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 @RichardLStone. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

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

And more

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

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

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

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

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

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we celebrated Christmas by catching up with friend-of-the-podcast Frazer Gregory to watch what might be the best of all the Star Trek films, Star Trek: First Contact.

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 New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

Notes and links

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

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

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

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

Picks of the Week

Todd

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

Peter

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

Brendan

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

Nathan

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

Follow us

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

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

And more

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

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

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

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

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 out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025.

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

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we enjoyed a dumb and action-packed episode of Star Trek: Enterprise called Azati Prime.

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 Animals, as well as The Long Way Round, What Just Happened?, Best Year Ever and Flatpack (in which she meets Christopher Ecclston’s Ninth Doctor).

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

Follow us

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

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

And more

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

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

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

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

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we marvelled at a clever and enjoyable episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in which a new Emissary turns up and Miles welcomes Keiko back to the station — Accession.

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 The Second Doctor Adventures: Beyond the War Games, released in 2020.

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

Follow us

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

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

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

And more

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

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

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

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

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we raised the occasional eyebrow as a shapeshifting red octopus ran amok on the Enterprise in an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series called The Survivor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we roared with laughter as Marina Sirtis turned fabulously evil in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Man of the People.

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 arranged by Cameron Lam.

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

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

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

And more

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

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

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

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

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

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we laughed and clapped as the crew of the USS Protostar saved the Federation in the two-part Season 1 finale of Star Trek: Prodigy.

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 on is called Pull to Open, with Pete Pachal and Chris Taylor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow us

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

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

And more

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

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

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

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

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we visited a holographic jazz bar in Vegas in 1962 for a surpassingly brilliant episode of Deep Space Nine called His Way.

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.social, while Simon is on X at @simonmoore72. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

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

And more

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

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

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

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

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

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, they went back in time to watch the crew of Star Trek: Discovery start off their second season in the far, far future in Kobayashi Maru.

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 Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll take advantage of the no-fact-checking rule to try and convince you that we’re actually your real parents.

And more

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

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

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

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

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, they went back in time to see the origin story of breakout character Peanut Hamper in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s The Quality of Life.