the fourth doctor

As our flight through Tom Baker’s first season comes to an end, we pull on a latex mask, strap on some bombs, fill our pockets with gold dust and drop down into Wookey Hole to discuss Revenge of the Cybermen.

Buy the stories!

Revenge of the Cybermen was released on DVD in 2010. It can be bought by itself in the US (Amazon US), but in the UK and Australia it was released in a box set along with Silver Nemesis (Amazon UK).

Links and notes

In Unnatural Selection, a Season 2 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Dr Pulaski (Diana Muldaur) is cured of some terrible aging makeup by a quick trip through the matter transporters. Coincidence? Probably.

The 1970s Japanese TV Series Saiyūki was dubbed into English by the BBC and broadcast under the title Monkey in the UK and Australia, with David Collings (Vorus) as the eponymous Monkey God. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation often ran it in the traditional 6.30 PM weekday timeslot that rightfully belonged to Doctor Who.

Brendan’s mysterious claim that Kellman was a collector of James Bond memorabilia will become clear if you just check out this page here.

Cottage Under Siege was a brilliant Doctor Who fanzine from the wilderness years, edited by Neil Corry and Gareth Roberts. There were three issues, published in 1993 and 1994. I’d love to see it again. Anyone?

Fans of using orographically enhanced toilet rolls to simulate asteroids will also enjoy the Blakes 7 Season 4 title sequence.

And for all of you who are mystified by Sarah’s hat in Robot, perhaps this picture of Mia Farrow in The Great Gatsby (1974) will clear things up.

Picks of the week

Todd and Nathan

The 60 minutes LP version of Genesis of the Daleks was released in 1978. It is still available on Audible. (Audible US) (Audible UK)

Todd

The Big Finish audio The Relics of Jegg-Sau sees the delightful Bernice Summerfield facing the K1 robot from, er, Robot.

Richard

The Doctor Who Monster Book, by Terrance Dicks, was published by Target Books in 1975. It was Nathan’s first introduction to Doctor Who, so we have that to thank it for. It is, sadly, currently out of print.

Harry Sullivan’s War, by Ian Marter, was a spy thriller published by Target Books in 1986, in the same month as Marter’s death. It’s out of print too, but if you’re keen you can almost certainly get hold of a second-hand copy through Amazon.

Brendan

I, Davros is a series of four Big Finish audios chronicling Davros’s life from his teens up until the events of Genesis of the Daleks.

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Brendan is on Twitter as @brandybongos, Nathan is @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Richard did have a Twitter account once, but he spoke to it in ALGOL that one time and it exploded. You can follow the podcast on Twitter as @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. And please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or Roger Murray-Leach will come over to your house and strew mannequins in all your hallways.

And coming on 1 August…

Check out our new project: Bondfinger. You can keep up with all the news on Twitter and Facebook. It’s getting closer every day!

Our weekly flight through Tom Baker’s first season continues with an episode made entirely of thirty foot thick reinforced concrete. That’s right, it’s time for that 1975 classic, Genesis of the Daleks!

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Genesis of the Daleks was released on DVD way back in 2006. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)

Links and notes

Commedia dell’arte is a genre of theatrical comedy featuring an array of various stock characters. It dates from 16th century Italy, but is based on a tradition that goes all the way back to Greek New Comedy from the end of the fourth century BC. So does that make Davros just the latest iteration of Pantalone?

Severin is the hero of Venus in Furs (1870), a novella written by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who gave his name to something called masochism. Probably best not to look that word up on Google.

The Time Lord is dressed as Death from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). Here is a version by French and Saunders. And this version comes from the first season of The Micallef Programme.

Fans of having no idea of what is going on will enjoy this article on Jacques Lacan from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Sadly, I’m unable to locate the Parliamentary speech made by a Conservative MP in the 1990s, in which he quoted Davros’s virus speech from Part 5 of this story. Fact fans will be able to corroborate its historicity, however, by referring to Miles and Wood’s About Time volume 4. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)

Follow us!

Brendan is on Twitter as @brandybongos, Nathan is @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Richard is simply enjoying the view. You can follow the podcast on Twitter as @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. And please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll sneak into your house and steal all your etheric beam locators.

And coming on 1 August…

Check out our new project: Bondfinger. You can keep up with all the news on Twitter and Facebook. We’re very excited about it!

This week, Flight Through Entirety is on location in Dartmoor, testing our resistance to fear, burning, pressure, fluid deprivation and immersion in liquids, as we discuss the third story of Tom Baker’s first season, The Sontaran Experiment.

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The Sontaran Experiment was released on DVD in 2006/2007. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)

Links and notes

Fans of posh white people living in orbital space stations will enjoy The Ark in Space, of course, and also Elysium (2013), which makes reasonably good use of Jodie Foster, whatever Brendan says.

Fans of dead teenagers will enjoy The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).

Dr Josef Mengele worked as an SS Officer in Auschwitz and performed brutal and sadistic experiments on some of the prisoners, as well as assigning many to the gas chambers.

Fans of the Sontaran insectoid robot will enjoy this photograph of the Canada Water Library in Southwark, which looks remarkably like it.

Follow us!

Brendan is on Twitter as @brandybongos, Nathan is @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Richard is here too. You can follow the podcast on Twitter as @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. And please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll hide an inflatable snake somewhere where you least expect to find it.

Todd has given that helmic regulator quite a twist, I’m afraid, and we’ve found ourselves in the year 16,087, on a space station being menaced by bubble wrap and fibreglass ants. And still it’s one of the best Doctor Who stories to date. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Ark in Space.

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The Ark in Space Special Edition was released on DVD in 2013. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)

The novelisation, Doctor Who and the Ark in Space, written by Ian Marter himself, was re-released to celebrate Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary in 2013. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)

Links and notes

Fans of this story and of Revelation of the Daleks will enjoy a delicious serving of Soylent Green (1973). (Spoilers: It’s people.)

Sorry, dear listeners, we don’t have any pictures of Ian Marter being giantly muscular. And don’t think I didn’t spend time looking.

This article from the Darwin’s God blog discusses the life cycle of the ichneumon wasp and its impact on 19th-century theology.

J. V. McConnell, (1962) “Memory transfer through cannibalism in planarians”, Journal of Neuropsychiatry 3 suppl 1 542-548. (See, we can be academically rigorous if we put our minds to it.)

This article from the website of the American Psychological Association discusses the history of James McConnell’s article.

I’m not sure that Ridley Scott has ever actually admitted to ripping off this story in his film Alien (1979), but that hasn’t stopped people from speculating about the possibility.

We haven’t yet managed to upload Todd’s interview with Lis Sladen, but we promise we’re working on it. Keep an eye out for an announcement in the shownotes over the next few episodes. In the meantime, you can enjoy Lis Sladen’s second appearance in this 1972 episode of Z Cars, directed by The Underwater Menace’s Julia Smith.

Follow us!

Brendan is on Twitter as @brandybongos, Nathan is @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Richard adores all of you and can’t wait to chat to each and every one of you in person. You can follow the podcast on Twitter as @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. And please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll install an intruder defence mechanism in your wardrobe and blow up all your shoes.

We have a new Doctor, and a new release schedule. In the first weekly episode of Flight Through Entirety, Brendan, Nathan, Richard and Todd, the sort of girls who give motorcars pet names, discuss Tom Baker’s first ever Doctor Who story, Robot. Please do not resist. We do not wish to cause you unnecessary pain.

Buy the story!

Robot was released on DVD in 2007. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)

Terrance Dicks’s novelisation, Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, is available as an audiobook, read by Tom Baker. (Audible US) (Audible UK)

Links and notes

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) has an emotional artificial person with a complex relationship with his creator. Coincidence?

Pearl White played the eponymous heroine in the 1914 film serial The Perils of Pauline. Apparently she never got tied to the railway tracks though.

Fans of terribly judgemental robots will enjoy Gort from George Pal’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).

Anyone appalled by Richard’s gingerphobia will perhaps be mollified by this video depicting Catherine Tate’s admission to the Ginger Hair Safe House.

If, like me, you’re disappointed that Miss Bassey won’t be singing the theme to the next Bond film, SPECTRE, you can console yourself by remembering the valiant It’s Got To Be Bassey campaign. Bless you, boys.

Some moments in this story are reminiscent of Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke’s second-season Avengers episode The Mauritius Penny, which exists on YouTube in its, er, entirety.

Follow us!

Brendan is on Twitter as @brandybongos, Nathan is @nathanbottomley, Todd is @toddbeilby, and Richard is just someone who loves life. You can follow the podcast on Twitter as @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. And please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes, or we’ll just keep nagging you about it every episode for the next few weeks.