First off, so I don't bury the lede: Today my five-day moving average weight was under 290 lbs for the first time since I started this project. Can I get a what what? I am mightily pleased. On a day-to-day basis it seems like nothing is happening, and then I look at the chart and hit this kind of milestone, and I am re-invigorated.

Today was the first half of perhaps the most lost of all of the lost episodes. For most of them, at least some footage remains if only a fragment from a television capture or some such. But for The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve there is literally nothing except the audio track and some still photographs. There is not even a clear consensus on what the closing credits said. It's not surprising, in that this story comes on the heels of what some (not me) consider the greatest Dalek story of all time, and is instead a purely historical story with no science fiction of any kind to be found aside from the TARDIS materializing at the beginning and dematerializing at the end. In between, the story recounts a historical event that is not nearly as notorious as any of the other ones portrayed in these early historicals. On top of that, the Doctor disappears from most of the story so that it becomes a tale of Steven encountering a group of Huguenots in a tavern and being swept up in the impending wave of violence.

For me, though, I am pretty jazzed about the story. I have already said how much I enjoy the pure historicals, and this is the third one written by John Lucarotti (Marco Polo, The Aztecs). It is a foregone conclusion that this story is not going to have a happy ending, but along the way there are some things to be learned about the French Religious Wars.

Let's talk about that.

Today was the big finish for The Daleks' Master Plan, and also the big finish for Sara Kingdom. Is the universe saved?  Does the Dalek Time Destructor work? Does William Hartnell come back from his unexpected vacation right at the climax of the story?

Let's talk about that.

In the entire fifty-four-year history of Doctor Who there is precisely one episode that initially aired on my birthday.Escape Switch first broadcast on January 15th, 1966 -- two years before I was born -- and, as luck would have it, is one of the few surviving intact episodes from The Daleks' Master Plan. On top of that, the two episodes I watched this morning really played well together as a single unit, both taking place during a side trip to ancient Egypt at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Oh, also: this morning marks my 100th episode watched since starting this project.

Let's talk about that.

Just a brief mini-post to say, "Yay! Doctor Who is back!"  This one doesn't count, I didn't watch it on the treadmill and I won't circle back to it for nearly two years. But still... I like Bill a lot, and it looks like Peter Capaldi is going to go out on a strong season. No spoilers, because my west coast friends haven't seen it yet. I'll just say - the thing I was worried about turned out not to be a thing. It's so nice to see Capaldi be allowed to play warmth, after his first series spent so much time with him playing alien and inhuman. I am very disappointed he won't be around longer. In any case, this season has started off strong and I am very much looking forward to the rest of it. Yay!

I know, I know, it's Easter. But the two episodes I watched this morning were originally aired on Christmas Day and New Year's Day respectively. So they've got me in the holiday mood. And hey, it must be Christmas because tonight I get the awesome present of the first new regular Doctor Who episode in over a year. So that's pretty cool. But getting back to The Daleks' Master Plan, half of this morning's viewing was worth watching. The other half? Not so much.

Let's talk about that.

With just over 24 hours to spare, I have finally completed all of my data entry. I had over 800 individual episodes to manually enter into my database, in order to have the structure that I need. As of this moment, all of the data on the Progress section of the page is 100% dynamically read from the database. This means that as new episodes air (like, tomorrow night at 9pm for example), I will be able to enter them in and see the story and episode counts increase and the percentages adjust accordingly. Yay!

This morning was the first day back on my own, now fully-repaired, treadmill. It was a comedy of errors. Part of repairing it was to spray some silicone lubricant underneath the new belt, and apparently a small bit of silicone got onto the front of my right shoe. I had to stop and change shoes after five minutes because every time I would stride forward, my right foot would lose traction and slip out from under me. Then somehow the magnetic key became jostled, and the whole thing cut out again thirty minutes later. Ultimately I made it through, and I think I have worked out the kinks and gotten the refurbished treadmill back into proper shape. Oh, and... I kid you not, at one point during the second episode this morning Sara Kingdom made a crack to Steven about treadmills. It's like the show was speaking directly to me across a gulf of fifty two years!

Let's talk about that!

The bad news: I missed another day of being on the treadmill, because my son has a sinus infection. I spent the morning taking him to the doctor, and then getting the necessary prescriptions. By the time I had him sorted out there was not time left in the day to work out.

The good news: the parts for my treadmill arrived this evening, and I have successfully replaced the faulty circuit board and belt. It took about an hour, plus lots of profanity, but it is done. Tomorrow morning I will be back in business, and diving back into The Daleks' Master Plan.

This morning the treadmill pretty well kicked my butt. I had pushed the speed up yesterday, and I pushed it up another notch today. That turned out to be a notch too far. On top of that, while I already knew about one of the major plot points in today's viewing I was completely caught off guard with the second big moment. While watching the reconstruction of the second and third episodes of The Daleks' Master Plan (which primarily consists of audio and still images), I was not fully prepared for it to cut to real footage for the first big moment. It was a huge gut-punch that left me reeling.

Let's talk about that.