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.

I dove into The Daleks' Master Plan this morning with some trepidation. As I have said before, "How can I miss you if you won't go away?" The good news is, this story is a vast improvement over the previous outing. The better news is, I completely forgot that this story marks the first appearance of Nicholas Courtney on the show. The director liked working with him so much that he asked him back the next year to appear in The Web of Fear, and the rest is history. So yeah, sure, he isn't the Brigadier yet, but that's just fine. His calm demeanor and stiff-upper-lippedness in the face of adversity shines through and raises the level of the story immensely.

Let's talk about that.

Much like the Thunder Dome, on Doctor Who when one companion leaves another companion must soon come aboard. In these early days, the swap is clearly in service to future stories already written -- teenager Susan leaves, and so teenager Vicki slots right in. Man of Action Ian leaves, and so Man of Action Steven slots right in. Arguably Barbara fails this mold, to which I would say: 1) Barbara was a goddess, and cannot be replaced, and 2) More likely, whatever future scenes had been written for Barbara could have been picked up easily by Vicki, so the same principle still applies. And so, with today's departure of Vicki also comes today's arrival of Katarina. Of course, Katarina won't be around all that long... But that's a conversation for another day (specifically: Wednesday). But today we have Trojan horses and Achilles tendons to discuss.

My son was sick last night, spectacularly so. The good news is that he seems to be feeling better today. But I was up doing a full hazmat cleaning routine at 1am, and he was up for several hours after that just feeling miserable. None of us got any sleep, and I don't feel up to leaving the house to go walk on a treadmill. Still, this is only the second day out of 49 that I have missed. That's a pretty good record. I'll finish up The Mythmakers tomorrow.

I am deep into recon territory now. It looks to me like it will be nine more days before I watch another non-reconstructed episode, and fully nineteen of the next 24 stories I watch will be either fully or partially reconstructed. As for today's story, it was the first half of The Myth Makers. We did the Romans in the second season, so it's only fitting that we should do the Greeks in the third. More specifically, the story is centered on the climax of the ten-year siege of Troy. It does help, when watching the story, to be familiar with The Iliad, since all of the major characters are there and some are played against type for irony. But it is another pure historical, and those are my favorite type of First Doctor stories.

Today's episode, Mission to the Unknown. is a bit of an oddity in the history of Doctor Who. It is the only story in the entire fifty-plus year history of the show to not include even a brief appearance by either the Doctor or any companions. All of the regulars went on vacation for a week, and instead we got a weird little story about a damaged spaceship, some murderous plants, the Daleks, and a brand new Axis of Galactic Evil. There is also one other significant detail, for which I will leave you, my dear imaginary readers, in suspense for the time being.