We’re back. It’s the first episode of a whole new era, and Matt Smith has 20 minutes to save the world and an hour to convince the audience that there’s life after David Tennant. Pull up a fire engine and delete your browser history — it’s time for The Eleventh Hour.
Notes and links
Richard mentions Pretend It’s a City, a seven-part documentary series in which Franz Lebowitz discusses her most bracing opinions with Martin Scorsese.
Perhaps the Atraxi come from Atraxi 3, a planet first mentioned in Kate Orman and Jon Blum’s novel Vampire Science. It’s also inhabited by a a race of giant mosquitos.
Nathan mentions Neil Gaiman’s short story The Problem of Susan, which uses the character of Susan Pevensie to discuss C S Lewis’s problem with adult female sexuality in his Narnia books. Sandifer uses this short story in her analysis of why the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan fails as a character in the early years of Doctor Who.
Lynda Day is the main character of Steven Moffat’s brilliant (and occasionally problematic) children’s series Press Gang. Brilliant played by Julia Sowalha, Lynda will be eerily familiar to anyone who has watched this era of Doctor Who.
Olivia Colman talks about first becoming really famous in the first episode of David Tennant’s excellent podcast David Tennant Does a Podcast with….
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Richard is @RichardLStone, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Peter remains steadfastly unavailable online. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
Episode 201: Tiggers Don’t Like Bacon
· Recorded on Sunday 24 January 2021 · Duration 1:05:01
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This week, we answer the most important questions about the latest leg of our flight — the Russell T Davies Era. What happened to Nerys during the Year of Hell? Which monsters would we most like to party with? Who is the best guest character, and why is it Ida Scott? And, finally, is this the best era in the show’s history?
Notes and links
Thank you to Pete Lambert, Steven Alexander, Bob Gilbey, Joe Ford, Simon Hart and Nathan Bottomley for supplying us with questions to answer on Twitter, and to Colin Neal for his contribution to our final round of Snog Marry Avoid.
Nathan would like to clarify here that the Astrid he’s referring to is not Kylie Minogue’s Astrid Peth but Astrid Ferrier from The Enemy of the World, who seems to be a source of fascination for Patrick Troughton’s Doctor.
You can listen to the Forest of the Dead commentary that Nathan mentions here: it features David Tennant, Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat. And you need to hear it.
Miranda Raison’s companion character in the Big Finish audios is called Constance Clarke, who is a Wren working at Bletchley Park during World War II.
Project: WHO? is a 2005 radio documentary about the process of bringing Doctor Who back to television in 2005, featuring all of the production crew and actors that we would grow to know and love over the next five years. It’s still available as an audiobook. (Audible US) (Audible UK) (Audible AU).
To celebrate the end of the production of RTD’s Doctor Who, the cast and crew shot a lovely video in which they lipsync to The Proclaimers’ “I would walk five hundred miles”. They’re all in it, and it’s absolutely adorable. (I still cry. I just checked.)
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Richard is @RichardLStone, Todd @toddbeilby, and Peter has wisely elected to avoid being available online. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam, and the strings performance was by Jane Aubourg. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll do such a great job of bringing back your favourite TV show that your life will be irrevocably changed for the better. Pretty intimidating threat, right?
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.
Episode 200: Technical Virtuosity
· Recorded on Sunday 27 December 2020 · Duration 1:32:08
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This week, we’ve hastily convened an emergency meeting in our darkest conference room: Todd’s itching to try out his new glove, Nathan has some serious objections to make, James is here mostly for the exposition and Peter is hunched over the desk doing his best Dalek Caan impersonation. It’s the end of the David Tennant era — The End of Time, Part Two.
Notes and links
For the last time ever, the best source for background information about the development of this script is Russell T Davies’s The Writer’s Tale, particularly Chapters 23 and 24. That’s also where you’ll find the scripts to some of the deleted scenes where John Simm was playing against himself, scenes which were very kindly pointed out to us by friend-of-the-podcast Scriptscribbles.
Our new trope for 2021 is the Florana speech — which is the speech where the Doctor lists a whole bunch of possible magnificent destinations in order to entice someone to travel with him. The locus classicus for this is Pertwee and Sarah at the end of Invasion of the Dinosaurs; Nathan’s personal favourite can be found at the beginning of The Day of the Doctor.
Picks of the week
Todd
Todd has been enjoying Marie-Claire’s World, a YouTube channel where a new series fan is watching her way through the entirety of the Classic Series and recording her reactions. She’s very positive about it.
Honourable mentions also go to SeskaSays and Medusa Cascade, who are doing pretty much the same thing.
James
James’s pick is returning favourite W1A, also chosen by Simon in Episode 172. It’s a sitcom set inside the BBC itself, starring Doctor Who royalty Jessica Hynes and Hugh Bonneville, and narrated by David Tennant.
Peter
Peter wants us to take a look as some of the news coverage of Donald Trump’s childish and mendacious post-election tantrum, so that we can properly appreciate what Joe Biden and the American voting public will deliver us from on 20 January. Not long now.
Nathan
Nathan has been watching The Boys, a violent and hilarious satire of comic-book superheroes and American capitalism, brought to you by those cuddly Marxist hippies at Amazon Prime.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, Todd is @toddbeilby, and if you see Peter around anywhere, tell him how keen you are to follow him when he finally gets round to creating a Twitter account. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam, and the strings performance was by Jane Aubourg. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
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 plan to release an episode on Revolution of the Daleks very soon after its broadcast.
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.
Episode 199: A Great Release of Tension
· Recorded on Sunday 13 December 2020 · Duration 1:02:08
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This Christmas, everyone’s incredibly hungry, but we’re not allowed to start on dinner until the Doctor’s embarrassing relatives arrive. It’s the episode with the most oxymoronic title in the entire series — The End of Time, Part One.
Notes and links
Prisoner — or Prisoner: Cell Block H — was a classic Australian soap opera before such things even existed. In this clip, the Freak introduces herself to fan favourite Doreen Burns in a particularly memorable way.
V was an American mini-series from the mid-80s, in which rat-eating lizard people invaded America in a way that we can only describe as extremely prophetic. You can see the scene that Todd mentions here.
Nathan prepared for this episode by live-tweeting both parts of The End of Time, using the hashtag #FinalDaysOfPlanetEarth.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, Todd @toddbeilby, and if you see Peter around anywhere, tell him how keen you are to follow him when he finally gets round to creating a Twitter account. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam, and the strings performance was by Jane Aubourg. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
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 plan to release an episode on Revolution of the Daleks early in January.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well. In our most recent episode, we watched the 1998 film version of The Avengers, so you don’t have to.
Episode 198: Do Something Big
· Recorded on Sunday 13 December 2020 · Duration 0:54:42
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This month, Brendan’s got his hand stuck up a robot, and Nathan is preparing a roast dinner made entirely of carrots and prions, when they are unexpectedly joined by those travellers in space and time known only as Pete Lambert and Conrad Westmaas. The conversation soon turns to accents, zombies and specious moral dilemmas: this is, after all, The Waters of Mars.
And finally, for those of you with pure hearts or strong stomachs, here’s David Tennant in 2008, accepting his award for Outstanding Drama Performance and announcing his resignation from Doctor Who.
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. Our recent tribute to Kate O’Mara, the Kate O’Marathon, was interrupted by the death of Diana Rigg, whose tribute may in turn be interrupted by a tribute to the late Sean Connery. 2020 hasn’t really worked out all that well, has it?
Episode 197: Fix or Flux
· Recorded on Sunday 11 October 2020 · Duration 1:15:07
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It’s Easter 2009, and here we are, huddling in a bus with Michelle Ryan and friend-of-the-podcast Simon Moore on the desert planet San Helios, with the sun in our eyes, hope in our hearts and a hundred billion dead people in our hair. It’s the first special episode of David Tennant’s final year: welcome to the Planet of the Dead.
Notes and links
Planet of the Dead was in some ways inspired by Gareth Roberts’s first Virgin New Adventure novel The Highest Science, which was first published in February 1993.
Transport nerds like James will be keen to learn more about the route followed by the 200 bus in our own non-Doctor Who universe.
Although Big Finish is yet to release its series of box sets starring Noma Dumezmeni as Erisa Magambo, Michelle Ryan’s Lady Christina is now an official Big Finish property, with a box set of her own released in August 2018.
The best source of background information about the 2009 specials is of course Russell T Davies’s own account of their production, The Writer’s Tale. The section on this episode is particuarly harrowing.
And finally, the banterous relationship between the Doctor and Lady Christina is inspired by a similar relationship between Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade (1963).
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 are all still shaken by the death of Dame Diana Rigg, and will soon be releasing the first of a series of commentaries in which we go on and on about how much we loved her.
Episode 196: Big Finish, Call Me Now
· Recorded on Friday 4 September 2020 · Duration 1:03:28
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This week, Thatcherism, marshmallows and contractual obligation collide as we fulfil a promise made late in 2017 to record a commentary on one of Doctor Who’s angriest and most revolutionary stories, The Happiness Patrol.
Buy the story!
The Happiness Patrol was released on DVD in 2012. In the US, it was released on its own (Amazon US), while in the UK and Australia, it was inexplicably released as part of the Ace Adventures box set, along with Dragonfire (Amazon UK).
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
Episode 195: Welcome to the Kandy Kommentary
· Recorded on Sunday 19 July 2020 · Duration 1:18:18
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It’s Christmas in July, and an amnesiac Todd is cosplaying as Colin Baker while his missing son Brendan is slaving away in a workhouse somewhere. Meanwhile, Richard is frocked up and ready to take over the British Empire, as usual, while Nathan is wearing a brass N95 mask and a gorilla suit and dreaming of summer days spent frolicking in the forests of the planet Tara. Pass us the eggnog, someone: it’s time to meet The Next Doctor.
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll upstage you at your next family Christmas by pretending to be a much more bombastic and somewhat less annoying version of you.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well. We’ve finished our Honor Blackman tribute season, and before embarking on our impending Kate O’Marathon, we recently spent a lovely 50 minutes admiring Joanna Lumley as Purdey in an episode of The New Avengers.
Episode 194: Mr Cole, Mr Scoones, Mr Fetch and Mr Commentary
· Recorded on Friday 19 June 2020 · Duration 1:03:57
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This week, we look back on Series 4 and consider some of the unanswered questions from the last thirteen weeks of Flight Through Entirety. Is Series 4 the best ever series of New Who? Sylvia Noble: threat or menace? What is the best story of the season, and why is it Midnight? And, as always, who or what should we snog, marry and avoid?
Notes and links
James mentions Donna’s solo return to the world of Doctor Who in the Big Finish box set Kidnapped!, which also stars Jacqueline King. Big Finish has also released an adventure with the Doctor and Donna that features Sir Bernard Cribbins as Wilf: it’s called No Place.
TV’s Sylvia Noble, Jacqueline King, stars as the Good Witch of the North in the Big Finish adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which also stars the extremely pretty and excitingly named Dan Bottomley as the Scarecrow. No relation.
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 again commemorate Honor Blackman by watching her appearance as Ronald Allen’s wife in an episode of Patrick McGoohan’s Danger Man called ColonelRodriguez.
Episode 193: Dalek Caan Saves the Day
· Recorded on Sunday 3 May 2020 · Duration 1:16:27
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This week, all four of us gather in the Console Room to tow the podcast home after a particularly trying week. It’s time for our journey to end, in — er — Journey’s End.
Notes and links
Perennial FTE punching bag Dodo Chaplet contracts syphilis — or at least an alien sex virus — in Daniel O’Mahony’s Virgin Missing Adventure The Man in the Velvet Mask.
During the Doctor’s year off in 2009, the 456 arrive on Earth to kidnap millions of children and are thwarted by Torchwood, without the assistance of Martha or Mickey. Despite this, Children of Earth is just about the best thing produced in Doctor Who’s modern era. If you haven’t seen it, you definitely should.
After the traditional transporter accident, Troi finds herself with two Will Rikers in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Second Chances, and somehow fails to take the obvious course of action.
Picks of the week
James
James wants you to watch The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, which is episodes 5 and 6 of Series 3 of The Sarah Jane Adventures, and which includes the last scenes David Tennant filmed at the Doctor before his final regular episodes were broadcast at the end of 2009. It features the Trickster and Nigel Havers, only one of whom is trying to marry Sarah.
Peter
Peter recommends War of the Worlds, a Fox co-production from 2019, which features Ty Tennant, the son of Georgia and David Tennant, previously seen in his grandfather’s Doctor Who fiftieth anniversary special, The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot.
Todd
Todd wants to take us a bit highbrow this week, with the sensational Netflix series, Tiger King, which for many of us was the way we celebrated the beginning of our endless COVID lockdown. Very much worth a look.
Nathan
Taking the opportunity to retreat into his own childhood, Nathan suggests that you read Tove Jansson’s Moomin books, which range from charming and whimsical to elegiac and character-driven. Recommended.
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll rudely push your ex-girlfriend across the room in an unsubtle attempt to hit on your ex-boyfriend. You really have quite the complicated love life, don’t you?
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well. In our most recent episode, we again commemorate Honor Blackman by watching her appearance as Ronald Allen’s wife in an episode of Patrick McGoohan’s Danger Man called Colonel Rodriguez.
Episode 192: Why He Wins
· Recorded on Monday 13 April 2020 · Duration 1:05:16
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This week, Nathan, James, Todd and Peter sit in our separate homes, longing for an invasion where the aliens order us all to congregate in the street together. Which is what happens, of course, in The Stolen Earth.
Notes and links
We’ve mentioned this over and over again, but for an account of how this season and its finale came to be, there’s no better place to go than Russell T Davies and Ben Cook’s The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter. It’s illustrated with cartoons by RTD himself, including his original conception of the Shadow Proclamation, and his headcanon explanation of Harriet Jones’s daring escape from the Daleks. An absolute must-read.
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 again commemorate Honor Blackman by watching her appearance as Ronald Allen’s wife in an episode of Patrick McGoohan’s Danger Man called Colonel Rodriguez.
Episode 191: Mr Smith’s Fanfare Is Diegetic
· Recorded on Monday 13 April 2020 · Duration 0:57:54
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This week, we’re joined by TV’s Joe Lidster, to discuss one of our favourite Doctor Who episodes while the world around us devolves into fascism and the universe collapses into nothingness. I guess that’s what happens when you fail to Turn Left.
Notes and links
We spend a lot of time talking about Years and Years, which is Russell’s latest iteration of the story of society’s impeding collapse, and which we first mentioned way back in Episode 159. If you haven’t seen it, you must. If you’re worried that it’s too bleak, it is, but it’s funny and heartwarming as well.
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 commemorate Honor Blackman by talking all the way through her appearance alongside Roger Moore in an episode of The Saint called The Arrow of God.
Episode 190: Just One Thing
· Recorded on Sunday 8 March 2020 · Duration 1:00:03
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Remember tourism? Sure, you would always end up on a crappy bus full of middle-class English holidaymakers who wanted to kill you, and there was always the imminent threat of alien attack, but at least it got you out of the house. Which is why this week we decided to catch up with Doctor Who YouTuberJosh Snares for a weekend getaway on the planet Midnight.
Notes and links
Russell T Davies’s script for Midnight is no longer available on thewriterstale.com, but it can still be found here. (It doesn’t have a title yet, and it’s still called Episode 8.)
In her essay on Fury from the Deep, El Sandifer explains that in a trad base-under-siege story, characterisation tends to focus on the competence of the characters rather than on anything more human and interesting.
The Midnight Entity™ (sigh) reminds James and Brendan of the creature from The Twilight Zone episode Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. (Which starred William Shatner, excitingly.)
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 commemorate Honor Blackman by talking all the way through her appearance alongside Roger Moore in an episode of The Saint called The Arrow of God.
Episode 189: Your Bezzie Mate
· Recorded on Thursday 13 February 2020 · Duration 0:50:39
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This week, we’re joined again by rockstar Doctor Who blogger Johnny Spandrell, for just under an hour of conversation and fruitless dieting in a VR environment. It’s the start — and the end — of a beautiful friendship, in Forest of the Dead.
Carole Lombard and Clark Gable do a number of films together, but their big romcom is called No Man of Her Own (1932).
Just by sheer coincidence, Kenny Phillips meets an Irish girl, who he falls in love with, loses and then nearly meets again in two episodes of Press Gang, Season 2’s Love and the Junior Gazette and Season 3’s Chance is a Fine Thing.
Miss Evangelista’s exciting new look owes more than a little to Picasso’s Weeping Woman series. One of the series, belonging to the National Gallery of Victoria, was stolen in 1986.
Picks of the week
Johnny
For some mysterious reason, Johnny wants you to read the Wikipedia entry on Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife. I suppose the reason will somehow become clear to you as you read it.
Peter
Peter wants you to rewatch The Tomb of the Cybermen to see a prototype of Mr Lux in the character of Betty Kaftan. He also wants you to watch the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Relics to see the prototype of someone saved in a transporter buffer for many years. And finally, he wants you read the New Series Target Novelisations Rose by Russell T Davies and The Day of the Doctor by Steven Moffat, two writers whose relationship is characterised by warmth and cameraderie. (In fact, by the most amazing coincidence, the most recent issue of Doctor Who Magazine has them interviewing each other, and the warmth of their relationship is very much evident there.)
As usual, Nathan suggests that you read the TARDIS Eruditorum entry on this story, which is actually a 100,000-word history of the first 50 years of Doctor Who. It’s an amazing piece of work.
Johnny’s magnum opus is his blog Random Whoness, in which he goes through every single story from the first thirty-seven series of Doctor Who, in random order, and manages something surprisingly new and insightful about each one. It’s like Flight Through Entirety, only random and less tiresome.
This week, Nathan, Peter and Richard are joined by renowned Doctor Who blogger Johnny Spandrell, but we spend most of our time lurking among the bookshelves frightened by our own shadows. And despite the customary non-stop chattering, it’s all about Silence in the Library.
Notes and links
Fans of the Vashta Nerada will also enjoy the episode of Scooby-Doo, Where are You? in which the gang are confronted by a terrifying skeleton in a space suit, characteristically called the Spooky Space Kook.
The Library of Babel (1948) is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which he imagines a library the size of the universe, which contains every book ever written, in a series of hexagonal rooms lined with shelves full of 410-page books containing every possible combination of letters. It’s a weird and interesting thought experiement. You can find a copy of the story itself here. Philosopher Daniel Dennett explores the idea further in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1996).
Johnny’s magnum opus is his blog Random Whoness, in which he goes through every single story from the first thirty-seven series of Doctor Who, in random order, and manages something surprisingly new and insightful about each one. It’s like Flight Through Entirety, only random and less tiresome.
This week, Peter’s having a quiet drink, Brendan’s spending a suspicious amount of time in the toilet, Max has gone for a walk in the woods with Sacha Dhawan, and Nathan is looking at dirty postcards and reminiscing about the days when he still used to get out of this chair. Plus, Agatha Christie’s here for cocktails. So be sure to watch out for The Unicorn and the Wasp.
Notes and links
Nathan has dim memories of three Agatha Christie miniseries, adapted for TV by Sarah Phelps, who is writing a second series of RTD’s A Very English Scandal in 2021. These adaptations were And Then There Were None (2015), Witness for the Prosecution (2016) and Ordeal by Innocence (2018).
The Doctor reminisces about rescuing Charlemagne from an insane computer, a scenario taken directly from a Doctor Who story on the BBC website: The Lonely Computer, by Peter’s old friend Rupert Laight.
This Guardian article from 1999 theorises that Agatha Christie disappeared to get back at her cheating husband, and that her amnesia was feigned to conceal this fact. Nathan learned this story, like everything else he knows, from a tweet. (You can see his reply here).
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll write a whole bunch of Doctor Who episodes that you really enjoy and then behave so poorly in public that you have no choice but to cancel us.
This week, we basically stand around gloomily watching a fish drown until Todd cheers us up with some surprisingly athletic backflips. It’s The Doctor’s Daughter.
Notes and links
During the recording of our episode on 42 last year (Episode 170: I Believe Beryl Reid as a Freighter Captain), Brendan and Todd enter an unholy pact to reunite on this week’s episode to redeem The Doctor’s Daughter. With the most terrible consequences.
A few days before we recorded this episode, Chris Chibnall was interviewed in the Radio Times, saying that he would love one day to bring back some of the show’s earlier companions, like Amy, Rory, Ace and Tegan.
We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll give you three delightfully unexpected weeks of work, during which you’ll mostly be required to flail around in mud.
This week, Nathan is crushing on that nice Colonel, James is crushing on a cloned replica of himself, and Peter is crushing on that nice young man who runs the local startup cult academy. And all the time, Adam Richard is roaming this suburban street with an axe, looking for cars to attack. It’s the end of the world, as usual: it’s The Poison Sky.
Notes and links
Adam’s TV show Outland (2012) screened on ABC-TV and told the story of five queer science-fiction fans thrown together after the breakup of their local fan group. Adam was co-creator, co-writer and one of the stars of the show. Outland was must-see TV for another small group of queer science fiction fans who would one day grow up to create the podcast Flight Through Entirety.
In March 2020, Catherine Tate returned to Big Finish with Jacqueline King in the Kidnapped! box set, in which Donna teams up with an old school friend to fight aliens in the Doctor’s absence.
Freeman Agyeman has just made her Big Finish début, but not in a Doctor Who story: instead, she’s joining Eve Myles in Torchwood: Dissected, released in February 2020.
As we said last week, Adam writes for the ABC-TV comedy quiz show Hard Quiz, which has been running in Australia since 2017, and is now in its fifth series.
Peter ponders the similarities between Luke Rattigan and convicted fraud Martin Shkreli, who is literally one of the world’s most appalling people.
Picks of the week
James
James wants you to watch Up the Women, a BBC4 sitcom created by Jessica Hynes, starring Hynes, Rebecca Front, Vicki Pepperdine and the Rattigan Academy’s very own Ryan Sampson.
Adam
Adam recommends The Stranger, Netflix’s answer to Broadchurch, produced by Nicola Shindler’s Red Production Company (Years and Years, Cucumber, Queer as Folk).
Peter
Hoping for the Rutans to make a return to Doctor Who, Peter suggests that you should watch Horror of Fang Rock, which we covered in the our delightfully named Episode 50, The Practical Problem with Leaving Someone Alive.
And he’s particularly keen for you to watch Netflix’s Elite, a Spanish teen drama in which attractive young people have sex and occasionally murder someone.
Nathan
Nathan finds depressing parallels between life in 2020 and life in 2060 as depicted in Avenue 5, a new HBO science-fiction comedy series by Armando Ianucci (The Thick of It).
Episode 184: This Soldier, This Soldier, This Soldier, This Soldier
· Recorded on Saturday 8 February 2020 · Duration 0:54:35
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This week, we’re joined again by Adam Richard for a discussion about RTD’s early-season two-parters, sidelining the main characters, the military, cloning, Sontarans, and the perils of spending too much time with our families. It all smells very much like The Sontaran Stratagem.
Notes and links
Martha is now engaged to the impressively handsome Thomas Milligan from Last of the Time Lords, who is played by Tom Ellis, who can now been seen in the titular role in Netflix’s supernatural police procedural Lucifer.
Sergeant Benton’s pretty new replacement in this version of UNIT, Ross Jenkins, is played by Christian Cooke, who was recently one of the suspects in the BBC adaption of Agatha Christie’s Ordeal by Innocence (2018).
Take a drink, dear listener. In her TARDIS Eruditorum article on The Time Warrior, El Sandifer explains that Bob Holmes did not create the Sontarans as a second-tier race of Doctor Who monsters; what he created there instead was the character of Linx.
If you’re young enough, you might not know that Christopher Ryan — who plays General Staal in this story — first became famous as Mike the Cool Person in the Thatcher-era BBC comedy series The Young Ones. He went on to play Jennifer Saunders’s long-suffering ex-husband Marshall in Absolutely Fabulous.
Adam writes for the ABC-TV comedy quiz show Hard Quiz, which has been running in Australia since 2017, and is now in its fifth series.
Follow us
Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Peter is still, unaccountably, nowhere to be found. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam, and the strings performance was by Jane Aubourg. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.
Our James Bond commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.
Episode 183: Crossed That off the Whiteboard
· Recorded on Saturday 8 February 2020 · Duration 0:48:26
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This week, James is admiring Mr Halpern’s hardware, Richard’s showing a PowerPoint presentation to some very important clients, Todd’s trying desperately not to fall over this railing, and Nathan’s ranting incessantly about Marx while seriously regretting his lunch order. Welcome to the Planet of the Ood.
Notes and links
Keith Temple was well-known for a BBC TV Movie called Angel Cake (2006), in which the Virgin Mary appears in some rock buns baked by Sarah Lancashire, to miraculous effect. You can read an interview with both of them about the production here.
Temple has also written a number of books, including It’s Behind You, in which a washed-up soap actor starts to receive death threats in the post while she’s doing panto, with hilarious results.
