This week, we’re joined by Adam Richard, shrunk to a microscopic size, and sent on a mission consisting mostly of ruthless moral self-examination. Meanwhile, somewhere else completely, a romcom is taking place. It’s Into the Dalek.

Some of us are old enough to remember the constant television repeats of Fantastic Voyage (1966), in which a small submarine and its crew are shrunk to microscopic size to remove a blood clot from the brain of a scientist who is defecting to the West. The glamorous catsuited assistant to the crew’s chief scientist is played by a young Raquel Welch.

Richard identifies as the chief influences on this episode Fantastic Voyage and Rob Shearman’s Doctor Who episode Dalek. (Which we discuss on Episode 137, To Mainsplain Aliens.)

Of course, Peter Capaldi was most well known for his role in Armando Ianucci’s political comedy series The Thick of It, in which he played Malcolm Tucker, the Prime Minister’s sweary and frankly terrifying political enforcer. Ianucci will go on to create Veep, in which Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays the hapless Vice President of the United States, and Avenue 5, starring Hugh Laurie as the captain of a luxury space cruiser which goes catastrophically off course.

Moffat’s first sitcom Joking Apart has been mentioned before on the podcast. Its main character also discovers how terrible he is as a person during the course of the first series.

Class was a short-lived and ill-fated Doctor Who spinoff, written by Patrick Ness and set at Coal Hill Academy. Peter Capaldi appears as the Doctor in Episode 1, and the season itself is broadcast between Series 9 and Series 10 of Doctor Who. It is cancelled after the first eight-episode run.

Trinity Wells, the American newsreader during the first RTD era, does have her very own Big Finish story: Driving Miss Wells by James Goss, which is part of the second Lives of Captain Jack box set, released in 2019.

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, James is @ohjamessellwood, and Richard is @RichardLStone. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at @FTEpodcast.

Adam is @adamrichard on Twitter, adamrichard on Instagram and Fabulous Adam Richard on Facebook. His website is at www.adamrichard.com.au. He can currently be found theorising about Doctor Who on his own podcast Adam Richard Has a Theory. And there’s also his other podcast Me. I Am. A Memoir. The Meaning of ‘The Meaning of Mariah Carey’, which is a deep dive into all of the most illuminating details of the entire Carey œuvre.

We’re also on Facebook, and you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll continue to make almost no effort at all to learn any of your names.

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.

Our James Bond 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. Plans are already well underway for our coverage of Series C later in the year, probably.

And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. We’ll be back with a new episode this coming Friday, but while you’re waiting for that, you can still catch our most recent episode, in which Joe and Nathan got together in person for the first time ever to watch the notorious Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Justice.