Flight Through Entirety: A Doctor Who Podcast

A wise man once said, “You can do loads in twelve minutes. Suck a mint, buy a sledge, have a fast bath.” Tonight, Brendan, Nathan, James and canonical friend-of-the-podcast Conrad Westmaas find out just what Paul McGann can do in just seven minutes and nine seconds. Turns out, quite a lot. It’s The Night of the Doctor.

When a spatio-temporal hyperlink connects 1963, 2013 and 2022, we find ourselves joined by Greg Miller for a conversation about our little fanboy hearts, the anniversary special An Adventure in Space and Time, and the brave, clever and difficult people who created the show that brought us all together.

Matt Smith’s last full season as the Doctor is a game of two halves — two costumes, two console rooms, two title sequences (or six, whatever) and two sets of companions over two consecutive years. And we’re in two minds about it. Welcome to the Series 7 retrospective.

This week, we’re spending a relaxing afternoon on sunny Trenzalore, chatting with friends, visiting people we’ve lost, solving a mystery, bringing up an age-old question, and generally getting everything neatly squared away before the fireworks start this November. It’s The Name of the Doctor.

In a far-off galaxy in a distant future, a band of misfit soldiers in a comical castle await the arrival of an enemy long thought dead — thousands upon thousands of killer Cybermen. Angie and Archie don’t seem particularly impressed, though, and neither do Nathan, Richard, James and Peter. It’s Nightmare in Silver.

This week we’re joined by Steven from New to Who to discuss one of the great loves of our lives — Dame Diana Rigg, whose astonishing performance makes The Crimson Horror one of the best episodes of the era.

This week, Nathan, Simon, Peter and their new friend Mathew find ourselves wandering some space corridors in search of some kind of button that will bust us out of this time loop. Are we on board the USS Voyager during one of its less successful high-concept episodes? Or do we find out — to our horror — that we’re on a Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS?

This week, Dougray Scott, Jessica Raine and two scary skeleton creatures are all so unspeakably horny that all Nathan, Corey, Si and Pete can do is Hide.

This week, we’re joined aboard a Soviet submarine by Mark McManus, Jack Shanahan and a low-effort lizard alien, who proceeds to run around the boat in the nude murdering members of the crew. But we’re all too interested in Jenna Coleman, David Warner, some guys from Game of Thrones and a discarded fibreglass suit of armour to notice.

The Doctor has a very limited first date repetoire: watching the destruction of Earth with weird aliens, visiting a far-future traffic jam full of weird aliens, seeing an entire marketing department being slaughtered by weird aliens, and stopping a gentle space whale from being endlessly tortured by English people. And his first date with Clara is no exception: hiring a space moped from a weird al...

It’s 2013 and Doctor Who is back for its anniversary season — with a new companion, a new outfit for the Doctor, and a lethal and potentially world-ending new threat from the Internet, more than a decade before the invention of Web3. Keep a close eye on your apes, everyone: it’s The Bells of Saint John.

Christmas, 1892: The Doctor has retired from saving the universe after a disastrous mid-series finale earlier in the year. He is cheered up somewhat by his encounter with a feisty young barmaid, who is intrigued enough to follow the Doctor home, only to learn a valuable and ultimately fatal lesson about the importance of railings. Richard E Grant is here too, as usual, delivering his lines through...

Many of us grow up: we live in a real world of marriages and families, jobs and mortgages. But some of us can never bring ourselves to leave our imaginary friend behind. Can you imagine the leaden apprehension when we learn that the choice has been taken from us forever? Kevin Burnard joins us for The Angels Take Manhattan.

This week, we have half an hour of fun character-based nonsense followed by a fairly disastrous five-minute Doctor Who episode. But we’re all too busy reminiscing about the end of an era to notice. Adam Richard joins us for The Power of Three.

This week, we’re in the Wild West for some down-home, old-fashioned, country-style moral philosophy. The burning question: is it permissible to let that well-spoken middle-aged country doctor get killed just because he sawed up a bunch of people and turned them into psychopathic gun-wielding maniacs? Steven B joins us to discuss a well-shot, well-acted, well-written and thought-provoking episode:...

This week, there’s a massive Silurian spaceship pre-crashing in the direction of Planet Earth, and the whole gang is on board for the ride. Brendan’s on the lookout for discarded teeth, Nathan’s holed up in an escape pod watching reruns of Mitchell and Webb, James’s progress is being hindered by the unfeasibly large amounts of vegetable matter in his pants, and Fiona is doing a terrific job of kee...

We’ve been off the air for a few months now, but apparently all it takes to bring us all back together is a few thousand Daleks desperate to find out who’s been playing them Bizet’s Carmen from deep inside their terrifyingly impregnable prison. Unfortunately none of us can muster much interest in any of that: instead, we’re worrying about the state of Amy and Rory’s marriage and wondering why on e...

When loveable middle-class white lady Sue Brockman (Claire Skinner) loses her husband Pete (Hugh Dennis) after his plane goes missing over the English Channel, she decides to withhold that information from her children (Tyger Drew-Honey, Daniel Roche and Ramona Marquez), because she is afraid it might ruin their Christmas (which it totally would). But her world is soon turned upside-down by a myst...

We’ve reached the end of an ambitious and controversial series of Doctor Who, and so we’ve all gathered at Demons’ Run to find the answers to some pressing questions. What were the high points and low points of the series? Amy’s pregnancy arc — tasteless or distateful? Who was our favourite guest star? And, finally, what is the First Question, and who will eventually answer it? It’s our Series 6 R...

This week, the Doctor and River Song get married in an episode that completely rewrites itself before our very eyes, and the eyepatch anecdote makes its triumphant return to the show. You are all cordially invited to The Wedding of River Song.

This week, a quick trip to Colchester with Joe Ford and Jack Shanahan, to try on a new frock at Sanderson & Grainger before being horribly murdered. In the meantime, of course, James Corden is learning a valuable lesson about fatherhood, while the Doctor comes to terms with his impending certain death, probably. It’s Closing Time.

This week, Nathan and Peter find themselves trapped in the corridors of a grimy English hotel with Si Hart and Conrad Westmaas, where the rooms are full of biting into a woollen jumper, turning up to your maths exam totally naked, and the fact that one day, you, your loved ones and everyone who has ever heard of you will be completely and irrevocably dead. The janitor seems pretty fit though. It’s...

This week, Simon Moore joins us again for a quick jaunt to the planet Apalapucia, where we visit a medical facility so staggeringly baffling and inept that it’s even terrifying to an audience living in the English-speaking world. It’s going to be quite a while before we get to see a doctor — that’s why it’s called The Girl Who Waited.

This week we’re joined by Corey McMahon for an hour of blinking and quivering under the bedclothes in the scariest bedroom in human history, before learning a Very Important Lesson about the power of a father’s love. (There’s a plot about dollies in there, but it doesn’t really go anywhere.) Hey-ho, it’s Night Terrors.

This week, perhaps inevitably, James and Nathan invite Simon Moore and Kevin Burnard to join them in 1930s Berlin for a gay Gypsy barmitzvah for the disabled. It’s fun, but we can’t help wondering if it’s in the best possible taste. But, what the hell, Let’s Kill Hitler.