The Doctor has a very limited first date repetoire: watching the destruction of Earth with weird aliens, visiting a far-future traffic jam full of weird aliens, seeing an entire marketing department being slaughtered by weird aliens, and stopping a gentle space whale from being endlessly tortured by English people. And his first date with Clara is no exception: hiring a space moped from a weird alien called Dor’een and visiting The Rings of Akhaten.

It’s in her essay on The Bells of Saint John that El Sandifer says that the second part of Series 7 “is an extended exercise in not fucking up too badly that is, in everyone’s eyes, undermined by fucking up at least once, though opinions differ on precisely where.”

The Rings of Akhaten came ninth last in Doctor Who Magazine’s First Fifty Years poll in 2014. (Yes, that’s number 233, as Peter happened to remember with perfect accuracy.) You can find the rest of the results here. Time and the Rani came third last, so, you know.

Emilia Jones, who played Merry in this episode, is 20 years old now, of course. In 2021, she starred in a film called CODA, in which she played Marlee Matlin’s daughter. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2022.

Yes, a before-they-were-famous Rock “the Dwayne” Johnson did feature in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager called Tsunkatse, in which he is beaten up by Jeri Ryan’s Seven of Nine. Here is Johnson admitting to this on Twitter (complete with video evidence), and here is Jeri Ryan’s reply.

Here’s Big Finish announcing the casting of Lauren Cornelius as Dodo Chaplet in the First Doctor Adventures. The press release is curiously reticent about what accent Lauren is intending to use.

Nathan is on Twitter as @nathanbottomley, Brendan is @brandybongos and Todd is @ToddBeilby. 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 you can check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll use your wedding album to buy gin and cigarettes.

You can find Jodie into Terror, our flashcast on 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 recording our final episode in just a few weeks from now.

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, whose coverage of Series B will be starting soon.

And finally, there’s our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we found ourselves enjoying an episode of Star Trek: Voyager called State of Flux.