Well, That’s All the Time We Have for Now (The Capaldi–Moffat Retrospective)
Episode 297
Wednesday, January 1, 2025 • Duration 01:29:26
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.
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.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
Now that Flight Through Entirety is taking a break, you should all go and subscribe to 500 Year Diary, our latest new Doctor Who podcast, in which we go back through the history of the show and examine new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early in 2024, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season, The Second Coming, early in 2025.
Last week, The Three-Handed Game released their first Christmas Special, discussing the 1966 Avengers episode Too Many Christmas Trees, in which Steed’s weird Christmas nightmares start to become reality. The boys will be back in 2025 for the third episode in their triptych The Pop Explosion.
Maximum Power is back at last with its long-awaited coverage of the 1981 season of Blakes 7. Last weekend we released our discussion on the season’s controversial second episode — Power.
And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we watched a notoriously silly early episode of Deep Space Nine, the widely reviled but never forgotten Move Along Home.
Thank you very much for listening: we’ll see you again in a few years. And on all of our other podcasts, of course.
Plummeting Towards Sheffield (Twice upon a Time)
Episode 296
Wednesday, December 25, 2024 • Duration 55:57
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, is due for release some time next year.
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The PPMMs (Series 10 Retrospective)
Episode 295
Sunday, December 8, 2024 • Duration 01:13:05
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.
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.
You can follow Flight Through Entirety on , as well as on , and . Our website is at . Please consider , or we’ll think of the right words later.
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Safe for Now (The Doctor Falls)
Episode 294
Sunday, December 1, 2024 • Duration 01:05:43
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 story, (1999), in which the Doctor’s companion Emma (Julia Sawalha) says You can — and should — .
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Check My CV (World Enough and Time)
Episode 293
Sunday, November 24, 2024 • Duration 56:39
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.
You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Bluesky, as well as on , and . Our website is at . Please consider , or we’ll make you wait years and years for Episode 298.
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A Perfect Crucible (The Eaters of Light)
Episode 292
Sunday, November 17, 2024 • Duration 59:40
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 , in which his forces were defeated by the Romans. You can read .
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Blaze of Glory (Empress of Mars)
Episode 291
Sunday, November 10, 2024 • Duration 53:27
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.
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.
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Vignettes from an Alien Invasion (The Lie of the Land)
Episode 290
Sunday, November 3, 2024 • Duration 54:32
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.
Narrative Vamping (The Pyramid at the End of the World)
Episode 289
Sunday, October 27, 2024 • Duration 52:07
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.
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 directed by Robert Wise (, ). 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.
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Honour the Invisible (Extremis)
Episode 288
Sunday, October 20, 2024 • Duration 01:05:01
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 , Brendan and review a game called , a video game set in a computer simulation which deals with questions of identity and religion.
You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Bluesky, as well as on Mastodon, X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll arrive uninvited at your place for Christmas dinner, sit at the table being miserable to everyone for an hour, and only cheer up when it’s finally time for us to leave.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire will back in a couple of days’ time with our hot take on Ncuti Gatwa’s second Christmas Special (and Steven Moffat’s ninth), Joy to the World. And we’ll be back again in 2025 to talk about Season 2.
Today, The Three-Handed Game is back for their first Christmas Special, discussing the 1966 Avengers episode Too Many Christmas Trees, in which Steed’s weird Christmas nightmares start to become reality. The boys will be back in 2025 for the third episode in their triptych The Pop Explosion.
Maximum Power is back at last with its long-awaited coverage of the 1981 series of Blakes 7, starting with the season première Rescue. We’ll be back again on this Sunday to talk about the second episode, Power.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
The Three-Handed Game makes a triumphant return to your podcatcher with Part 2 of its The Pop Explosion triptych, Build a Better Mousetrap, in which Cathy Gale joins a motorcycle gang which is threatened by witches, which is a thing that basically happened all the time in the 1960s.
“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.”
Todd recommends the Special Edition of The Happiness Patrol, which restores many deleted scenes and adds some clever and sympathetically designed new special effects. It’s available on the Season 25 box set of Doctor Who: The Collection. (Amazon UK) (Amazon US) (Amazon AU)
Brendan recommends George Sheard’s reimagining of these two episodes as a 1960s Doctor Who story as Genesis of the Cybermen: World Enough and Time Noir. Check out the trailer here.
Nathan recommends our other Doctor Who podcast, 500 Year Diary, which will be taking over from Flight Through Entirety for a few years while FTE takes a well-earned break. In our first season, New Beginnings, we discussed six episodes in Doctor Who and its spinoffs, where a show is making a new or fresh start. We’ll be back with a second season early in 2025. Like and subscribe.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
This week’s monster is based on very common depictions found in Pictish carvings of an animal called the Pictish Beast. Some depictions are found among the carvings seen in this episode.
Tania Bell is a companion to the Eighth Doctor, first appearing in Big Finish’s Stranded in 2020 — the first transgender companion to appear in Doctor Who. She is played by Rebecca Root. John has written five stories for Tania: her second story Wild Animals, as well as The Long Way Round, What Just Happened?, Best Year Ever and Flatpack (in which she meets Christopher Ecclston’s Ninth Doctor).
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
In the most recent episode of Maximum Power, Pete and Si interviewed two of the people involved in the creation of the new Blakes 7 Series 1 blu-ray box set — filmmakers Chris Chapman and Chris Thompson. We’ll be back to cover Series D next month.
And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we marvelled at a clever and enjoyable episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in which a new Emissary turns up and Miles welcomes Keiko back to the station — Accession.
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.
According to Toby, Anthony Calf, who plays Godsacre here, was also in The Visitation. He played Charles, the son of John Savident’s Squire in the opening scenes of Part 1, and it was indeed his first television role.
You can find out everything about Toby Hadoke at his website tobyhadoke.com, and you can catch up with his podcasts at Toby Hadoke’s Time Travels. A publication date for the first volume of Toby’s book series on Quatermass will be announced very soon.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
Last weekend, a new episode of Maximum Power was released, in which Pete and Si interviewed two of the people involved in the creation of the new Blakes 7 Series 1 blu-ray box set — filmmakers Chris Chapman and Chris Thompson. We’ll be back to cover Series D next month.
And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we raised the occasional eyebrow as a shapeshifting red octopus ran amok on the Enterprise in an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series called The Survivor.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
Brendan, Richard and Steven also recently released another episode of their Avengers podcast The Three Handed Game. It’s the first episode of their triptych The Pop Explosion, covering a monochrome Emma Peel episode called Death at Bargain Prices, in which Steed and Mrs Peel go undercover in a London department store and discover a plot to blow up much of the city.
At the time that this episode was released, the Doomsday Clock was at 90 seconds to midnight, mostly thanks to the climate disaster and the involvement of nuclear powers in wars in Ukraine and Gaza. So sleep well, everyone.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
Brendan, Richard and Steven have also just released another episode of their Avengers podcast The Three Handed Game. It’s the first episode of their triptych The Pop Explosion, covering a monochrome Emma Peel episode called Death at Bargain Prices, in which Steed and Mrs Peel go undercover in a London department store and discover a plot to blow up much of the city.
Nathan has a website called the Randomiser at therandomiser.net, which can help you pick a random Doctor Who story to watch, but which can also (more importantly, perhaps) reassure you that you’re not living in a computer simulation.
The properly randomised Doctor Who podcast which Nathan appeared on is called Pull to Open, with Pete Pachal and Chris Taylor.
As a kind of public service, Steven alerts us to a 2015 article by Charlie Brooker about a group of German researchers created a version of Super Mario World in which Mario was self-aware and emotionally affected by his experiences in the game.
Steven also draws our attention to a branch of philosophy concerned with the possibility that we might all be living in a computer simulation. This 2020 article in Scientific American sums up the state of play.
Johnny refers to Kit Pedler’s original conception of the Cybermen as a race of Star Monks — an idea that El Sandifer runs with in a productive and interesting way in her essay on The Tenth Planet.
You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s a summary of where we’re up to right now.
500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.
The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2.
Just two weeks ago, on Startling Barbara Bain, we faced what is perhaps the most memorable and terrifying episode of Space: 1999 ever with our usual mix of valour and prosecco. It’s Dragon’s Domain.
And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we visited a holographic jazz bar in Vegas in 1962 for a surpassingly brilliant episode of Deep Space Nine called His Way.
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