So Doctor Who is back, doing the same old thing for another year, but this time we’re relitigating the main moral question of a thirty-year-old episode: can we kill a genocidal dictator even though he’s just a small child with a dirty face lost on a battlefield somewhere? Tom Spilsbury joins us to discuss The Magician’s Apprentice.

Notes and Links

Nathan compares the hand mines in this episode to the terrifying Gloom Spawn from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

Tom and Peter mention two videos that accompany this episode. The first one is a deleted scene on Karn starring Clare Higgins as Ohila; the second one is a six-minute skit by Steven Moffat called The Doctor’s Meditation, in which the Doctor’s attempts to meditate fail because of the poor quality of the water he’s drinking and so he spends days and days getting the townsfolk to dig wells instead.

Follow us

Nathan is on Twitter (not calling it X) as @nathanbottomley, and James is @ohjamessellwood. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

We’re also on Facebook and Mastodon, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll fail to invite you to our next massive shindig in medieval Essex.

And more

You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on the entirety of the Whittaker Era of Doctor Who, at jodieintoterror.com, at @JodieIntoTerror on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts can be found. We’ll be back with a new flashcast on the second Russell T Davies era in November. Stay tuned for more details: it’s not long now.

Our James Bond (et al.) commentary podcast is called Bondfinger, and you can find that at bondfinger.com, at @bondfingercast on Twitter, on Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else as well.

We can also be heard on the Blakes 7 podcast Maximum Power, which has completed its coverage of the first half of the show’s entire run. Stay tuned for news about the release of our coverage of Series C.

There’s also our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. In our most recent episode, we watch a top-tier episode from Deep Space Nine’s sixth season, Rocks and Shoals.