Episode 252
Comedy to High Drama
Sunday 1 January 2023
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 Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November 2023.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well. In our most recent episode we watched a very silly film called Bullseye!, starring Roger Moore and Michael Cain.
We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which is currently covering Series B of the show. In this week’s episode, Terry Nation makes a triumphant return to the show in Countdown.
And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we watched an episode of the Star Trek cartoon Lower Decks called Mugato, Gumato, in which the crew of the USS Cerritos rescue some rightly unloved space animals from the Original Series who have been captured by Ferengi criminals.