Is it like pulling off a bandage quickly, thus sparing you pain, or is it like using a hypodermic needle that has twice the diameter causing more pain.

Either way, tell us what you think about Mr. Schubert's nefarious plans to melt the Earth's ice caps and collect all our invaluable K7.

Download or listen to the episode here.

While everyone who commented generally liked the series a lot (I truly fail to see the reason why), I decided to respond only to the first posting as I deemed it being the one that "opened the floodgates."

A user who goes by the name "ascringle" wrote:

First, this was NOT a children's show. It was a prime time network show on NBC. I'm old enough (50 years old) to remember this show being on at that time. It may have ended up becoming a children's show in syndication, but on its original network run it was a prime time TV show.

Second, the show runner was Herb Solow. This man WORKED on classic Star Trek which is why I find it so incredibly hard for him to have turned around and worked on something which eventually became nothing more than trash. All one has to do is watch the pilot (which did show some potential in spite of a number of its glaring scientific flaws) and then see how the series absolutely degenerated into something which is BENEATH the quality of a children's show with such episodes as Imp, C.W. Hyde, and The Naked Montague.

No, I cannot agree. This TV series is absolute garbage. It could have been something really good (even Patrick Duffy seems to think so), but in the end fell WAY short of other mediocre TV sci-fi shows such as Fantastic Journey or Logan's Run (which as a TV series ended up being an insult to the theatrical film, but that's a discussion for another time).

Ultimately it seemed to me (and my interpretation may not, of course, be what was intended) that in this podcast - and in the title - what Eugene and Ben were objecting too, when you strip everything else away, was the use of the bootstrap paradox. I think Moffat first used it in, and it is certainly most prominent and unadorned in Blink, which Eugene and Ben must hate? Surely not.

Also - Eugene and Ben - you almost persuaded me, back in Fusion Patrol 15, that I preferred The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang to the awesome Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways but now you're ripping it apart? Do you still like the story overall, despite your issues with the non-linear causality?

Oh, and a couple more things. I didn't ignore the plot of Let's Kill Hitler and yet I still enjoyed it. RTD is on record as saying he wanted Doctor Who to compete with reality TV but I don't think that's where Moffat has gone - I think the growing complexity of his storytelling is evidence of that. Reality TV, anyway, has very simple linear causality. You have a vote, someone gets booted out...

Finally, Eugene - you had a pop at 1930s cartoons in this episode, but a while back discussing UFO you told me not to judge 60s TV by 21 century standards (something I meant to disagree with - but haven't got round to yet!) Isn't there an inconsistency there? ;-)

Another lively bit of podcasting - enjoyed it a lot.

Have you say!

Reflecting on this episode, the thing that stands out for me about it was how Russell T. Davies it was. It could almost have been written by RTD, and I wouldn't be surprised to find it was originally intended for his era: the modern setting on a council estate, the cuckoo alien, the physical manifestation of emotion (the distress call through time and space) and in particular everything being resolved by wuv.

I wonder what we would have made of this had it been near the beginning of the 11th Doctor's run? The Moffatt/Smith style is now stamped with such confidence on the show that a script like this can be taken on its merits - not that any of the parallels are I've drawn are by way of criticism: RTD has written some of the best Doctor Who even if this format has sometimes failed, too. But I think some of the strongest elements of the episode were due to the visual style of the last couple of seasons, and in particular Matt Smith's fascinating alienness, which is just so extraordinary in this kind of context. That helped lift the opening of the episode and mitigated some of the weaker elements like the stock neighbours.

You can download the podcast episode in iTunes, or at the podcast page. It's a long one as not only are there three of us, but as the series finale, we take a look back over the series as a whole and pronounce final judgment.

After editing the episode, I had a few further thoughts and a few concepts we either cut out, or didn't occur to us at the time.  I'll start those out in this thread, but I suggest you listen to the podcast first.

And while I cannot guarantee that this video will remain available online, you can (at the moment) watch Sapphire & Steel's final adventure on youtube.

Oh yes, that's right, let's send him through time.

Actually what I was saying was we'd all be going over the episodes again during the mini-hiatus, as we would have been had this occurred in any previous season. But I think there'll be more to be found this time than ever before. But it's not like homework in the sense you'll get given lines if you don't submit on time. You can still have fun watching just once. Just like you can enjoy watching Hamlet just once.

Ben: perhaps you feel there are loose ends, niggles, that result from this approach to baking into the story little Easter Eggs that are only revealed on the second or third viewing? I'd argue that they are well written enough to mean they don't actually detract from the first viewing; at least no more than niggles and loose ends during the RTD era which in fact were just niggles and genuine loose ends. Two episodes may have the same quality of "first viewability" as I shall call it, and yet one be far less rewarding than the other on second viewing.

As a mathematician I'm tempted to liken this "rewatchability" to a geometric progression (my own experience suggests an exponential curve should be a good fit). So the coefficient of rewatchability (r) determines the quality ratio of subsequent viewings to the quality of the first viewing (q), such that the second viewing is qr, the third is qr^2 and so forth. Of course r lies in the interval [0,1).

Thus for something like Hamlet, the magnitude of q would be extremely large, but r would also be approaching 1 (rewatching is highly rewarding). For something like, say, the Web Planet, both q and r would be close to zero. However I'd say if you compared Turn Left to A Good Man Goes to War, q would be higher for the former than the latter, but r would be higher for the latter than the former, so that although watching Turn Left would be more rewarding initially, for sufficiently large n, A Good Man Goes to War would be more rewarding on the nth viewing.

I seem to have rather strayed off my point. I'll stop now ;-)

In that vein, don't read on to the next message, because there were a couple points I forgot to raise in the podcast.

Are we the only ones?  Did you actually like

It's currently on YouTube, for as long as it lasts, and you can see UFO S01E05 Survival right here.

Discuss it right here....

There was a lot to mock in this episode and not all that much time to mock it.

The fundamental flaw of the episode was, like the Pisces before it, trying to find a way to insert pre-catastrophe people into the storyline.  To do so requires a certain convoluted story contrivance.  The first time they used cryogenic suspension, which was plausible, then the effects of time dilation, also plausible, but not very and now they've used extreme youth serum and a plot hole you could have flown the Ark through to justify its use.

For dramatic purposes, the production crew obviously decided they needed "voices from pre-catastophe" but that runs completely contrary to the basic premise of the show:  That everyone is gone and the knowledge has been lost.

A known (as yet unfixed) bug of the forum software that we're using is that it garbles the e-mail address into [yourusername]@foo.com which, unless you happen to be at foo.com is unlikely to be your real address.  

Our forum software has several configuration options for sending you notifications, but that can only work if your e-mail address is accurate.

Also, you can also input your twitter name and your profile page will show your most recent tweets.