Flight Through Entirety: A Doctor Who Podcast

The latest leg of our flight through entirety comes to a gentle landing this week, but before we all head off to collect our luggage, all seven of us take the opportunity to say goodbye to Peter Capaldi and Steven Moffat in one last retrospective. 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 Appl

This Christmas, we travel from a snowy wasteland in the recent past, to an alien battlefield on a distant planet, to a historical battlefield that has faded from human memory — only to discover that the real battlefield was the friends we made along the way. Or something. Time to say goodbye to Peter Capaldi in Twice upon a Time. 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 @Richa

We’ve spent the last twelve weeks enjoying some unexpected extra time with Peter Capaldi and friends, and so it’s finally time to kick back and chat about what we’ve loved, what we’ve learned, and (inevitably) who we’d snog. It’s the Series 10 Retrospective. 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 <a href="https://5

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 availab

This week, things take an upsetting turn on Flight Through Entirety, as Bill is beset, in succession, by a nervous gunman, the master in latex (as usual), the passage of time, a creepy surgeon, and narrative inevitability. Also, the Masters are having an end-of-series party with the Cybermen again. It’s World Enough and Time. 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

This week, John Dorney joins us in northern Scotland to investigate the disappearance of the Ninth Legion — only to discover that there are things here even more terrible than the Roman army, things that can only be fought with trust and empathy and music. It’s The Eaters of Light. 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 A

This week, we’re huddling with Toby Hadoke in a tent in a cave set somewhere on Mars, wondering what that massive gun is for and trying to decide which terrifying Imperial Majesty to give our fealty to. It’s Empress of Mars. 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 <a href="https://www.bigfinish.com/rel

The Earth has once again fallen under the thrall of some wizened cadaverous monsters, who demand our love, our loyalty, and our uncritical acceptance of the Great Monk theory of history. And the only way to throw off their yoke is with a lot of laborious exposition. It’s The Lie of the Land. 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 Yo

This week, Tom Salinsky joins us for a World War III–adjacent chat in Madeupistan, while a global apocalypse is self-organising somewhere in Yorkshire. Also, some scary people keep trying to invite us to a free Bible study. It’s The Pyramid at the End of the World. 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 arrang

This week, Brendan, Nathan, Steven B and Johnny Spandrell penetrate the heart of the Vatican, only to discover that behind its dusty and arcane lore lies an eldritch horror that threatens the very idea of existence itself. It’s Extremis. 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

Did you know that if we had a nickel for every Doctor Who episode in which you have to pay the Company for the right to breathe, we’d have ten American cents? Which still wouldn’t be enough — even with Kate Orman’s help — to pay for today’s supply of Oxygen. 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.

This week, six millennials are astonishingly successful finding a large house to rent — the power points don’t work, there’s no mobile reception and the walls are quite literally made of alien woodlice. Oh, and it collapses into dust on their first night. It’s Knock Knock. 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 <a href="https://www.faceb

This week, we’re joined by Melvin Peña for a day trip to the Thames Frost Fair in 1814, expecting a jolly afternoon of daydrinking, sword swallowers and juicy sheep hearts, only to find ourselves tied to a bomb and engaged in an intriguing discussion about race, class, death and the ethics of killing. It’s Thin Ice. 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</

In a distant future where all life has been destroyed by technology, Brendan, James and Nathan sit down with their friend Bjay from The Bjay BJ Game Show to record a podcast about a Doctor Who episode called Smile. 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 Nat

We’re back for the first episode of Peter Capaldi’s final year — a simple, well-told tale of Girl Meets Girl, Girl Becomes Puddle, Girl Loses Girl and, finally, Girl Goes off with Her Tutor on a Series of Adventures in Time and Space. Welcome aboard, Bill Potts. It’s The Pilot. 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 <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/ohjamessellwood.bsky.so

This Christmas in July, we are joined by Adam Richard on a sleigh ride that flies right past the Marvel Cinematic Universe and lands on Margot Kidder’s rooftop in 1978. Which is, it turns out, not a bad place to be. It’s The Return of Doctor Mysterio. 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 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 Cele

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, Bren

From Skaro to Gallifrey, twelve episodes of one of the strangest seasons in Doctor Who’s history. What did we think, what did we learn, and what are we most looking forward to? And, as always, who would we snog, marry or avoid? 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 <a href="https://start

This week, the Doctor learns that mere relentless persistence is no match for the inevitability of loss, and a Doctor Who spinoff is created which we will never get to see. It’s Hell Bent. 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 <a href="htt

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 j

This week, we’re hanging out in a mystical London street full of Sontarans, Judoon and Cybermen, investigating a murder with Johnny Spandrell — only to find, to our horror, that the murder hasn’t happened yet. And, of course, that it’s time for Clara Oswald to Face the Raven. Notes and links Fridging or Women in Refrigerators is a trope in which a woman is murdered and the emotions of her male parent/lover/friend become more important to the narrative than the death of the woman herself. This article from The Guardian discusses its use in Strangers, an ITV drama in which our very own Devla Kirwan’s death evokes trauma in her husband, our very own John Simm. 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 <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Flightthroughentirety

This week, in orbit of the planet Neptune, a Doctor Who story is created which kills literally everyone who watches it. Which is why we should probably have thought twice before inviting the lovely Jeremy Radick to discuss it with us. Notes and links Steven Moffat’s version of Dracula (2020) is actually Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s version of Dracula. It stars the beautiful and terrifying Claes Bang in the title role, and it features the full complement of Moffat and Gatiss tropes, which will either be to your taste or not. And The Ring (2002) — a remake of the Japanese film Ringu (1998) — also contains a video which will kill all the people who watch it. (In seven days. It’s nice to have a definite timeline.) Nathan and Erik Stadnik also share a birthday with Samuel Anderson. Forgot to mention that. 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

This week, we’re all enjoying bombing and threatening one another, until the Doctor comes along and delivers a long speech about New Cruel People, which starts making us feel bad about ourselves. And fair enough. It’s The Zygon Inversion. Notes and links The Decimas were tiny squeaky-voiced aliens, who looked like nothing so much as miniature Zygons; their leader was played by our very own Deep Roy. They appeared in the fifth episode of Blakes 7, Web, and so you can hear more about them in Maximum Power episode 5, Color-coded Anoraks. Sonequa Martin-Green is the astonishing beautiful lead in the first of the new new Star Trek series, Star Trek: Discovery. Her ability to convey genuine emotional distress in Series 1 was so impressive that they required her to do it in just about every scene in Series 2. And Truth or Consequences is a real place in New Mexico, a small town that voted to name itself after a radio game show in 1950. (Before that, it was called Hot Springs.) Picks of the Week Simon Simon recommends seminal Cold War-era horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), which has been an influence on Doctor Who all the way back to The Faceless Ones. James James brings us back to 2023 with his recommendation of Marvel’s TV miniseries Secret Invasion, which itself goes back to a comic book crossover storyline that ran for a few months in 2008. Peter Peter suggests Barbenheimer, which was this year’s weirdest media trend, watching Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) on the same day. If Bonnie is still around in 2023, you have to believe that she participated. 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 <a hr

This week, we’ve invited twenty million Zygons over for cocktails, and now we’re starting to feel self-conscious about cooking up all that salt-and-pepper squid. And so soon we’re involved in an international political thriller that takes us from Fake New Mexico all the way to Madeupistan. It’s The Zygon Invasion. Notes and links Sister Lamont from Terror of the Zygons was played by Lillias Walker, who died in August at the age of 93. I hope she knew how many small children she terrified. Bless her. 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 f

It’s been a mere 900 years since last week’s episode, and it’s time to check in with Ashildr to see if she’s still the naive and loving young girl she was back in her Viking village days. Or — like the rest of us — has she simply turned into Peter Capaldi’s Doctor? It’s The Woman Who Lived. Notes and links Nathan refers to the Blackadder the Third episode Amy and Amiability in which a young woman played by Miranda Richardson disguises herself as a highwayman called the Shadow, who has a serious problem with squirrels. The first scene of this story is very much written by someone who remembers that episode. In his massive best seller Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell proposes the theory that it takes 10,000 hours to become really proficient at something. If you want to hear two of our favourite podcasters rip Gladwell’s book apart, they do that in an episode of their 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 <a

This week, we remind ourselves of what the Doctor stands for, as we watch him train up some very silly Vikings to be sweet and funny enough to see off an invasion by big stupid monsters with mouths full of teeth. Stacey Smith? joins us to discuss the story of The Girl Who Died. Notes and links Stacey discovered how much she liked this episode while watching it for Who is the Doctor 2, an unofficial guide to the Smith and Capaldi years, published in 2020. Wallander was a Swedish TV series based on the detective novels by Henning Menkell. It was re-made in English, in a version starring Kenneth Branagh as the detective, and featuring our very own haematophobic Viking Heidi (Barnaby Kay). And finally, the director of this episode, Ed Bazalgette, is very likely to have featured in this music video, familiar to both Nathan and Stacey from their childhoods: Turning Japanese by the Vapors. 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 <a href="https://trapo

This week, a bone Vervoid joins in the fun as we travel back in time to Wales in 2015 pretending to be Scotland in 1980 pretending to be somewhere in the Soviet Union. And it’s hard to say which time paradox is the most annoying, the bootstrap one or the predestination one. Thank goodness Frazer Gregory is here to help us sort it all out — it’s Before the Flood. Notes and links Like Steven B in our episode on Flatline, Frazer uses the Christopher Nolan film The Prestige (2006) as a way of understanding what Toby Whithouse is doing by setting up the bootstrap paradox at the start of this episode — it’s a magic trick. Likewise, Frazer compares this story’s unresolved conclusion with the way that the Season 9 episode of The 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 <em

This week, we’re playing Doctor Who madlibs — cowering in an UNDERWATER BASE, waiting for the ELECTROMAGNETIC GHOSTS to pick us off one by one. Fortunately, Peter Capaldi and some attractive young people are here to keep us entertained. We’re Under the Lake. Notes and links The CEO of this base under siege is apparently called Richard Pritchard, a name some of us first encountered in Broken News, a 2005 comedy which replicated the exprience of channel hoping between 24-hour news channels during an emerging international crisis. On one of those channels, news anchor Richard Pritchard was accompanied by Katie Tate and Melanie Bellamby (Torchwood’s Indira Varma). 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

This week, the Doctor chats with Davros, Missy chats with Clara, and the four of us wonder if those chats are fun enough to sustain forty-five minutes of television. All while actually having quite a fun chat ourselves. It’s The Witch’s Familiar. Notes and links Quite a few mentions are made of the 60-minute LP of Genesis of the Daleks. This was released in 1979, more than 10 years before the first VHS release, so for much of our childhood it was the only Doctor Who story we could actually own (apart from the novelisations). Naturally, we basically know it off by heart. The convention in Sydney that Nathan talks about took place in November 2015. In fact, it was where we all met Steven B for the first time. Here’s an account of the event published at the time in The Guardian. The last time Moffat wrote for both the Daleks and the Master, the Master was played by Jonathan Pryce, and it was a story that also featured sewers full of faeces. That story was The Curse of Fatal Death, which we’ve linked to many times before and which you should all re-watch immediately. Richard sees thematic parallels between this story and the 1961 film Judgement at Nuremberg, featuring Judy Garland, obviously, a lot of very accomplished actors and mad-uncle-of-the-podcast William Shatner. He also draws a parallel between the conversations here between the Doctor and Davros and the ones between Patrick McGoohan and Leo McKern in the final episodes of The Prisoner. Sir Ken Adam (1921–2016) was the designer on many of the early James Bond films, from Dr. No in 1962 to Moonraker in 1979. He’s particularly famous for his sets’ modernist design and angled ceilings. Picks of the week Simon Simon recommends a quiet and thoughtful science fiction film After Yang (2021), in which a family has to come to terms with the death of their AI assistant Yang. Here’s the review from The Guardian. Todd Todd recommends the Australian competitive reality TV show Hunted, in which 24 people are dropped in Melbourne and have to avoid being captured by various former police officers

So Doctor Who is back, doing the same old thing for another year, but this time we’re relitigating the main moral question of a thirty-year-old episode: can we kill a genocidal dictator even though he’s just a small child with a dirty face lost on a battlefield somewhere? Tom Spilsbury joins us to discuss The Magician’s Apprentice. 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 <a href="https://

It’s Christmas in July, and what could be more Christmassy than having your brains sucked out by predatory alien crabs? Why, Nick Frost as Santa, of course! So welcome, everyone, to your Last Christmas. 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 w

Peter Capaldi’s Doctor might not be sure if he’s a good man, but can Nathan, Todd, Peter and Simon be sure if his first series is a good series? Let’s find out (while determining who to snog, marry and avoid on the way). 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.

It’s happened again: it’s the end of the season, and all our long-dead relatives have come back as Cybermen. Only this time, instead of hanging around the kitchen reeking of tobacco, they’re wandering through graveyards and — well, that’s it really, wandering through graveyards. Fortunately, Missy is here to liven things up a bit. It’s Death in Heaven. 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 <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/jodie-into-terror/id

This week, Danny’s death is somehow made up for by the culmination of a season-long arc which finally brings Michelle Gomez properly into the limelight. It’s Dark Water. 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 flash

It’s like the New Forest only newer, as well as more sudden and completely worldwide. But is it here for revenge, or to provide us with some much-needed help? Let’s find out as Mathew Hounsell and Kevin Burnard join us to discuss In the Forest of the Night. 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 <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/flight-through-entirety-a-doctor-who-podcast/id882716995"

This week, we’re doing some judicially-mandated cleaning up around a council estate in Bristol when we make some terrifying discoveries about the source and nature of the graffiti we’re painting over, and some even more terrifying discoveries about our own and our friends’ moral characters. Also, someone left the TARDIS prop from Logopolis Part 3 lying around here somewhere. It’s Flatline. 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, an

This week, a technologically-augmented interdimensional mummy runs amok on a replica of the Orient Express in space under the control of a terrifying alien intelligence or something. It’s a day at the office for Doctor Who, in Mummy on the Orient Express. 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 <a href="https://twitter.com/

This week, Nathan, Brendan, Simon and Colin are trapped in a room with only forty-five minutes to decide whether Kill the Moon is terrible or a towering work of genius. It goes quite well, surprisingly. 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 f

This week, Pete Lambert and Hannah Cooper join us for a particularly embarrassing Coal Hill School parents’ evening, which goes horribly wrong when a Mechanoid is found roaming the premises. It’s The Caretaker. 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. <h

Nathan, James, Peter and Simon come to in a bare darkened room full of mid-range sound recording equipment with no memory at all of how they got there, only to find — to their horror — that they have agreed to podcast about our next Doctor Who episode, Time Heist. 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 er

This week, we’re joined under the Doctor’s bed by Fiona Tomney, to discuss whether monsters are real or imaginary or both, and to squee repeatedly over the Capaldi performance. It’s Listen. 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 <e

This week, Nathan, Richard, Todd and Adrian Phoon leave the peasants of Worksop to their mud-eating and get together to ask themselves the questions Is the Doctor as big a hero as Robin Hood? and Is Robin Hood even real?, only to come up with some very surprising answers. It’s Robot of Sherwood. 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 w

This week, we’re joined by Adam Richard, shrunk to a microscopic size, and sent on a mission consisting mostly of ruthless moral self-examination. Meanwhile, somewhere else completely, a romcom is taking place. It’s Into the Dalek. 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 @Rich

After half a lifetime of waiting, the time has come for Peter Capaldi to finally take on the role he was born to play. But is twenty-first century Who ready for this spiky and unpredictable leading man and his sexy and unhinged mortal enemy? We’re about to find out — but first, let’s take a Deep Breath. 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

From Amy’s imaginary friend to the Hero of Trenzalore, Matt Smith spent four years and more than a few centuries as the Doctor. So now that he’s gone, how do we think he did? 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 <a href="https:/

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 Podcas

After a whole week of anniversary celebrations on Flight Through Entirety, it’s time for us to acknowledge how ridiculous it all is, and who better to take charge of that than our very own Peter Davison, who lovingly chronicles his own utterly fictional attempts to shoehorn himself into the Anniversary Special in The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot. 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 Po

The original FTE team has already spent an hour discussing The Day of the Doctor, but it wouldn’t be a fiftieth anniversary celebration without James, Peter and Simon on the couch toasting everyone’s health. There will be cocktails, as we convene just one more time to discuss The Day of the Doctor. 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

To celebrate Doctor Who’s fiftieth and fifty-ninth anniversaries, Brendan, Nathan, Richard and Todd are reunited at last for the first of two panels discussing The Day of the Doctor. We squealed, we laughed, we wept, we injured Brendan, and we spent quite a bit of time fangirling about Ingrid Oliver. Happy birthday, everyone! 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 Nath