The Review of Death
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📝 SHOW NOTES | 'Wild Blue Yonder'
🕑 Added 2023-12-04 21:52:54 +0000 UTCWhat a rollercoaster! Not a Peter Capaldi or Matt Smith or Susan Foreman in sight and yet Doctor Who delivered beyond all expectations on Saturday night. And so did Matt, editing and publishing the audio and video versions of the podcast hours after we recorded it on Monday morning (UK time!).
Billy was fast asleep as he beavered away - we've got a new way of recording the podcast with an ultra quick turnaround time, so this'll be something to build on for future episodes!
As for our review of 'The Giggle', we have tentatively planned to go live on the batmanmarch YouTube channel THIS SATURDAY at 8:30pm GMT - an hour after the end of the final 60th Anniversary Special on BBC One. It's only been penciled in and plans may change, but we'll let you know either way.
Right, here are Billy's notes from RoD Ep67. 'Wild Blue Yonder'...
- Newton. Mavity.
- Wild Blue Yonder = song didn't work for me.
- Arrive on a spaceship at the edge of creation which is slowing counting down to blowing itself up.
- Mysteries built up brilliantly - the ship’s interior resetting itself,, a slow robot, CLANG!, airlock opened and closed three years ago, MY ARMS ARE TOO LONG.
- The Not-Things. Firstly, what are they called? My notes tell me that Disney plus says both No-Things and Not-Things. Secondly, a Doctor Who episode is only as good as it’s villain or threat and they made this surely one of the best episodes of Doctor Who since it was revived in 2005. Scary as fuck dopple-gangers.
- When Not-14 came into Donna’s room, my first thought was, “This is 14 from the future. He’s been zapped away off screen and he’s looking at Donna mournfully because he knows she doesn’t make it through this adventure.” But no.
- The Not-Things proceed to, in Donna’s words, “scare” and “terrorise” our heroes. They came from outside. The ship’s captain sacrificed herself so they couldn’t copy her and pilot the ship through the universe... to take it over? Replicate it? They need to scare them to get their minds to race to find a way out so they can also learn how to escape, but the Doctor can’t stop thinking (loved that bit, great work from DT all the way through this).
- The Flux and The Timeless Child.
- What did you think of the final bit of action? Green screen = “dodgy as fuck”. Donna fakeout. Masterfully executed and Catherine Tate’s best moment of the episode, but how does the Doctor work out he’s got the wrong Donna? Did the TARDIS tell him or was it intuition? Wasn’t all that clear to me on both viewings.
- The Doctor feels the use of salt to ward off the Not-Things and invoking a superstition at the edge of creation was a bad idea. Is this how the Toymaker appears?
- Wilf! It’s all we’ve got of Bernard in the specials and it’s amazing to see him. A touching tribute. Goes to show the impact he’s had and how much he was loved. I’m going to ask the most morbid Doctor Who quiz question ever, which will ensure we’re never asked again about doing a round at the Quiz of Rassilon - How many episodes of Doctor Who feature a “In Living Memory of...” caption?
- ■ The TV Movie (Jon Pertwee), Voyage of the Damned (Verity Lambert), The Waters of Mars (Barry Letts), Terrance Dicks (Spyfall) and now this. (N.B. People also mentioned Elizabeth Sladen and Nicholas Courtney received captions - so thanks for that, bloody know it alls!)
- People are going crazy. Planes are falling out of the sky!
- This was a jaw-dropper but not in the way we all expected. Such a departure from last week and that’s got to be RTD showing off the vast array of stories Doctor Who tells. Last week, Mad Paddington nearly blew up London in a fun runaround - this week, liminal and body horror before ‘Strictly...’. Mad.
- Russell says he thinks keeping this underwraps might have worked against it: “I think everyone’s expecting Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi and the ghost of Wiliam Hartnell riding on the back of a Garm. I kept it secret partly because its nice to keep some episodes completely secret but also because this is the simplest one of the lot.”
- RTD: “People expect you to base episodes on classic episodes like Genesis of the Daleks, or The Caves of Androzani, or Blink, or The Timeless Children. I don’t think anyone really expected me to base an episode on Underworld. We’ve got special effects corridors all the way through that the cast weren’t in.
- RoD 💜💚
Comments
sam bradbury
Watched 'Planet of Evil' for the first time today after seeing Russel's Instagram post about the deleted reference to the Doctor's previous encounters with beings from beyond the edge of the universe. I have to say, it works brilliantly as a prequel to 'Wild Blue Yonder'.
