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.

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

Notes and links

Once again, Friend from the Future was a promotional short designed to introduce Bill Potts. Nathan makes fun of the fact that at the end of the short, the on-screen caption reads Introducing Pearl Mackie asBill. You can see the entire short, including that unfortunate typo, here.

Like Martha before her and Ruby after her, Bill is concerned that treading on a butterfly in the past will change the present in terrible ways. That concern comes from Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder, which you should really just go off and read right now.

In Bong Joon-ho’s post-apocalyptic film Snowpiercer (2013), the poor people who live in the back of the train are fed on glistening black protein bars, which we discover are made from ground-up cockroaches.

Flight Through Entirety only occasionally advocates for political violence (see Episode 182: The Icy Moral High Ground), but this week we are pleased to bring you this clip of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer being punched in the head during an interview on ABC-TV in January 2017.

Melvin alludes to the Slave Compensation Act 1837, which authorised the payment of about £20 million in compensation to slave owners in the British colonies. This sum was finally paid off when the British Government restructured its debt in 2015. (The people who had been enslaved didn’t receive any compensation, of course.)

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.bsky.social, Todd is on X at @toddbeilby, and here’s Melvin’s profile on about.me. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Mastodon 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 won’t tell you what’s in those fish pies that you’re so looking forward to for dinner this evening.

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 poscast is called The Bjay BJ Game Show. In the most recent episode, they discuss The Talos Principle (2014), a puzzle-based game with a sentient robot protagonist, which raises questions about identity, consciousness and religion.

Brendan, Richard and Steven have released another episode of their Avengers podcast The Three Handed Game. It’s the third episode of their triptych The Cool War, covering an early Season 2 episode called The Decapod, featuring Julie Stevens as Venus Smith.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. Last week, they dropped in on the Q Continuum in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager called Death Wish.

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

Notes and links

Anticipating with relish the final demise of X, we have decided to preserve here for posterity the Twitter exchange between Nathan and Mina Anwar that he mentions early this episode.

Nathan suggests taking a look at this — an aerial view of the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia in Spain.

Brendan admits that he is a regular reader of Lance Parkin’s AHistory: An Unauthorised History of the Doctor Who Universe, which is an impressively quixotic attempt to harmonise all the televised stories, spinoffs and deuterocanonical material into one vast, sprawling ridiculous chronology. We thank him for his service.

James mentions how the phenomenon of social contagion was observed in a large-scale study conducted on Facebook in 2012. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published an article describing the results of the experiment in 2014, which makes it a plausible influence on this episode. Here’s a contemporary news article discussing the ethical problems with this experiment.

Grey goo is a kind of technical term for the possibility that everything on Earth might be consumed by rogue nanotechnology. The term was first coined in 1986 by Kim Eric Drexler in his book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. It’s also the basis of Michael Crichton’s 2002 novel Prey.

Erewhon: or, Over the Range (1872) by Samuel Butler is a satirical description of a utopian society, which bans machines for fear that they might become conscious and self-replicating.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.bsky.social, James is at @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social, and Brendan is at @retrobrendo.bsky.social. 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 sneak over to your house next time you’re on holiday and replace all the walls with angry clockwork lego bricks.

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.

This week’s guest on Flight Through Entirety is Bjay Hobbs, who can be heard regularly discussing indie games with our very own Brendan Jones on The Bjay BJ Game Show. In their most recent episode, they discuss The Talos Principle (2014), a puzzle-based game that raises questions about identity, consciousness and religion. The episode Brendan mentions on Lost in Play will actually be out in a couple of weeks.

Brendan, Richard and Steven have just released another episode of their Avengers podcast The Three Handed Game. It’s the third episode of their triptych The Cool War, covering an early Season 2 episode called The Decapod, featuring Julie Stevens as Venus Smith, with a guest appearance by Philip Madoc, (probably) not in fishnets.

The Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power started recording its Series D coverage yesterday; new episodes will be released in December.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. Last week, they paid a visit to an idyllic bird person planet with deranged exocomp Peanut Hamper in an episode of Lower Decks called A Mathematically Perfect Redemption.

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

Notes and links

Friend from the Future was a promotional short designed to introduce Bill Potts, first broadcast during Match of the Day on 23 April 2016, nearly a year before this episode aired. You can see the entire short here.

Unsurprisingly, Nathan is wrong about the music cue that greets Bill when she arrives in the TARDIS. It’s not River Song’s theme at all: it’s Murray Gold’s iconic A Madman with a Box, which you should listen to immediately.

Peter mentions the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Skin of Evil as another TV episode containing a high-concept puddle. It’s famously not very good, as Joe and Nathan discovered in this episode of Untitled Star Trek Project.

And you’ll be unsurprised to learn, again, that Nathan is wrong about John Peel: he doesn’t claim that Genesis of the Daleks took place in 1831. However, TARDIS Wikia dates it as set in the 15th or 16th centuries, probably because in The Daleks, one of the Daleks claims that there were two races on Skaro 500 years ago. But the whole idea is absolutely enervating, don’t you think?

The squishy thing Todd mentions as a possible companion for the Doctor is, of course, Mr Huffle from The Return of Doctor Mysterio. The Doctor does apparently take it with him at the end of the story.

And Pearl Mackie married her wife Kam Chhokar on 4 May this year. Here’s a wedding photo from Tumblr.

Douglas is Cancelled is Steven Moffat’s most recent TV show — a four-part miniseries starring Hugh Bonneville, Karen Gillan and Alex Kingston, about a middle-aged male TV personality who is overheard making a sexist joke at a friend’s wedding. Worth a look.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.bsky.social and James is at @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social; Todd is on X as @toddbeilby. 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 invent a massively high-concept backstory for you which prevents you from ever truly realising yourself as a person.

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.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We’ve covered the first six episodes of Series 1; Episode 7 should be out some times in the next couple of weeks.

The Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power has been on hiatus for a while, but arrangements for the recording of Series D are well underway, and we will definitely have some new episodes for you before the end of the year.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. Last week, they took a trip with Kirk, Spock and McCoy to the Planet of Space Ancient Rome in Bread and Circuses.

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

Notes and links

Steven Moffat’s clear inspiration here is Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie (1978), an astonishingly well-made and entertaining superhero movie starring Christopher Reeve as Clark and the wonderful Margot Kidder as Lois. If you haven’t seen it, put your phone down at once and go and find a copy.

In Episode 271: Eels with Jazz Hands, we mentioned the previous life of director Ed Bazalgette as a member of 1980s one-hit wonder The Vapors. The one hit in question was called Turning Japanese, and it was a massive thing at the time.

The CW superhero shows Peter mentions are collectively called the Arrowverse, which started just a few years before this episode aired, and which included shows like Arrow (2012), The Flash (2014), Supergirl (2015) and Legends of Tomorrow (2016), featuring our very own Arthur Darvill.

Ang Lee’s unloved film Hulk (2003) liberally used comic book panels to transition between scenes (in a way far more sophisticated than what’s attempted in this Doctor Who episode). This brief video will give you the idea.

It was Adam’s job to watch Series 10 of Doctor Who as a regular on the ABC’s Doctor Who aftershow Whovians, which covered Series 10 to 12 and screened a day or so after each episode aired.

Brendan mentions the Matt Fleischer animated Superman films from the 1940s, particularly the kinds of villains this version of Superman routinely fought. In the second film, The Mechanical Monsters (1941), Superman confronts a group of giant robots who rob banks and museums and inspire artists and filmmakers for generations. Go and watch it at once.

Attractive Coal Hill Academy student Ram loses a leg in the first episode of the Doctor Who spin-off Class, which screened over eight weeks leading up to the start of December 2016. And then no one ever mentioned it or even thought about it ever again.

Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993) was an insanely popular television show in the 1990s, starring Teri Hatcher as Lois Lane and featuring the incredibly beautiful Dean Cain as Clark. (He’s a horrid alt-right nutcase these days, which is a grim warning to all of us, I suppose.)

Follow us

Nathan is on X as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos, and Adam is @adamrichard. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam.

Adam Richard’s daily Doctor Who podcast is called Adam Richard Has a Theory: it’s the place to find Adam’s hot-to-lukewarm takes and wild-to-really-quite-sensible theories about everything Doctor Who.

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 sneak into your bedroom and torture your favourite stuffed toy. Wait, no we won’t. That would be awful. Sorry.

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.

There’s also Startling Barbara Bain, our Space: 1999 commentary podcast. We’ve covered the first five episodes of Series 1; Episode 6 should be out in the next couple of weeks.

The Three Handed Game is a podcast on The Avengers and The New Avengers. In the most recent episode, Brendan, Richard and Steven watched an episode from Diana Rigg’s first series, Two’s a Crowd.

Brendan’s gaming podcast is called The Bjay BJ Game Show, and in its most recent episode, Brendan and Bjay visited some tilt-shifted Minecraft-inspired holiday destinations in The Touryst.

And finally there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. Last week, we visited the centre of the galaxy and met up with the Devil (who seemed nice) in an inexpensively produced episode of The Animated Series called The Magicks of Megas-Tu.