BONUS CONTENT-The Quest is the Quest a reading by James

BONUS CONTENT-The Quest is the Quest a reading by James

This bonus content is inspired by the late Anthony Head. RIP Anthony. 

This podcast contains adult language and adult subject matter and is rated M for mature. Listener discretion is advised. 

Closing audio

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

So, it turns out that in the early days of the revival, there were a lot of Doctor Who commentaries. The series one box set, the Christopher Eckleson Year, that had a commentary on every track. And when it came to David Tennant, not only were there commentaries on the DVDs, there were also commentaries that you could download. But it turns out that there was one episode that didn't get a commentary. Not on the DVD, not on the internet. And as that is one of the episodes that stars Anthony Stewart Head, I figured it might be time to redress the balance. So, here is a three-doo-hoo commentary extra for the Infinite Quest. So that we are, well not exactly on the same page, but on the same second, this commentary track is going to be designed to run alongside the version that is on iPlayer, which is the DVD version. The Infinite Quest has come out as part of various Blu-ray box sets as well, but thanks to different frame rates and the like. Not due to any extra footage, it is just the technicalities. If you want to check, the version that I'm going to be doing this commentary alongside of has a runtime of just under 47 minutes. It's about 46 minutes and 42 seconds. The Blu-ray 1 lasts about 48 minutes. And by now you've probably realized that this won't just be a commentary as to what is happening on screen. We are gonna go off on the usual tangents into expanded universe, all kinds of other bits and pieces. So get your Infinite Quest production ready, whether it be the DVD or the iPlayer. And get ready because the quest will start in five, four, three, two, one. And there it is. Okay, so cold openers are pretty standard these days, but Doctor Who Wise, we got our first one back in the 1980s. We had a reprise of the Doctor's Regeneration from Legopolis. We got it at the start of Castro Valva, but it wasn't really until Time in the Rani, the Seventh Doctor's first story, that the pre-credit sequence actually had relevance to the plot. Okay. We've got 10th Doctor and Martha. They've used Martha's red leather jacket as the model for the story. That was the one that was in all the pre-publicity stuff when it was announced that Martha would be joining. And yes. Okay, we have a Doctor arriving who knows everything that has been going on. That wasn't really a classic Doctor Who thing. That became very much predominant in the wilderness years. And in the Virgin New Adventures with the seventh Doctor in the lead role, you frequently found that even if you're only on page three, the Doctor was on page 300, had already done pages minus 17 onwards, and had everything going on. So, yes. Here we've got the Doctor knowing full well what Balthazar has been doing. And he's about to save the world from being turned into diamonds. Quite frankly, I'm surprised Martha doesn't ask for one or two to be kept aside because diamonds are called Sarah Girl's best friend. Right. Okay. Anthony Stewarthead. This is his fourth Doctor Who. And bizarrely, even though this is his second video-based one, it's the only one where his face isn't used. He was part of Death Comes to Time, which was I think an interesting attempt to make an online Doctor Who story. He was a voice actor in it because it wasn't really a full animation, but in the slideshow type production that they did for the internet, his character was drawn as Anthony Stewart Head. You then had Excelis. And yes, even though it was a big finish audio series, his character was on the cover, so he was featured. And yes, of course, we have School Reunion where, well, he's the villain. And if you want to see some more spaceships dissolving into Rust, then I can recommend the 8th Doctor and Charlie story, The Girl Who Never Was. That is a complicated one because it comes at the end of a very big story arc. And yes, there's lots of rust action, and there is a twist at the end that only Big Fingers could get away with. Right, numbers between 99 and 0. Martha picks three of them. That means that the TARDIS's destination settings have only got just over 970,000 possible outcomes. Okay, um I think we'll f we'll kind of overlook the mathematical uncertainty of how the universe of space and time can be less than a million coordinates. And yes, in the classic series, it wasn't three numbers between 0 and 99, it was binary strings. It was all kind of things. Right, time tunnel time. Okay. Lovely touch that they've animated the TARDIS rather than just leave the standard police box in. The Time Tunnel, red and blue. Okay, past and future travel. Third Doctor was the first one to get a Time Tunnel as the title sequence. He got it for his last season, which also featured the TARDIS. Most commonly associated with the fourth Doctor, Tom Baker. And if you've got the robot DVD or the Blu-ray block the Blu-ray box set that contains Robot, there is a brilliant article, uh brilliant special feature on there about how the original time tunnel effect was done. The TARDIS did not really crop up in the title sequence for the four for the rest of the Fourth Doctor, the Fifth Doctor, and the Sixth Doctor. It was in the ridiculously animation-intensive, heavy uh seventh Doctor title sequence. And then, yeah, the eighth Doctor title sequence for the Pool McGann TV movie definitely provided, I think, some inspiration for the Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant versions. Right, okay, more on the voice acting. Right. Core. So named because it's voiced by Toby Longworth, and if you look at his acting credits for Big Finish, you go, Core! There is a hell of a long list. He plays everything, he does everything. Toby Longworth is one of the Big Finish standards. He's been there since the start, and yeah, there is a reason they keep using him because he is absolutely brilliant. Okay, Core's ability to pluck the TARDIS out of space. Okay, it's a little bit dubious the fact that they would know exactly where the TARDIS was going to leave the time vortex, but it does at least confirm that in this version of Doctor Who, as in classic series, the TARDIS is capable of travelling through the vortex and through real space. Okay, this infinite sequence predates our reality relics from the dark times. This is very definitely something that first kind of crops up in the Virgin New Adventures. And after the infinite quest, you would get an awful lot about the dark times in the interesting, I think that's the right word, the interesting attempt to do the multi-platform event Time Lord Victorious. It's also been suggested that along with the ones that uh were listed on screen, the animus from Doctor Who the Web Planet possibly comes from The Dark Times. And we'll be returning to the Animus later on. Right. Okay, a little bit about the Infinite Quest. Because we are nearly seven minutes into it. And you might be wondering why this is such a really fast-moving story with lots of chopping and changing. The Infinite Quest wasn't originally released as one episode. In the early days of RTD1, Doctor Who really did have a very huge following to the extent where there were you know there were loads of spin-offs. And one of them was kind of like Doctor Who confidential but done for school children. It was called Totally Doctor Who, and it ran for two seasons. First season was alongside David Tennant and Billy Piper, second season was alongside David Tennant and uh Freeman Adiman. And as part of each of the 12 episodes that made up series two, there was a three and a bit minute extract from Doctor Who The Infinite Quest. So far, the pre-credit sequence which ended with Baltazar swearing vengeance and everything, that was episode one. Um we've now got episode two ended with Balthazar um swearing revenge. And so this is our third episode. Okay. And yeah. Anyone who says, oh, Doctor Who was only woke in you know very recent years, here is Doctor Who commenting on fossil fuels and oil in the school kid school children version of Doctor Who in 2000 and well, 2007, I believe this was. Okay. We've got Lisa Tarbuck on screen. Well, voice of Lisa Tarbuck as the Pirate Queen. If you are a fan of Doctor Who and you are a fan of Pirates, then I can very strongly recommend Doctor Who and the Pirates. A big finish Sixth Doctor story featuring the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn. Yes, it has a certain amount of infamy because it is a musical episode. See, Doctor Who does them long before Shooty Gatwa. And do not be um do not be lulled into thinking that just because it's a musical episode, it's a happy one. Doctor Who and the Pirates is one of the most heartbreaking Doctor Who stories that Big Finish did. And okay, back to Lisa Tarbuck. Right. Lisa Tarbuck. Uh she crops up in one Big Finish as a voice artist. She's got an amazing career uh in sitcoms and being Lisa Tarbuck. She's the daughter of stand-up comedian, whatever you want to call him, um Jimmy Tarbuck. But yeah, she's definitely very talented. Um unusually for one of these things, other than the Doctor and Martha, the visuals of the characters do not really re represent what the actresses look like. Right. Okay, if you want to throw forward, oh look, skeletons in spacesuit type things, I would not like to suggest that maybe Doctor Who's Silence in the Library took any kind of inspiration from this. But you do have to stop and say, oh, there's a very big similarity with that reveal to how they were revealed in the television series four. Okay. And yes, pirates, they've got laser cutlasses. Welcome to Marching Forward, and that was the end of episode three. Right, we are now one quarter of the way through. So, let's talk about Doctor Who and animation briefly. In the wilderness years, there were various rumors of a Doctor Who animated series. There were various bits of concept art that were allegedly produced, all kinds of things, but it never came to pass. In 1999, 2000, 2001, there was the online Doctor Who adventure, Death Comes to Time. Now, of course, that's basically pre-everyone having decent broadband. So Death Comes to Time was an online story with a slideshow presentation rather than full-blown animation. You've got something similar when Big Finished You one called Real Time, again, Sixth Doctor and Evelyn, them up against the Cybermen, and yeah, there is an extended version of that on CD, but it's a bit more standard Doctor Who, shall we say, than Death Comes to Time. First one you get, which is actual proper animation, even though it is very low quality, is the prov the 2003 Doctor Who Shada. 8th Doctor, Romana, and K9 in a remake of an unmade Tom Baker story. Well, I say unmade. They made about a third of it before the BBC went on strike. And so, yeah, finally Tom Baker handed over to Paul McCann. They did Shada, and it was, you know, an attempt at the time to do some kind of slightly more basic animation. Scream of the Shalka is uh the main Doctor Who animation for online that featured Richard E. Grant as a ninth Doctor, uh, with Derek Jacoby as the master. Oh, that's sounding familiar. And it was announced at the same time as the return to TV led by Russell T. Davis. The BBC's left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. Yes, the BBC didn't just try to relaunch Doctor Who once, it tried to do it twice simultaneously, and Scream of the Shalker being the online version lost out, although quite a lot of the unused storylines that were prepared for that did turn up as big finish productions and other things. Right. Okay, Sonic Screwdriver came back with RTD, it was destroyed in season 19. Hence, uh, in the time crash uh charity episode with 10 and 5. That's why the doctor why the 10th Doctor talks about the fifth doctor going all hands free. But yeah, uh Sonic Screwdriver. Lucky they're not really it's very difficult to imagine Doctor Who these days without it, but there were quite a few years where it didn't crop up. And yes, even in the classic series, it had limitations, it didn't work on wood, it worked on just about everything else, but it wasn't quite the fix-it-all solution that it became when RTD brought it back. Okay, let's see how we're doing with this. Okay, we've got three suns by the way. Not sure exactly how three suns is gonna work for a planet. Um, this is one of those times where basically my physics brain has to turn off. Especially as earlier on we saw three suns but only one shadow. Right. We are having a quest story. So, gotta collect data chips. This is a nice info dump because, of course, we are currently on episode four. And basically, we need a bit of a recap because three-minute episodes uh spread over 12 weeks. You're not gonna for not gonna remember everything. If you want quest stories, I can recommend from William Hartnell's era, The Keys of Marinus, where basically the Doctor and companions go off on a quest to find data keys rather than data chips. Umcluding, let me see, we've got an ice world where basically, yeah, some less than pleasant things are suggested. Anyone who thinks Doctor Who was purely for kids should watch the the ice area episode of Keys of Marinus and realize that they did some things on screen which were definitely not ideal for children. Okay, you also have the Key to Time season. The whole of Classic Who's season 16 was one big quest. And I like to think that this being a Martha episode, well, this is where she gets the idea for the kind of the quest for the pieces of the well, all say is the rather laughable gun, but intentionally laughable, in Last of the Time Lords, Sound of Drums, etc. Right, okay, um, Doctor Who and Deserts. Okay, you got Planet of the Dead, which is a few years after the infant quest. You've got two episodes of the William Hartnell story The Chase, which are set on the planet Oridius. Yeah, why you would name a planet Oridius when it kind of then conveniently became a desert from being a water world, I don't think we'll ever understand. But we can say goodbye to deserts into jungles. Oh my god, the number of jungles in Doctor Who probably outnumbers the number of quarries. Okay. We have got a new location, and we have got a couple of very important voice artists coming up. But yeah, uh, if you want to know where to take a break for the end of episode 5, it's the attack of the glowy green bugs. Terence Dix, by the way, uh once famously said that when it came to Doctor Who, the colour of monsters is green. And this next segment is definitely gonna provide us with green monsters aplenty. Right. I have to say that between Baltazar and this gentleman that is now arriving, I think we've got the inspiration for the Hass in series four when Martha turns up again and goes on a trip with the Doctor and Donna in The Doctor's Daughter. Right. Okay, voice artist number one is Mr. Frog Person on screen. He is being voiced by Paul Clayton. He's got a very distinctive voice and he puts it to incredible use when he turns up in the Big Finish version of Torchwood. Torchwood had four seasons on TV of varying degrees of quality, along with lots of standalone single CD stories. Big Finish also did three complete seasons of Torchwood, and basically Paul Clayton takes over as essentially the head of Torchwood, a character called Mr. Colchester. I can recommend Torchwood, um, Aliens Among Us and God Among Us if you've not seen certain Marvel. Productions or are not a fan of certain Marvel stories because it turns out that those first two years may have borrowed their plot from a certain Marvel comic series. Not gonna say which one because that really would be a massive spoiler. Okay. The other one we've got, uh we have got the voice of the Queen, Lizzie Hopley. Okay. Lizzie Hopley has the distinction of not just being a void art voice artist for Big Finish, but she is also a writer for them, all kinds of things. But the reason I wanted to make specific mention of her is that she crops up in an 8th Doctor Charlie and Kelis story called Terra Firma. It's a standalone story. It actually comes after the whole big kind of taking the Doctor out of the universe uh story arc that they did. It is the Doctor, Charlie, and Kellez returning to our universe. Unfortunately, kind of running into Davros and the Daleks, as you do. But more importantly, Lizzie Hopley plays a companion that had travelled with the Eighth Doctor that previously we knew nothing about. So this whole idea of the TV series slotting in things, it's like, oh, you never mentioned that you were the fugitive doctor, always because you forgot all about it. It's basically a similar situation with the Doctor and former companions that Davros has maybe possibly done a few things to the Doctor's brain about. Right. Okay, uh the monster on the rampage that turns out to be a man in a suit. Okay, bit of a science fiction trope. But gotta hand it to them. If you watch, or sorry, if you go to kind of like the Doctor Who Annuals of the mid-60s, it's actually very similar that scene to when it turned out that there was some zombie, giant insect-like things, that had a monster inside them. Right, sorry, that had a human inside them. Okay, uh the reason I want to mention this is it's time to mention the author of The Infinite Quest, Alan Barnes. Alan Barnes has written loads of Doctor Who for Big Fingish. He is a very knowledgeable person, and you can be pretty certain that if you think something is possibly a reference, he will have put it in as a very subtle kind of reference as well. He is that sort of person. The approach of the monster, by the way, was the end of episode six. So we are now over halfway through. And yeah, pretty impressive in 20-something minutes to have managed six cliffhangers. The termite queen that you're seeing on screen, by the way, um, looks very similar to a monster from a big fish story called Shadow of the Scourge. Um that saw Seventh Doctor, Ace, and Professor Benice Summerfield deal with termite preying mantis type creatures uh who were invading from another dimension. Okay. So a bit more okay, where am I on my nose? Yeah. If you want another story where you have got massive termite mounds, then I can recommend the Virgin new adventure called Birthright. And birthright is very noticeable because it is what we would now call a Doctor Light adventure. Whereas these days the Doctor Light adventures are done for practical reasons, Birthright was done as a Doctor Light adventure just for the sake of it. Okay, just exactly why the Doctor is missing is then revealed in the following book, because whereas the TV does the Doctor Light adventures and then moves on, when Birthright came out as the Doctor Light one, it was paired with Iceberg, which was a Doctor Heavy book, and basically the two books run side by side. And yeah, going back to my comments at the start about the Virgin New Adventures, Birthright is a classic one for us turning up in the middle of a story where the Doctor has set events in motion, but we don't really know what's going on till towards the end. Right. Okay. Basically, Scream of the Shalker launched then the animated episodes of Doctor Who to replace the missing visuals from episodes that no longer exist in the archives. So basically, Scream of the Shalker came in a bit under budget. So the company that did it said, why don't we animate two missing episodes? And that is why the Invasion actually came out on DVD complete with the two missing episodes animated. Um it's an awkward one because six episodes of The Invasion exist, two are missing. The visual continuity between the animation and the existing episodes is a little bit jarring because they kind of redesign props and sets between animated and real episodes. Okay, but that means though that at least we got the episodes and it was so well received that we are still getting animated episodes to this day. Different styles for different episodes. Uh the Celestial Toy Maker certainly had its own unique style for a missing episode animation. But things like the Macro Terra, the Savages, Faceless Ones, they are all done in a reasonably similar style to what we've got at the moment. And essentially, yeah, if it wasn't for Screen with a Shalka, whether or not we would have had a successful range of missing episodes animated is questionable. Right. Okay. So Paul Clayton has left this the recording studio, and we're about to go on to our Snow World. And yeah, gotta hand it to them. If you're gonna make a 50-minute episode which is animated, this is the way to do it. You know, we have had so many different environments. Can you imagine them trying to do this many environments in one televised episode of Doctor Who? Um Keys of Marinus at least did kind of like, you know, different sets every 25-minute episodes or so, but certainly I think this is the episode that takes the record for sheer number of locations in such a small space of time. Right. Okay, are you wearing Cermals? The doctor puts his coat on, but Martha doesn't. Why, Martha? You know, you've got a massive wardrobe. The wardrobe over the years has thrown out some brilliant outfits. I mean, and again, that's not just a recent thing. In the 1960s, there is a missing episode uh called The Mythmakers, where it's revealed that the TARDIS wardrobe even has Trojan soldier outfits in there and Trojan handmaiden outfits in there. And you have got a question just exactly why the Doctor is travelling around with a wardrobe packed with Trojan warrior outfits. Um Stephen Taylor does look quite good in them from what few pictures there are. Just try not to picture William Hartnell maybe in one of them. Okay. Um, a quick side note out of the realms of Doctor Who. This idea of the Doctor's brain being scanned always reminds me of the Red Dwarf episode Justice, um where Arnold Rimmer, who lives his life by the book, has his brain scanned and suddenly finds there are accounts of murder in there because he feels guilty for them rather than it actually being murder. Right, okay. Last of our big name guest actors, and again, you know, multiple locations is a great way to ramp in the number of guest artists. The current voice on screen is being provided by Stephen Grifes. Now, in terms of Doctor Who, he cropped up in a very early Doctor Who big fingish called Primeval, which definitely put his deliciously evil sounding voice to good use. But in terms of science fiction, he is one of the two actors to have portrayed Space Commander Travis in Blake 7. And if you look at his IMDB, he is well, so he was one of those actors who was absolutely never out of work. But he was a proper actor, you know, doing one-off roles in this, that, and the other rather than playing the same thing over and over again. Okay. Currently, by the way, we're on episode 9, and we've got, oh, well, we've got the robots, haven't we? Okay. Doctor Who in the waters of Mars. He said he wasn't too keen on gimmicky robots, you know, gadget gadget. So, I want to point you in the direction of a comic strip which has got an absolutely superb array of robots on display. There is another reason for recommending it as well, which I'll get to, but Doctor Who, the Iron Legion, was the first Doctor Who weekly comic strip set in a parallel timeline where the Roman Empire didn't fall and is now being run by robots. And to be honest, the only way you could really do something like that and get it do it well would either be in a comic strip, which you then animated, or if you want the characters but not the visuals, Doctor Who and the Iron Legion is done by Big Fingish as one of two comic strip adaptations that they did. And if you want to know what the other one was, well, it's that never ever been referenced again. Doctor Who story, The Starbeast. So, yes, if you want Roman Legion robot action in audio, you can get it as part of the comic strip adaptations, which is paired with the Star Beast, and we all know what happened to that one. Right. Okay. Gold. You'll notice when we had the safe opened earlier, there was quite a lot of gold in there, and we talked about gold fusion. So, why am I bringing up the Web Planet? And released how is this going to actually end up being really useful for the 12th Doctor? Okay. Web Planet is a rather strange Doctor Who story from the William Hartnell era, which does its best, as we've got on screen at the moment, to pack in some visuals that maybe the TV series probably shouldn't have done because it was a little bit outside of the budget. But most importantly, the web planet featured a creature called the Animus, a giant foam rubber spider type affair, that had the ability to control gold. But in episode 1, the Animus also has control over the TARDIS, which kind of suggests that the TARDIS has got a lot of gold in it. Okay. Why is this important? So you then fast forward to the Tom Baker story, Revenge of the Cybermen, which is set on Vogue, Planet of Gold, which has the Time Lord symbol in it. Well, actually, it wasn't the Time Lord symbol at the time, it was just a pretty decoration. But basically, yeah, uh, you watch Revenge of the Cybermen, and suddenly you see the big Time Lord symbol in the background that would eventually come to be associated with every single episode that had the Time Lords in it. So I'm wondering if accidentally Animus being able to control Gold and the TARDIS means that the Time Lords had a vested interest in the Doctor investigating the Animus, getting rid of it, because yeah, earlier on we talked about the Dark Times. I've long since suspected that the Animus came from the Dark Times and was a threat to the Time Lords because basically it could control gold, hence, the Time Lords needed gold for their TARDIS, had a trading agreement with Voga, Planet of Gold, and the Gold Fusion that is about to be referenced again, actually crops up in Robot of Sherwood. So for those of you who thought this idea of gold fusion was a 12th Doctor thing, and having a spaceship powered by gold seemed a little bit unlikely. Well, actually it has its origins in this, the Infinite Quest. You see, this is one of those things that they kind of they put out Doctor Who and they put it out in ways that very few people watch it. Infinite Quest, um, as I said, part of Totally Doctor Who. Totally Doctor Who, being a children's thing, never really even broke the 1 million viewer barrier. It was between about 0.6 and 0.9 million viewers each episode, which for children's TV, by the way, is quite good in the UK. Um, but yeah, it's great because they can sneak out all these bits of Doctor Who lore that no one remembers, and then suddenly it's like, oh yeah, we'll do them in the TV series, and it will look terribly, terribly original. And it's like, no, actually, we did them a few years ago, we just snuck it out under the radar, um, and we're reusing the ideas that no one knew we'd re we're reusing the ideas no one knew we had used in the first place. Right. It's also very convenient, of course, that gold is valuable for you know for non-pretty reasons. Yeah, it gives you a nice good way to get a get people on quests for gold. Right. Okay, we are now in episode 11, by the way. Okay, and squaw. Ooh, interesting comment. Because okay, squaw, yeah. Perches on Balthazar's finger, but later on we're gonna see score a lot larger, which kind of suggests that score is made of living metal. So if you want stories where there are living metal or metal that can grow, I can strongly recommend pointing you towards Doctor Who Robot, Tom Baker's first story, and also Doctor Who Silver Nemesis, which had living metal as part of the plot. Okay. You knew only my TARDIS could track each data chip on planet. Only my TARDIS could track each data chip. It is worth pointing out that there are two possible meanings to that line. The first one is that, okay, the Doctor's TARDIS is a type 40. And it was basically rescued from the knacker's yard. This means that it probably is old, probably has things in it that modern TARDISSes wouldn't bother having. So, yes, this wonderful kind of ability to read these data chips probably phased out the same way that very few households these days have ways to play VHS tapes. Which is a shame because I've got a whacking great box of money to play. Anyway, the other reason, of course, is that okay, this is middle of series three. We haven't yet got to Utopia onwards. So therefore, at the moment, we are still under the belief that the Doctor is the only Time Lord. You know, the Master isn't yet on the scene, and so it is not unreasonable to think that actually this is possibly the only TARDIS in existence. I mean, you've got the whole problem about what happened to all the other TARDICE in the Time War, and later on we would then find out, of course, that you know, the 12th Doctor can revisit the first Doctor in Twice Upon a Time. Loads of issues about, you know, multiple TARDICE and everything. But yeah, at the moment, we are of the RTD1 era thinking that this is probably the only TARDIS in the universe, and so it's not actually unreasonable that it would be the only thing out there that could read these data chips. Right, and I do want to take a moment to say, isn't the animation actually, you know, the artwork and everything is really fantastic? You know, as I've said, you couldn't get away with doing this many locations in a 45-minute or so episode on TV. But that doesn't mean that they, you know, that they've given themselves an easy task in the infinite quest. Okay, it would have been very tempting to say, well, we'll have the TARDIS, you know, we'll travel with it, but do we really need to see the inside of it? You know, you think about, you know, we've got what maybe one or two minutes at most inside the TARDIS, but they have gone to the trouble of faithfully recreating the control room, animating the controls, everything going on. It is a beautiful attempt to do it. And then, yeah, you look at all of the other bits, and you say, Yeah, they could have skimped, they could have done it in maybe one or two settings at most, but no, they've really pulled the stops out. Right, okay. One thing to remember is that yes, RTD1, especially series one, two, and three, had that wonderful, very subtle underscore of the companion falling in love with the doctor. So that might give you an indication of how we've suddenly got two tenth doctors on our screen, one with Martha and one flying in on Squawk. Doctor being in love with companion. Um Companion being in love with the Doctor. It's one of the big things of the Eighth Doctor and Charlie arc that Charlie became besotted with the Doctor. And when Whether or not you think they handled that particularly well is up to you to decide. But yeah. It's also worth noticing that with the William Hartnell doctor accidentally got engaged to an OAP Aztec woman. The doctor and love don't really go hand in hand, but companion and love seems to be a much bigger thing these days. Where is she? Right. Pet Peeve. Okay, the doctor is going to turn out being away for three years. His clothes have held out really well. I don't think I've got any clothes at the last three years when I've been imprisoned on a snow planet. But, okay, it's part of the illusion, of course, that he still looks exactly as he has done, so that Martha is convinced. And this, by the way, continues the tradition of the Doctor and the Doppelganger. First Doctor never met the never met himself, but he met a Dalek duplicate. And in a missing story called The Massacre, also known as the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve, there was the Abbot of Amboise, who was the exact duplicate of William Hartnell. Split Screen, though, hadn't been brought into existence, the two never met. And in the chase, when the Doctor met the Dalek Duplicate, I think Duplicate has never ever been used in such a loose fashion before. The second doctor did meet his duplicate, Salamander, face to face, for a brief piece of Split Screen. The third Doctor saw a ghost of himself. In the Day of the Daleks, we opened with the Doctor and Joe Grant seeing projections of their future selves, but the flip side of this, the future selves seeing projections of their past selves, got excised from the script. So if you want the punchline to it, you needed to read the target novelisation. The fourth doctor had the duplicate of himself in Megloss, and there is also an off-screen duplicate of himself in The Stones of Blood. The fifth Doctor met himself in Ark of Infinity. The sixth Doctor never actively met himself, but shared a face with Commander Maxil. Ooh, also strangely from Ark of Infinity. It means that the seventh Doctor was the first Doctor that didn't actually meet his duplicate. Eighth Doctor. Well, there's been an awful lot of Eighth Doctor. Whether or not you count the kind of things like Kedroyer, where he didn't meet himself just once but twice as canonical is up to you. 9th Doctor never met himself. Same as the 7th Doctor. But the 10th did, the 11th did. 12th Doctor shared a face. Basically, if you want to get into trouble, make sure you look like a regeneration of the Doctor. Okay, Rust and Wishful Thinking, Sonic Screwdriver. Yeah. I think basically this is one of the few times when actually I can believe in the Sonic screwdriver triggering the collapse of the ship. Whether or not you believe that that should work, you know, so well in you know a partial vacuum type environment is entirely up to you. But basically, yeah, we've got the Sonic screwdriver validly being used to kind of be the conclusion of the story. And yeah, the ship breaking up is just beautiful.

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I know he was rotten to the core.

SPEAKER_00 47:55

They really have gone out of their way to make the kind of the visuals of this distinctive and impressive. Some reviewers said it was rather lukewarm. You know, they weren't overly impressed. But I've got to say, I'm actually really really like, okay, you did this for a kid's show. You know, they could have skimped on so much, but they really didn't. Infinite Quest um is the first of two David Tennant animated episodes. In the in the year where there were just the specials, you know, Waters of Mars, Planet of the Dead, that kind of thing, there was also another animated special called Dreamland that was also released in bits before being released full, you know, as a full episode. And yeah, um we've got all kinds of rumors of the animated preschool kids' version that's still in development at at the time of recording this commentary. Executive producers for Doctor Who, Russell T. Davis and Julie Gardner. No matter what you think, whether or not you think an animated story is canon or not, that was the Doctor Who team throwing their all into an animated adventure to keep the younger viewers interested. That was the Infinite Quest, well, very little of the Infinite Quest and an awful lot of other bits and pieces. Um and yeah, Dreamland does have an official commentary. Uh that one still knocks around on various sites because it was released by the BBC as a downloadable file. And yeah, hopefully hopefully Um we will get more Doctor Who one day, but yeah, that theoretically now gives you some kind of commentary for the Infinite Quest, and it means that every tenant episode has got something to go with it.