you're listening to fusion patrol a listener supported podcast each week we take a single
episode of a science fiction tv series movie or audio and overanalyze it to within an inch
of its life welcome to the discussion
hello and welcome to another episode of fusion patrol i'm eugene and i'm simon and tonight we
are looking at the doctor who's 60th anniversary special number two the wild blue yonder or
actually i just think wild blue yonder i don't think there's a though there i think you're right
before we get going,
I just want to do a little bit of housekeeping because it's very rare that a
Fusion Patrol episode and it's recording and its release are nearly
contemporaneous.
So I just wanted to say that you can find out more about this on
fusion patrol.com.
I've started a weekly,
hopefully blog post called patrolling beyond fusion,
where it's kind of behind the scenes
and you can kind of get some other thoughts
on what's going on around here.
And it's also an opportunity to get some thoughts
in on some of the shows as we're recording them
rather than after.
After you've heard what we had to say.
So it would be thoughts about the shows, wouldn't it?
But so that's at FusionPatrol.com.
We're also now on the Fediverse,
which you probably hear called Mastodon.
If you know what that is, you know where it is.
And you can find us at podcast at Fusion Patrol dot com and all our posts and stuff will be there.
And and we're still getting that worked out, but it's live and it's it's a thing.
And the last thing is a correction.
I believe that on the last episode, I believe we did mention that I thought I thought that the name of the Christmas special was Church of Ruby Rose.
I got that in all good faith off the internet through someone who got it through Disney+.
It has now been announced.
It is Christmas Day, and it is the church on Ruby Road, not Church of Ruby Rose, which
just thankfully, because I was just thinking, geez, RTD, cut it out with the Rose stuff.
Anyway, so let's get on with the episode, Wild Blue Yonder.
Episode synopsis.
Careening out of control due to the TARDIS's stupid design choice of a coffee maker on the console and Donna's gross ineptitude,
the TARDIS crash lands on a spacecraft in the middle of nothing.
The spaceship is seemingly empty, yet the TARDIS's head system nonetheless senses danger and displaces itself until the danger is over,
leaving the Doctor and Donna stranded.
Although the ship's systems confirm that there are no life forms aboard, the Doctor and Donna meet doppelgangers of themselves.
These are formless not-things from the nothingness beyond the edge of the universe.
Their plan? Duplicate the Doctor and Donna perfectly, then take possession of the TARDIS, where they shall journey into the universe, and be problematic, presumably.
the doctor discovers the pilot of the ship killed herself three years ago but why and why is the
ship in the middle of a very very slow countdown when the doctor figures that out it's time to
speed up the countdown to the self-destruction of the ship destroying the not things in the process
the TARDIS returns in the nick of time and saves the doctor and Donna they return to earth to find
wilf waiting at a world gone bad and I feel that synopsis may have been longer than it needed to be
Just so wild blue yonder.
Were you as disappointed as I was?
Well, I wasn't expecting the 14 doctors.
I wasn't even hoping for the 14 doctors.
So I'm guessing I probably wasn't.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
I wasn't disappointed because it wasn't the 14 doctors.
I was just disappointed because this felt like we've got 13 episodes and we need a couple fillers in the middle.
and this is it and instead we only have three episodes with with these two and we didn't need
a filler that's why i'm disappointed i like filler and i have been trying to puzzle why i found this
episode unsatisfying i didn't hate it but i didn't hate it i i guess i was disappointed by it and i
think part of that is a sense that this it is partly a sense that this kind of 60th anniversary
thing should I guess have a bit more drive to it and the RTD has somehow created a a mini season
where you know you've got the opening episode with all the plot and then you've got the episodes in
the middle of the season where they go off and do things and then the kind of finale where you draw
altogether the the plots the arc strands that have been chuntering along uh in the background
of them of the episodes in the middle except the episodes in the middle are one episode and it's
this episode yep and it doesn't really seem to have anything to do with the episodes either side
of it and that that that's in the middle of a series i think i would enjoy this a bit more
i've got a caveat about that but i but i think i would but in this position it it makes it it makes
it more problematic it it actually reminded me a bit of um i don't know if you remember uh in
in big finishes audio series with uh charlie pollard traveling with paul mcgann's doctor
and um towards the end of that series there's i don't want to give any spoilers to those who
haven't heard it but there's quite a major development in a trilogy that begins with
patient zero uh paper cuts and then wild blue yonder finish out that trilogy and paper cuts
is literally just treading water there's nothing wrong with the story but i cannot listen to it
and enjoy it because of the aspects of the trilogy that are in there but which don't get developed
did you say wild blue yonder yonder was the third episode of that i did say wild beyond but i didn't
mean wild blue yonder i mean oh wild blue it's not it's not even wild is it it's blue planet
okay something blue planet sorry i'm now the fact that wild blue yonder has got into my head
i'm also confused by the fact that the doctor started going on about the wide blue yonder in
the underwater menace so i'm i'm a bit muddled but you're not the only one uh yeah i i i really
I just feel kind of cheated.
I feel like this was a squandered episode.
It's not that it's bad.
I have some things about it.
I have caveats, as you do, that I am deeply concerned about.
They didn't hate it or anything.
But when I watched Star Beast, I sat down and I said,
I'm going to watch this and I'm going to enjoy it.
And I'm not going to take notes.
And I did.
And that was on a Saturday.
And then on Sunday, now I'm going to sit down and I'm going to watch this and I'm going to take notes.
And I watched it and I took notes.
And so that we could talk on Monday.
Now, in this case, this one came out on Saturday.
I sat down to enjoy it.
Not going to take notes.
When I got to the end of it, I said, I should have taken notes.
And I hastily jotted down my notes because I'm not going to watch it again.
It just wasn't worth watching again now.
interesting because i i did not feel like watching it again and when i when i re-watched patient uh
patient zero god i really am getting confused star beast i'm i'm my brain is congested when i
watched the star beast thank you i i wanted to watch it again i i was i was keen to you know i
I'd enjoyed watching it.
There were a lot of strands in there.
I was keen to think about what I'd seen kind of with my expectations adjusted,
having waited a whole year for this thing to come along.
I'm not quite sure my expectations of this one were,
but I do think that in some sense, this whole 60th anniversary thing,
my expectations were not just that we would get a miniature version of the,
what would it be, 2008 season, which is kind of what this feels like.
It's almost like there has been no development.
And I know it's a bit odd to say that when it explicitly mentions the flux
and the Timeless Child stuff.
But I think one of the things about actual genuine filler episodes are that when you're in the process of watching a kind of an ongoing run of a show,
you've maybe got a new doctor or you've got a new companion or a new doctor companion pairing.
And part of what you're watching is how do these people interact with each other?
And what's, you know, what's this new companion like?
Or what's the Doctor's character now?
These little things come out in little drips and draps.
And it's quite, I think it's a more important part of watching those filler episodes than I had previously realised.
because watching this it's like because it's the doctor and donna and we've kind of had their story
and we know all about them and even even in terms of kind of filling in the missing 15 years
it's kind of pretty much donna info dumped all of that in the star beast and well we know what
happened to the doctor in the missing years because we've been watching the show thousands
of years yeah so i mean a lot going on between i i don't know if i'll watch this again you know in a
few months time or whatever and feel i've i've misjudged it but it it feels like there isn't a
lot going on between the characters does that seem odd yeah it seems exactly how i interpreted it i
mean they were just okay so they were a little comfortable with each other and they were having
a little bit of talk talk but which you know is not necessarily bad but i tell you what the other
thing about this episode that really was weird to me is that during the first i don't know 10 15
minutes once they started exploring the ship i thought there's a lot of this is really well
constructed to build tension and what the heck is going on in this ship i definitely was like
drawn into the mystery the problem was as it kept going on and on and on it could no longer hold
that and so it was a it was a letdown within itself as well because it felt like it had really
good promise up front and then it it it didn't deliver and the other thing that i'll just say
that is a strike against this episode to me is that this show well first off let's just say this
was not the episode to lead number two when you're trying to introduce dr who to a whole new audience
right for disney worldwide it's like number one was a pretty darn good episode number two
and so not i'm gonna i'm gonna definitely disagree with that you don't think that the
first one was any good either for introducing i mean i i i thought the first one was great
and i have been watching both of these with not we's and their reaction is much more positive
than mine okay including to this episode so i i think there is a strong element of our
expectations around this and i think if you don't know the characters if you don't know the doctor
and Donna maybe some of what you know those interactions there are partly to kind of
reintroduce all of that stuff to the to the audience the problem I think is that doesn't
serve two masters very well because you know you've got to do that for the new audience but
the old audience they already know the doctor and Donna and the only the only reward you're
getting from this is the kind of nostalgia hit that you know to be fair is quite satisfying but
it is also something i could get by just putting on any of my dvds from that year's episodes
there is a movie well this is a tangent but okay we'll go with it there is a movie that i will
probably never go see uh despite the fact that when i heard the premise of it i really was kind
of like that that appeals to something that bothers the heck out of me about adventure movies
let's say and that is i guess it's david dachovny and meg ryan i don't know the name of the film
but they're two ex-lovers who are stranded in an airport after they've been broken up for
30 years or something and they've got lives and they meet they meet up and discuss the past and
what might have been and what wasn't was and and whatnot and that itself doesn't exactly appeal to
me what i hate is adventure films where two people bump into each other fall in love at the end of
the film you know they live happily ever after and i would love to see any of those couples 30
years later because you know they didn't and then they went on to have lives and i i like the concept
of catching up and so i guess maybe for viewers who did not watch the old doctor who maybe this
sort of the doctor and donna old friends getting back together and kind of reminiscing a little bit
might work. I don't know. It didn't exactly work for me, but okay. I'll, I'll take the idea that,
that maybe the concept go. Now, what the other part that I wanted to say that this film,
this episode did confirm my worst fears about Disney and the money. And that is, I absolutely
detest the distorting blobby blob morphy morph cg crap in this and any film i just think it no
matter how well they do it i think it looks terrible and it just looks like you're throwing
money at the screen to no good effect and it's like oh uh they episode two and they're already
go into one of my pet peeves like so i didn't like that but and and now i'm worried that they
are going to be throwing fx at the story unnecessarily but on the catching up with the
old old characters who you've met before i i i like that i mean i i enjoyed it in power of the
doctor where we got to see ace and tegan even though i felt that there was certain gratuitous
writing over all this big finish stuff and i did i mean i did quite like the fact that in the star
beast we got to catch up with what has happened to donna over the last 15 years it's just i guess
this feels more more like something like a a reset and it's partly because it is
Russell T Davies doing it he's he's just picked up his own story from back then and he's kind of
slid back into where it's what Catherine Tate has described as getting the band back together again
it is it is like you know these these bands that go around and they know that the audiences just
want to hear them play the classic material so that's what they do and i i kind of not going to
retread the old ground i talked about how this kind of felt a bit big finishy last time but
just yeah on that i i because i'm not knocking big finish i really enjoy big finish but actually
i was thinking the ones i really enjoy the most are the ones with colin baker or sylvester mccoy
or Paul McGann, where they're doing something that extends the character and develops it and
takes it into situations that we have not seen before. And actually, I enjoy less the ones with
Tom Baker or David Tennant, where they seem to be much more focused on recreating a style of story
that just exactly fits into their era.
And the premise that we've got here
doesn't require them to fit a story into the era.
There could be kind of development here,
but I don't think that's what this is about.
I think that's partly as a result of it being a 60th anniversary special.
And again, I think it's expectations,
but having Donna pop up in it,
thought would be something that was a part of a 60th anniversary special which would be much more
like you know something like the day of the doctor and it in fact seems to be the main pull it's like
it's is catherine tate and david tennant and that's what's special about it being the 60th and
i'm glad they're doing it i'm glad they're enjoying it and that they've still got that
kind of because there's no doubt about it they're still really really good they're firing on all
cylinders yes just i agree with that it's not that special for me sorry what's special for me
because doctor who is always about renewal is what's next uh you know you you did mention that
it's kind of like a mini season and i my notes actually are not quite the same it's like it was
a classic series in three parts technically they were mostly in four parts but you know episode one
sets you up episode three finishes you off and episode three is them running up and down corridors
the whole time and wow did they do that in spades they made the whole thing one giant corridor yeah
yeah the longest corridor i'm sure that was deliberate look so i i didn't think that could
possibly be a coincidence but uh uh anyway and you say you say you mentioned the three-part story
and i again i think my expectation was when i heard there were these three specials that they
were going to be a three-part story and that it was all going to be focused on why has the doctor
got this face and nothing in this episode even begins to address the question of why has the
talk to go on this face no and and as you mentioned they brought up the flux and and i think this is
what they were rtd was saying about you know we're going to address it in in such a way that in an
oblique way um it did okay it happened you know um which is good that means some future writer can
fix it but look in the uh stephen moffat 2 era but uh comes along and fixes canon that's
my job i'm the i'm the i'm the repair carpenter after we've we built a kind of shaky house we'll
go yeah so yeah half the universe was in fact still destroyed look i'm not i'm not keen on on
the on the either of those aspects of the of the kind of chibnall mythos but i what i'm missing i
guess is that when chibnall took the show over he did something different with it it felt new
and it felt like it was unpredictable and you know so did so did rtd when he took it over
but you know i don't know when i look back on when i look back on these episodes once i've seen what
the kind of futigatwa seasons are like maybe i'll relax more because he'll do something incredibly
radical and different and exciting and it'll get me properly fired up again but i'm a little bit
worried that we've kind of reset something here and that the show it should it should be in good
health right i mean it's got all this disney disney money and uh new production and everything
but why was why was no one else desperately keen to take on running it i don't i don't know
i think i you know my guess and it is a guess is that if you're going to get a big investor
like Disney, they needed to give them some assurances.
I think as we discussed, I think RG in this case, I know they were having trouble with
it anyway, but let's face it, considering the budget that they were being clearly not
given during the Chibnall era, why would anybody want to take it on?
I mean, I don't care how much you like Doctor Who, you're going to give me a buck 98 and
some paperclips.
I can't do this job.
And so I can understand why it's a poison pill.
you get disney in you had to get something in to make disney feel comfortable with their investment
and i think that's probably it and then but i was wondering if that if could that be someone else
could that be someone with a track record in running a television show who has a new take on
doctor who or what doctor who's about i mean i really hope rtc has has a new take but yeah
Well, here's JMS's chance.
Well, you know, yeah, it could be.
I mean, obviously, I would hate that,
but it could be someone who has that kind of track record,
but who hasn't had a go at Doctor Who,
and who might do things with the show that haven't been done before.
Yeah.
I have a question about people in the United Kingdom.
if the temperature drops rapidly
do you
only notice it when you see your breath
condensing or
does your skin react to cold
like it does mine
because I would notice the temperature
dropping rapidly without
having to see my breath
forming in front of my face
we're always cold
it's only when you see your breath you realize it's really cold
okay so that's just a British thing
okay
it doesn't play well
it's like how stupid are you donna can't you tell that it's dropping like all right man
i mean it's it's there's a lot of kind of little details in it the and talking about talking about
doing something that's not been done before i kind of feel like these are these are the episodes
where i i like them doing something quite experimental so an episode that's basically
just katherine tate and david ten and no one else terrific but it's not and and i and i will
overlook all those kind of little details and things that go wrong if you're gonna do something
ambitious and exciting like that but it's not really the first time they've done something like
this because heaven's end right and also i mean it reminded me a bit of midnight it's it reminded
Maybe a lot of midnight.
Yeah.
He can do these things with much less and certainly without the budget.
And he can make them more effective than he did with this.
And I think what you were saying earlier about the tension building up, I think these are hard kind of things to write.
Because, you know, you are, you're filling an hour with two actors and you've really got to figure out how to kind of, how to play the dynamics of that to keep the tension and excitement going.
Because you can't just keep ramping it up for 60 minutes.
But having said that, I do think you're right.
I don't think it quite works.
It somehow feels like they let the air out somewhere, somewhere in the middle, and they don't quite get the momentum back.
Here's another one that I just want to point out here.
And these are all RTD who wrote these specials, right?
All three of them?
Yeah.
Well, apart from the Star Beast.
Well, but he wrote the screenplay.
He adapted the Star Beast into what it became.
And definitely what I'm about to mention is definitely RTD.
He, in the Starbeast, he took the Sonic Screwdriver to the next level yet again.
And then he himself, in the very next episode, has to get rid of it to make this story work.
That is not the greatest of planning.
Now, usually when you see that in a story, you can tell it's different writers who have different styles.
They're like, oh, where's the Sonic Screwdriver?
I left it on the TARDIS console.
And you go, oh, yeah, OK, that's a writer who doesn't like the sonic screwdriver.
I liked this. I liked the fact that the sonic was being used in a meaningful way.
And you couldn't really fault the doctor for having left it behind.
No, I'm not faulting the doctor for it.
I kind of fault the writer for having to do it to not have the supersonic, as we shall now call it, screwdriver in the scene.
But that's what it felt like.
It's like as soon as he stuck it in the...
I presume he's still got his non-sonic screwdriver because he didn't actually insert that into the lock.
Yeah, let's hope so.
Maybe he could have used that for some...
That would have been clever.
That would have been that would have been extremely clever.
The doctor definitely should have done that in this story to demonstrate that he is not just about or worse.
You know, there was something that needed unscrewing and he couldn't because he didn't have the sonic.
And Donna goes, yeah, have a screwdriver in your pocket.
Well, how great, you know, or whatever.
So, yeah.
Let's ask this question.
Wild Blue Yonder, WTF.
Don't know.
That's one of the details where I thought there was going to be some kind of real thematic resonance to it.
And I still don't get it.
Still don't get it.
Yeah.
It's not jolly.
They're not going to war.
What's it got to do with anything?
So it does, in fact, make a good case that this was a placeholder name.
And then at the end, they just said, I still can't come up with a name.
I know.
Let's have the TARDIS play that when we land and comes back.
Why?
I don't know.
But there is substantial dialogue within the episode that relates to it.
So it's not throwaway stuff.
But it doesn't make anything.
Okay.
That felt to me like, again, try to put my mind in the writer's position.
That's something you want to say.
that's some that's some cool thought that occurred to you that you go oh you know that's the thing
that people don't think about this isn't really a jolly song it's a nasty song and and i want to
say that i want to make that point and we know rtd's definitely got an anti-military bit just
based on what he did with unit um but i felt like he wanted to get that dialogue in there
but it doesn't fit it doesn't have any thematic as you say tie in with this thing i guess you
could argue that you're out in the middle of nowhere that is the wild blue yonder but honestly
it's the wild black yonder and i couldn't find any significance to that song for the british i mean
it is as far as i can tell absolutely 100 a creation by contest for the u.s army air corps
in the 1940s oh you've never heard of it okay well i'll i'll run the i've heard that song so
many times it's the official song of the u.s air force and has been since the 40s which when it was
the army air corps i went through the lyrics to see if there was anything that if you knew the
lyrics and i'll just give you the first voice verse here off we go into the wild blue yonder
climbing high into the sun oh you're not gonna sing i'm not gonna sing all right fun here they
come zooming to meet our thunder adam boys give her the gun give her the gun down we die
spouting our flames from under oh with one hell of a roar we live in fame or go down in flame hey
nothing will stop the army air corps there you go bravo encore i don't know the second verse but i
knew the first verse pretty well as a kid um and i knew it as army air corps too because that's the
way my dad would sing it and he was in the navy but he liked the song but thought it was a jolly
old song but it's well i couldn't find anything i did look through the other lyrics and i don't see
anything that could make you it's all it's all this you know we built planes we do stuff we go
out and meet the enemy blah blah blah like it just it just doesn't make any sense and unless
you know he's setting up something in in shooty gat was season where the tardis plays a different
song every time they land which i'm gonna hate well just gonna worry yeah it's gonna go right
now i mean that could be that could be cool that could be cool if it chooses more interesting songs
it's just i don't know why it's chosen this soul yeah and i mean i think you it's a cool idea you're
right but I expected more from RCD in terms of there being some real kind of relevance of this
particular theme and he he's he's using it I think I mean it's not just a cool idea he's using it
because he wants to do the work around establishing Donna's relationship with Wilf and you know he
plays that into it but yeah i i was expecting i was expecting something more and i i kind of thought
at the beginning of the episode right this is going to come back in some way and then when i
watched it the second time i was thinking what did i miss did i did i miss something because i don't
remember there being anything that kind of resonated with the theme there but second viewing i didn't
pick it up either so i don't know it it seems to be without rhyme nor reason in the story except
to give it a title that doesn't give anything away but i don't know what title you could give
this that would give something away the enough not things the you know spacecraft at the edge
of the universe it still doesn't give anything away no but it's just okay but and you know my
wife and i talked this over again and she did pick up she learned something from our discussion about
the star beast and that was uh because she would ask me questions and then she'd go all right right
don't think i go yeah there you go don't think they literally say don't think in that world
you know calm down and stop thinking yes they do say that so uh but i don't think that it's
possible for him to have retroactively heard the podcast and then um carried that somehow
you have the power of foresight to to know this would become the theme maybe that's it this is
precognition that i just didn't realize in the centauri way so it was of absolute no use to me
whatsoever but it was right um so i get the idea that the more the doctor thinks the more donna
thinks the more i guess basically data that the the knot things have so that they could create a
more accurate replica i get that part so slow it down i don't understand why the ship had to do
this slowly i and and nor why did all the panels have to turn and flop and swig and reconfigure
i mean apart from the fact that you're showing off your money yeah they had to spend the money
on something and they weren't spending on the cast yes yes so if we have this surplus budget
what can we do uh i know lots of lots of spaceship stuff no i i don't i don't understand that that
aspect of the plot exactly i i tried to focus on it a bit more the second time and i i can't i kind
of appreciated that the kind of thinking had to be done slowly and so i guess the captain set
something up that was so not obvious that they wouldn't be able to put it they wouldn't be able
to figure it out and wouldn't figure it out if the doctor hadn't turned up but i think the thing
that again maybe makes this episode less successful than you know some of those other more uh well
some of those other equally ambitious episodes is that i didn't really understand what it was saying
well you know what's it saying about thinking and about is it that we all think too much and we
should we should calm down more in our lives or you know what's the moral message of that part of
the story because we obviously weren't getting the moral message about the jolly sounding song
being actually going to war so i was looking for my morals elsewhere and i couldn't really figure
it out there either it's always seemed to me quite a good thing that the doctor is a fast
thinker that he's yeah you know he he puts things together he has insights things kind of flash in
his brain and that's why he talks fast and that's all kind of quite exciting and i get that for
someone like that it'd be very difficult for them if they had were put in a position where they had
to calm down but i wasn't really sure a what that would tell us and b anyway they didn't really
kind of they didn't commit to that there was about you know 10 seconds of him sort of saying
i mustn't think i mustn't think i mustn't think and then he just carried on thinking and obviously
screwed everything up so i don't know what it was telling it yeah they're using his they're using
his strengths against him it's uh it's not thing jujitsu and it's saying i'm yeah i don't didn't
think there was any moral aspect to that thread i just thought that was supposed to uh okay here's
another one still leaves me wondering what is this episode about yeah well so he's thinking so it is
turning that the doctor thinks very fast that's the worst thing that you could possibly do this
is an opportunity for donna to save the day who is not so good a thinker and and i'm not busting
on Donna's chops there is just simply Donna is not as good a thinker as the doctor that no one
is as good a thinker as the doctor in this show so you know maybe close but but so there was an
opportunity for Donna to shine but she didn't well in one no she didn't that was the thing and
there was this thing about humans being able to hold two mutually contradictory ideas at the same
time but i didn't also not a good thing and really see where that was going either so yeah there were
there were there were lots of little things in this that i i kind of liked it's but they didn't
add up to the sum of their parts and i mean really liked the speech that the doctor was giving to one
of the things about wondering what has what the tardis did when the hostile action displacement
system kicked in because of course it could be away for hundreds of years and i love that little
story about the being a tribe worshiping it and then a city growing up and then a city collapsing
and everything and i'm looking forward to when someone makes an animation of all of that and
sticks it on youtube with the doctor's narration over it that would be that would be all right now
there is another possibility maybe you know we have to give it we have to give the possibility
to this we have complained and i know we didn't do the russell td there but i know that we have
complained so much about bad wolf over the years or at least i have certainly ben has um about
how lame that story arc was how illogical that story how ill-planned that story arc was
it's like let's just pop bad wolf up wherever we need it and so we just have that that thing and
and I'll sort it out in the end.
Maybe all this stuff is set up for next time.
Maybe the humans holding two contrary positions,
maybe the wild blue yonder or something about that.
Maybe, you know, all of those things,
maybe that is set up for the next episode.
And then maybe this one would have some rewatch value
when you come back to it and you go, oh.
It could be, but I mean, I think,
I think the thing where we actually have had that was when beep talks about
the boss and that's obviously a setup.
The thing about the thing that's occurred to me there is that maybe we won't
find out in the trilogy.
Maybe that's a shooting thing or something.
And it's just,
I don't think,
I don't think RTD will go that long.
I don't think he's got that.
I don't think he has that mindset and I'm that's,
I'm not busting on him.
It's just I don't think he plans a game two or three years down the line.
I think he's he's in the in the moment kind of writer.
I will say this had the absolute best.
Hey, podcasters, don't fact check the writer sequence ever.
And that is you don't have the math.
Don't tell me it's impossible.
You just don't understand the math yet.
So you little humans go away.
I was amused by that. Speaking of the Hads, if those two had perfectly replicated the Doctor and then disposed of the Doctor and Donna, would the TARDIS think the danger was over and even bother to come back?
Well, that seems to be what the doctor believes.
Yeah.
But I don't know whether that kind of, yeah, I don't know.
We don't really get that much information about what this replication process actually involves.
And if they were able to make a proper copy, would they actually be the doctor and Donna?
And then would they behave differently?
Would they behave like the doctor and Donna?
Would they become so like them that they would behave like them?
Because if they don't, then they're not.
I mean don't forget that there's a similar thing in Heaven Sent because the Doctor is being teleported.
Yeah.
So you're getting, it's a copy.
It is a copy.
The Doctor we've got now is a copy.
Although one of my kind of feelings about David Tennant now is that it doesn't feel like he was ever Peter Capaldi.
Yeah.
But when he was Peter Capaldi he was copied.
they do seem to be trying to imply that he's he's different because he was jodie whittaker though
occasionally it's definitely he's more feminine yeah i mean i find it easier to believe he was
it was easy to believe he was jodie whittaker because we saw jodie whittaker regenerate into
him but i don't know it was one of those it was one of those things where i kind of i particularly
liked the fact that with david tennett's original performance it felt and you know because he's a
complete uber fan that he was incorporating a little bit of every other actor who played it
before him into his performance but he should have incorporated some of that now i don't know
he could do that now because he's already kind of established his performance as the doctor and he
you can't add in a bit of matt smith kind of fooling around or or um capaldi frowning or
tensity yeah yeah or jody imitating david tenet that's easier to incorporate so maybe
that's another reason why i feel that that's there you know they've they've they've kind of
twice in this in this in these two episodes we have the scene where the doctor says i love
somebody is oh is that how i talk now which is and then in this episode it's like it was hot oh
is that how i am now and don is like yeah basically you've always been just a hair's
from gay she's not those words but that's exactly what she says and it's like oh that's setting up
shooty just like when capaldi says yeah maybe next time i'll be a woman i don't know um yeah
i'll try to remember tom baker saying next time i might be a woman so well we'll have to come back
to that one yeah well but i'm i'm putting it here i i think that's where we're going i don't know
how that would be quick i don't know what that would mean for a character who is basically
sexless asexual yeah let's see what else do we have oh um behind the scene when we talked about
this i know i mentioned how a huge fan i am of the volume walls and what they can do with those
for special effects.
I watched the behind the scenes on this.
They absolutely do not have a volume wall.
The spaceship was green screen,
you know, practical set with green screen
and then projected behind it.
And the TARDIS set is that honking stupidly big.
It's an absolute ginormous aircraft hangar size,
physical set.
It's like, wow.
I still hate it.
I don't hate it.
I like the aesthetic of it.
I do not like the size of it.
The size of it is so dumb.
Look, it's just dumb.
I know the TARDIS has infinite space,
but what good is that space?
It has nothing in it.
And of course, he could fill it with furniture again,
but actually no, because it's ramps,
rails mostly it's empty space between the platforms and an empty volume it just seems like
a a design choice to make it look big finally go oh the tardis big i you know what i like to think
the tardis is big i like them to occasionally go into the tardis and actually be amazed at how
infinite it is not journey to the center of the tardis but other instances you know it's it's a
it's an interesting day when you can say yeah you know i mean they definitely did it better in
invasion of time true right i mean yes in in the invasion of time the tardis is really eccentric
you're wandering around back there going and going this is just bizarre yes the brick walls were
perhaps should have been covered up but again no but i'm not i'm not gonna i'm not gonna argue
that the TARDIS in The Invasion of Time
is not better than this TARDIS.
And I know what you mean.
And Logopolis has a certain amount of that kind of effect,
which is achieved by basically taking the standard TARDIS set
and redressing it in different ways.
But it creates the same illusion,
and you don't need it to be in your face.
And I'd also think you don't need the TARDIS to be that big
for it to be bigger on the inside than it is on the outside it only needs to be
well big enough to get the job done in the control room it needs to be visibly it needs to be visibly
bigger right i mean i was going to say it only needs to be a centimeter bigger but it needs it
needs to be visibly bigger but as soon as the interior dimensions are twice the exterior
dimensions you spot that whereas now they're what i mean i don't you could get hundreds and hundreds
of exterior TARDISes into that space.
Oh, yeah.
It's a poor choice.
I don't hate the look,
but I hate the size.
And the size informs the look to some degree.
So hopefully...
And I did hear something where
David Tennant did a tour of the TARDIS set on camera.
It's one of the behind the scenes
where he saw it for the first time
when they were still building it.
And he did say something to the effect
at least i i get it before i have to turn this set over to shooty so i'm pretty sure that's
the ongoing set i'm not surprised it's so big they could not possibly have amortized the
the expense of building it and then rebuilding it they just couldn't i mean hopefully they'll
take the coffee maker out you know maybe put it i think that would be that would be a relatively
cost-effective um uh adjustment given that it will save them lots of money in explosion and
fire special effect but yeah i guess i'd rather they kept jodie whittaker's tardis interior for
oh god johnson oh i think if they if they kept kept them for the specials and then this had been
this had been the new aesthetic going along with shooty and his you know very slick threads and all
that maybe i maybe i could have coped with it i don't know i guess i guess you know once it once
i've got used to him in it we can come back to that question and see how i'm getting old
or if i'm still nursing a grudge again don't think but you know i i can't say that there's a good
reason for it because the doctor regenerates at the end of parting ways he's in the TARDIS boom
he regenerates the TARDIS is fine but when he regenerates at the end of David Tennant's era
and whatever that story was uh he regenerates so strongly he blows up the TARDIS okay that's why
we change TARDIS desktop themes that's why we change desktop themes going from Tennant to to
Smith. Also,
when Smith regenerated,
boom, bang, boom. But, and yet...
No, no. No, he didn't.
He didn't. That's right. He did not.
Smith to Capaldi, TARDIS stayed the same.
That's right. It did. And he
didn't. He didn't so. But when
Whitaker went, she was outside.
She was outside.
And absolutely no damage
to the TARDIS should have been there at all.
It should be the same.
No. And I can't remember
why it changed for the snowmen either i think i think that was implied that matt smith was just
tinkering right he'd been living up in the clouds for a long long time and he'd just been tinkering
around with it i i prefer that if i'm honest i prefer that yeah well yeah or he walks around
and finds another control room somewhere back next to the boot cupboard i mean i think moffat
has has to take some of the blame here for the fact that he i mean i i assume it was his choice
to have a new tardis interior at the start of his run as as showrunner but then he also changed it
during his run as showrunner and so the sense of there being a a tardis set that has some longevity
because you know it didn't change that much between 1963 and 1989 that's kind of gone now
no occasional tonsil change and yeah yeah yeah now it's like yeah we've got we've got to have
a new one with every doctor and possibly two yeah the only good thing about changing it is
sometimes you get a really awful TARDIS and they don't last long Jodie Whittaker's TARDIS which is
the worst ever but it was you know it still works um i don't know that i have anything else about
this episode i got a couple of things okay i'll i'll alternate between the things that i like
and the things i didn't say one of the things i liked um and this touches on the referring back
to previous episodes things well i think is a lot more oblique than the references to the flux and
the timeless child but i'm pretty sure there's a reference to kill the moon in there because
donna says that one of the things sean always complains about when he's watching sci-fi films
is where does all the extra mass come from and do you remember what we said about kill the moon
yeah okay well yeah okay maybe let me ask this question davis was sitting there watching that
thinking where you know when i get my hands back on the show i'll say what i think about that piece
of nonsense okay then let me ask this question or let me ask the question to physicists out there
in the uh are we talking obviously you're converting heat to mass in this is that any
more possible i don't think it is you're not asking me are you asking the physicists are we
are we going to sit here i'm asking you yeah you haven't thought about it maybe you do you went to
the same i don't know you work at the same university where a friend of mine who is a
physicist got his degree so i mean i i like but i haven't asked him but uh uh yeah i thought maybe
i don't know the answer to that you don't know the answer to that but i think the point the
point about the line is that it's not a poke at this episode it is a poke at where it is very
obviously completely implausible and that is kill the moon it's just you don't have the math
well that would be that would be a better answer that would be a better answer
okay let let me move on to something that i was less keen on and that was the cold open i
there were a lot of reasons I didn't like it oh it wasn't like awful it was just when you add up
all the things all the things I'm like why was thing there I mean one thing is that it felt
like the end of the star beast leads right into the post credits of wild blue yonder the TARDIS
is exploding and the doors fly open and a blast of flame comes out I think it would have been
better if it had just gone straight through with the continuity there so that's one thing another
thing is and you know i will complain about these things although i think the chance of them being
ever given any attention is minimal but in the big finish world we do already have a an isaac
newton and he's played by david warner extremely brilliantly and he's characterized completely
from this newton i was gonna say i believe newton was a particularly unpleasant human being
yeah this guy is kind of like going out and skipping in the meadows and sitting under the
apple tree on a sunny day and he's definitely romance novel yeah cover hair guy so so yeah i
wasn't keen on that i also wasn't keen on the fact that the whole thing just felt like it was the
reject from the children in need skit yeah it's a better idea and he didn't want to chuck this one
out and then i did at some point during the episode think actually is it more than that is
the fact that time appears to have been changed because there are allusions to this they have
time mavity is that going to be significant and it hasn't been significant and i cannot believe i
know you're going to say oh maybe this is something to tie up in the next episode and
Or in the Judy Gatto season, we'll look back on this and think, ah, this is him cleverly laying the foundations for some intricate time.
I have dreams of hopes that he has clever laying of plans, but that's Moffat's forte.
I don't think that we are going to hear.
And we're never going to hear about Mavity ever again.
That's what I think.
I agree.
I think we're never going to hear it again.
let me finish my my little list of uh things with another positive thing we talked about
murray gold last time i'm not any keener on the theme tunes and everything but the music the
incidental music in this episode is not like anything i've heard him do before and so silver
screen i'm sure they're listening silver screen we need a 60th anniversary special cd release please
i am gonna say that i uh in a way would also say that it's not like anything he's done before
because i didn't hear a single note of it honestly that crossed my mind uh yesterday i was like oh
yeah i didn't uh i didn't actually hear any music at all i'm sure it was there but it wasn't it
didn't stand out anyway it didn't catch my ear so funny thing i'm gonna take a digression here
Just briefly, I think I told you that in Sola Screen, we can bring that to the reporter.
They put out an album for Jodie Whittaker's first year, which I got.
And I do actually like Sagan Ekinola's theme song.
I think that's a good Doctor Who theme song.
I like the whole CD.
The theme is excellent.
It's really good.
The rest of the CD to me, when I'm listening to it in my car, I've said this before,
makes me think that maybe there's something wrong with my car.
I don't hear it as music.
I hear it as noises that are like wrong.
They're just wrong.
The Carrie Blythe legacy.
But I went on looking,
I was looking on silver screen this past week,
looking at all the Doctor Who,
because they have a Doctor Who section,
going, oh, I didn't know they put that one out.
Oh, I didn't know they put that one out.
Oh, tell me they put the last Peter Palsy season out.
I don't believe they put the last season of Peter Capaldi out,
but they definitely did put out the last season of Jodie Whittaker.
And because I'm a completist, I added that to my collection,
and we were in the car, and one of those themes came up,
and I actually heard it.
So it was like, oh, maybe he improved with seasons X and beyond.
Still wasn't like, this is, eh, eh.
There's no, there's no, I am the doctor there or.
No, but he's very different.
Yeah.
He's very different.
And it kind of poke, poke, poking at Carrie Blyton or whoever.
I mean, the thing about the early years of the show was, I mean, obviously Dudley Simpson
did a lot of stuff, but there was, there were different composers on it.
And so I, I quite appreciate the fact that we've, we have had someone else, you know,
besides besides murray gold much as i love murray gold again is about hearing someone else do
something different and i don't suppose it's ever going to happen but it made me think it would be
quite nice if we could have different composers coming in and you know doing well maybe not
individual episodes but different seasons or something yeah you know here's the thing um you
you talk about how one of the appeals to doctor who is that is the change and what's coming next
And I'm I'm going to stand in a little bit of the nostalgia zone.
I don't I don't need it to change huge amounts.
It's got to change some.
But, you know, when you make a big change, whenever you make a big change, sometimes you can just make you can bring somebody and they can just do absolutely the worst possible thing.
Jody Whitaker's there.
And and and you can destroy what you're trying to preserve.
OK, fine.
But this happens when you hire new people and you hire, you know, as time goes on, these things will just ultimately happen because even people who are trying to ape the style of previous shows will introduce their own changes to it.
It is it is inevitable that it will happen to some degree.
Nobody is so perfect that they can hold it in stasis forever.
But it is also a thing that artists like to put their own stamp on.
on things so there is a there is a mindset that says when you come back and do something you have
to come back and do it differently this is why we get such you know awful things like the brady
bunch movie or we we get people who come in and and 20 years later revive something and just make
an absolute ruin of it because they they want they want it to be something a new interpretation a new
that mindset prevails even on individual people and i felt like murray gold what did really well
during the rtd era and then he did so much better during the stephen moffat era because he tried to
reinvent the sound whether or not that was from external yeah arguments or not he did then when
he went to the capaldi era i felt like he'd run out of options um it's it's okay music but it does
not build upon matt smith era music it did not it did not exceed the matt smith era music murray gold
yeah has run his course composers like john horner who has a lot of big films out there i can spot
his music in every single film because he returns to the same sound over and over again and like he
does not reinvent himself but of course when you're making completely different movies and
they've got the same soundtrack you're kind of like huh alien sounds just like star trek wrath
of khan and i don't know but i think murray at least murray's been given a rest yeah i know i
absolutely know what you mean if if you hear john barry on the radio you know it's john barry if
you had john williams on the radio you know it's john williams yeah yeah so uh trying to reinvent
it you've only got so much in the tank and i don't know i i i think it was time for murray to move on
i don't have anything against the music we heard in the specials this episode notwithstanding
because i didn't hear it but like well i was because i because i'm coming back that was the
one that i was like oh i'm not sure murray should come back uh rtd maybe he's got a second wind
maybe he's gonna hire he's gonna hire a bunch of other writers hopefully so we only have to worry
about you know three or four episodes a year that are rtds and then six others by as showrunner he
has a huge influence but that's not the same as actually having to sit down and come up with new
ideas that's coming up with like i think this idea could work better if you did this or if you if you
went there i mean i i don't know about that but i will take the point that murray gold has worked
on the show for a lot longer than rtd did at two i also i also think you've you've put in mind
for me something else about the way that Stephen
Moffat really pushed changing
the show for his own era like
not a question of coming back and reinventing it he was reinventing
it all the time in a way that I don't think
RTD actually did and I
appreciated that again because I felt like it was
rather than allowing it because he was showrunner for a long time off it rather than allowing it to
be diminishing returns like a slightly paler version of what had had been done before he
he started off very much taking rtd's template for a season and doing his own version of that
which was great but then he started doing different things and when matt smith came in he had this
fairy tale idea and when peter proudly came in he had this whole thing about whether he was a good
ran and argue about whether that was effective but it was it was something different and he mixed up
whether there were going to be one parters or two parters or a mix of one and two parters
and i think all of those things brought something new all of the time and i hope that rtd is going
to bring so you know as well as having some new stories to tell himself is going to bring something
new to the way he runs the show yeah well you know last time when rtd came in everyone said
you know he's he's he's got his gay agenda which was you know showing people who are gay in stories
i think this time i think they'll be right i think that's i think that's where he's planted
his flag i think i think and not necessarily that but in other words i think he's planted
his flag on representation and that is going to be the theme throughout all of this era he is going
to make that first foremost and most important aspect of this era this is this is what he wants
to say i have this well i think i'm not sure what he wants to say because it's what he does
it's what he has always really done and i and i think you couldn't he couldn't he couldn't do
anything without doing that really yeah i i just think that he's got more leeway now but i'm not
sure i'm not sure that in it i'm not sure that in itself is well but it doesn't it doesn't it
doesn't give you the show on its own it gives it an energy definitely and it did you know it did
that back in 2005 you know the kind of effect of having captain jack in the show was that i'm sure
it's not like anyone arguing it's the factor but i did see quite persuasive case made that one of
the many factors that led to gay marriage being legalized in this country was doctor who and the
fact that characters were being portrayed so that a kind of mass viewing audience would just see
them see this as normal so i i you know i said i think it's important i think there's a there's
something that doing that adds to the show but I don't know that that is going to be I don't know
that that's going to be everything in the same way that with Chibnall it wasn't everything he
massively massively increased the diversity of the writership of the show but that wasn't
I don't know that you'd look back on his run and say that was the defining characteristic it was
one of the key characteristics undoubtedly but it's not what made the show what it was when he
was running it i don't think well we shall see by the way i don't know if you've noticed that the
bbc well not the bbc well maybe the bbc it comes to the bbc doctor who youtube channel they've been
putting out lots of videos about oh here's what you need to know about catching up with the doctor
and here you know so you're if you're new to doctor who and it's that the other and there is
one thing that is absolutely certain they have changed the doctor's pronouns today
that in all official doctor who because on screen videos yeah but when they've heard and then that's
what they do and then that's what uh yeah they're they're using it it it has been in several of the
videos that they've put out to explain doctor who uh on the net it's like okay that's a conscious
choice i mean i i i've always kind of i've when we've been talking about the show i've kind of
gone with using the pronouns for the gender of the doctor at the time of the show that we're
talking about but it definitely becomes a lot more difficult to do that when you're talking about
anything kind of much more general about you know the the doctor over their whole life kind of thing
you can't like you can't say the doctor over his whole life you can't really say the doctor over
her whole life or you can and you're going to refer to the one that will make sense in context
in the moment but yeah well yeah i mean that and that's what i that's what i mean that's what i've
been doing where it's very very obviously focused on a discussion around a particular episode or
whatever but when you start talking about all the all the instances i don't know where the doctor
faced the daleks or whatever you could be saying he did this one minute and she did that one minute
except there's the 10 million other doctors we don't know about the timeless child now so
maybe they fought the Daleks so many times Daleks I'm sure
that's just another flaw with the whole concept of creating all those extra doctors
and having a TARDIS that looks like a pull and it'll get me started don't get me started with
how poorly thought out that was uh we can talk about how poorly thought out this was but I
any others any other items i know that was your list that was my list all right well next time
the even worse named episode the giggle well looks like it's gonna be a laugh
ah well i guess it was worth it for that it's a celebration it's a celebration remember 60 years
of the show yeah yeah all right well silent thank you for joining me it's a pleasure as always
And listeners, I do hope you'll join us all again next time on Fusion Patrol.
You'll also find there over a decade of past episodes.
You can find some of our other works at soundcloud.com slash fusion patrol.
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