Flight Through Entirety: A Doctor Who Podcast

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 heroically clenched teeth. It’s The Snowmen.

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: A Town Called Mercy.

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 keeping her feisty new companions under control. Somehow, life finds a way, in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.

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 earth the new girl has turned up a year early. It’s Asylum of the Daleks.

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 mysterious stranger (a very young Prince Philip in his first television role), who beguiles the children with hot and cold running lemonade before whisking them off to an extraterrestrial forest which is about to have massive vats of acid dumped on it. Meanwhile, surprisingly, obnoxiously messianic lion Aslan (Liam Neeson) is nowhere to be found. Mark McManus and Pete Lambert guest star. It’s The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe.

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 Retrospective.

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 The God Complex.

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.

It’s the last episode of the first half of the season, and to celebrate, Nathan, James, Peter and Adam Richard have invited literally everyone they’ve ever met to join them at Demons’ Run for a bloodless victory swiftly followed by a painful death. Oh, and the baby shower has been cancelled. Which is just the sort of thing that happens when A Good Man Goes to War.

This week, Nathan, Peter, Richard and Simon rise up against their more viscous oppressors, launching blistering attacks on their shot composition, plot conveniences and crimes against good taste. Because, in a very real sense, we are all The Almost People.

This week, gooey duplicates of Nathan, Peter and Richard are joined by a gooey duplicate of Simon Moore for an earnest discussion of camerawork, capitalism (again) and the deepest questions of human identity. Doctor Who ruins yet another workers’ uprising, in The Rebel Flesh.

This week, Nathan and James are joined by Steven B and Dan from the New to Who podcast for an episode made up of the scavenged parts of other episodes. It’s time to meet the first character from the first shot of the first ever Doctor Who episode. Say hello, everyone, to The Doctor’s Wife.

This week, Nathan, James, Todd and Richard find themselves becalmed on board the Fancy, under threat from medical hologram that has gone rogue and imagines itself to be a terrifying and murderous Doctor Who monster. There’s rum, sodomy and some very low-effort space corridors, in The Curse of the Black Spot.