The Sea Devils, The Green Death, Death to the Daleks, Revenge of the Cybermen and The Robots of Death.

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 Darmok, which is one of the best episodes in Star Trek’s absurdly long history.

Notes and links

Richard is reminded of the Hammer film Vampire Circus (1972), which features Lalla Ward, Adrienne Corri and Laurence Payne, which means that we can now regard The Leisure Hive as its canonical sequel. He also mentions the 1988 film Waxwork, which features genre stalwarts David Warner and John Rhys-Davies.

Neil Gaiman handles childhood fears so beautifully in The Graveyard Book (2008) that Nathan and Richard recommend that you go and read it at once. It’s the story of Nobody Owens, who lives in a graveyard and is raised by ghosts after his family is murdered. Beautiful, funny and haunting.

And some film trivia that you can use to surprise and delight your remaining friends: as Richard says, Mel Brooks was one of the producers (uncredited) of Star Trek’s David Cronenberg’s 1986 film, The Fly.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Richard is @RichardLStone and James is @ohjamessellwood. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll do a film adaptation of all your most terrifying childhood fears on a tight budget and a very short time frame.

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’ll be releasing our final episode on The Power of the Doctor on 25 October, we hope.

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 Series B social media campaign has begun in earnest. Expect something very special very 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 watched the worst Star Trek: Enterprise episode ever, apparently, and Nathan really quite enjoyed it.

Notes and links

So, Diana Rigg. As we all know, her breakout role was as Mrs Peel in The Avengers from 1966 to 1968. And so this is not her first appearance on Flight Through Entirety. Before discussing The Seeds of Doom, Brendan, Nathan and Richard discussed the Avengers episode that undoubtedly inspired it: The Man Eater of Surrey Green (see Episode 43: Sexiest Exposition Trope). Since then, on Bondfinger, we’ve discussed several more episodes of The Avengers that she starred in, as well as the 1969 Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), which also starred the recently-cancelled George Lazenby as Bond.

Richard’s Pick of the Week: the “almost unwatchable” German Super 8 films starring Diana Rigg — Der goldene Schlüssel (1966), minikillers (1969) and Diadem (1969). They’re all available on YouTube, but we would completely understand if you decided not to follow the links.

Mark Gatiss named Mr Sweet after his friend Matthew Sweet, the author of Inventing the Victorians (2001), which attempts to demythologise the culture of the Victorian era: turns out, they were just as much fun as we are, apparently. Sweet is also known for his probing interviews of Doctor Who actors which can be found as extras on many DVD and Blu-ray releases.

We occasionally mention or allude to The League of Gentlemen, a sketch comedy series set in the fictional northern town of Royston Vasey, which ran for three seasons, a movie and a return season 15 years later. It doesn’t totally hold up now, for many reasons, but it’s certainly a useful text when it comes to understanding Mark Gatiss’s interests as a writer.

Richard points out that the opening scene of the episode echoes the famous Hovis Bread commercial from 1973, directed by Ridley Scott, which the people at Hovis (credibly) claim is “Britain’s most iconic and heart-warming advert”. More about the ad here.

Mrs Gillyflower’s revival meeting reminds Nathan of Mrs Melrose Ape, the lady preacher from Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which we know that Mark Gatiss is aware of, because he plays a small role in Stephen Fry’s film adaptation of the novel, Bright Young Things (2003).

And finally, as a well-known Sherlockian, Gatiss ties this episode into the Holmes canon: in The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez, Watson briefly refers to his notes on “the repulsive story of the red leech”.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, Richard is @RichardLStone and Steven B is @steedstylin. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

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. You can follow New to Who on Twitter at @NewToWhoPodcast and check out the episodes wherever podcasts can be found.

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 we’ll sprinkle pepper down the front of our blouse instead of salt so we can laugh at the sound of your sneezing.

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’ll be releasing our final episode on The Power of the Doctor a couple of days after 23 October, turns out.

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 to your podcatcher with a second series (a Series B, if you will) even more action-packed and breathtaking than the first.

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 welcomed the USS Voyager’s long-awaited return home in Endgame.

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Simon is @simonmoore72, and Mathew is @MathewHounsell. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll somehow convince you that that space accident turned you into a dot-matrix printer or something.

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’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.

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.

El Sandifer is particularly scathing in her assessment of Nigel Kneale in her essay on (among other things) ITV’s 1978 TV movie version of Quatermass.

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.

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 we’ll embarrass you on your first day by inviting your great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter along.

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’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.

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, Jack is @shackjanahan, and Mark is @QuarkMcMalus The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

You can hear more of Jack, in conversation with our friend Joe Ford, on The Nimon Be Praised podcast, which is on Twitter as @NimonPodcast. Mark can be found on the Trap One podcast, and he also appears regularly on the Maximum Power podcast.

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 in our next episode we’ll spoil the surprising and extremely upsetting ending to The Song of the Red Snow.

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’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.

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 released an epic two-hour episode on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s two-part Season 7 opener Image in the Sand and Shadows and Symbols.

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.

Here’s Big Finish announcing the casting of Lauren Cornelius as Dodo Chaplet in the First Doctor Adventures. The press release is curiously reticent about what accent Lauren is intending to use.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos and Todd is @ToddBeilby. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll use your wedding album to buy gin and cigarettes.

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’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.

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos and James is @ohjamessellwood The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll move in next door to you and give our wifi network an obscene and insulting SSID.

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’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.

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Simon is @simonmoore72, and Todd is @ToddBeilby. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll catastrophically fall to our deaths from your balcony and completely ruin your Christmas (in July).

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’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.

"Tell her, this is the story of Amelia Pond. And this is how it ends.”

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Simon is @simonmoore72, Todd is @ToddBeilby, and Kevin is @scribblesscript. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

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.

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 we’ll disappear utterly from your life and leave you with an epic case of the sadz.

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.

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.

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood and Adam is @adamrichard. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

Adam is @adamrichard on Twitter, adamrichard on Instagram and Fabulous Adam Richard on Facebook. His website is at www.adamrichard.com.au. He can currently be found theorising about Doctor Who on his own podcast Adam Richard Has a Theory; he also appears with Philip Lee Curtis on the podcast Me. I am. A Memoir. The Meaning of ‘The Meaning of Mariah Carey’ to provide you with as much Mariah-related content as you could possibly need. And, finally, he can be seen on SBS’s answer to Channel 4’s Countdown: Celebrity Letters and Numbers.

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 we’ll lob round to yours for a year and complain constantly about how boring your life is.

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.

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.

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood and Steven is @steedstylin. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

You can find Steven on New to Who podcast, which is on Twitter at @NewToWhoPodcast.

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 next time you’re at the head of an angry mob, we’ll spoil all your fun by moralising about the state of your immortal soul.

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 released our Legend of the Sea Devils episode just a few days ago.

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.

Here’s a link to Brendan’s YouTube series A Walk to Work with Whittaker: his take on this episode will appear some time tomorrow (or today if you’re in a different time zone, I guess).

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.

And, as promised, here are some lovely photos of Fiona’s dog Aston and his toy triceratops Tricey.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, and James is @ohjamessellwood. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll embarrass you at your next family gathering by going on about how much like your father you’ve become.

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’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.

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 fan favourite Sub Rosa. And we’re still recovering.

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Simon is @simonmoore72, Todd is @ToddBeilby and Richard is @RichardLStone. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll suddenly raise questions about your identity so terrifying that they cause your soufflé to collapse.

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’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.

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 called Blaze of Glory.

Here’s Brendan’s take on this episode in his YouTube series A Walk to Work with Whittaker.

Notes and Links

Here’s The Young Ones parodying The Lion, the Witch 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.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, Pete is @Prof_Quiteamess, and Mark is @QuarkMcMalus. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

Pete and Mark are frequent contributors to the Trap One Podcast, and can both be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast, Maximum Power.

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 we’ll come over to your house again and be so quirky and zany that your children will end up loving us much more than they love you.

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 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.

Notes and links

Thank you to everyone who helped us out by contributing questions to this episode: Mark Cockram, Frazer Gregory, Si Hart, DJ Alpha-T, and Blaine Coughlan.

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.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Todd is @ToddBeilby and Richard is @RichardLStone. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. 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 Apple Podcasts, or we’ll come over to your house and savagely critique the performance of your children.

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.

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.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which is also releasing a retrospective this week: it’s the Series A retrospective.