As of this morning, I have taken more than 500,000 steps since the start of this project. When I began nearly three months ago, it was all I could do to last 55 minutes at 3 miles per hour, reaching a grand total of 2.4 miles per day. I have been gradually increasing the speed over time, to the point where this morning I was up to 3.9 miles per hour and a total distance walked of 3.57 miles -- that's over a mile further I am walking every day. I'm not sure at what point I will cross over from walking to jogging, but I expect it will happen before I meet Sarah Jane Smith.

Anyway, today I watched the first half of The Underwater Menace on DVD. The first episode was a reconstruction using telesnaps, and I have to say that although the audio quality was superior I really do think that Loose Cannon does a better job with the video reconstruction. The DVD reconstruction was missing any descriptive subtitles during several passages where they would have been helpful to clarify the action. Also, all of the pictures were static and sometimes poorly timed, as opposed to how Loose Cannon frequently animates things by moving or panning the picture, or by cutting to facial closeups of the characters who are speaking. The second episode, however, was an honest-to-goodness real existing video. I was suddenly struck that, fully a dozen episodes into the Second Doctor's era, this was the first time I was actually seeing Patrick Troughton in action.

Let's talk about that.

The Underwater Menace - Episodes 1 & 2

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

I have to say from the start, this story is a bit dodgy. Eventually there arrives a hard science element to the plot, but before you get there it is a whole lot of Atlanteans running around in fish-themed headgear threatening human sacrifices and such. It is very much out of character from the last several non-historical stories such as The War Machines and The Power of the Daleks. It also features a villain whose only motivation seems to be "be a villain".

Basically, the TARDIS materializes on a volcanic island and shortly thereafter all of the leads are captured and sent down some kind of elevator to the underwater city of Atlantis. This is not a historical episode, the story definitely takes place at some point in the early 1970's. The surviving Atlanteans are a tribal culture that believes in ritual sacrifice and such, but they also have an advanced level of technology -- partially because some time ago they took in a visionary scientist named Zaroff, who faked his own death to the world above and then fled to Atlantis to continue his research. 

Zaroff was accepted by the Atlanteans because he promised them he could raise Atlantis back to the surface, if they supply him with the laboratory and materials he needs. Unfortunately, as the Doctor discovers, his plan isn't so much to "raise Atlantis" as it is to "lower the oceans by draining them into the Earth's core" -- the end result of which will be all of the water turning to steam inside the Earth's mantle, and then completely destroying the planet in the resulting catastrophic explosion. When the Doctor asks him why he would do such a thing, he basically says that it would be the ultimate human achievement to actually blow up the Earth. Huh? I gather that, in the original script, there was some additional motivation about his wife and child being killed in a car accident, but that didn't make it to the final shooting script.

At one point all four of the leads are about to be sacrificed to the gods, until the Doctor fast talks his way out of that crisis. Then shortly after that Polly is almost given involuntary surgery to have plastic gills installed so that she can become a fish-person and be used as slave labor out on the ocean floor harvesting plankton and such. Of course she escapes that fate, and eventually links back up with Ben and Jamie who had been sent off as slaves in the mining operation digging the doomsday hole through the Earth's crust. Needless to say, they also rapidly escaped their fate.

Also along the way, the Doctor gets to wear an elaborate Atlantean headdress and cloak as a disguise, which he finds completely delightful. The thing that the telesnaps fail to show, and even the animated reconstruction of The Power of the Daleks misses are all of the subtle shifts of facial expression that make Patrick Troughton such a joy to watch. I literally laughed out loud at one point, when the Doctor gave a sly little smile in response to a question. I love this Doctor so much, especially after wading through more than two months of Hartnell's waspish prickishness.

So anyway, where I left off today was with the Doctor trying to convince the ruler of Atlantis that scientist Zaroff is mad as a hatter and plotting to annihilate Atlantis and everyone in it, and the ruler responding by calling Zaroff himself and handing over the Doctor to him to do with as he will. Dun dun DUN!!

The real bummer of this DVD release is that, originally the missing first and fourth episodes were supposed to be given the same animated reconstruction treatment as many of the other partial stories that had been previously released. Unfortunately, the animation house that was supposed to do the work went out of business. Originally it was supposed to be released in 2014, then it was canceled in 2015, and eventually it came out in 2016 with simple telesnap reconstructions. As I mentioned above, I really thing the Loose Cannon recons are better, to the point where I doubt if tomorrow morning I will watch the fourth episode from the DVD. I would rather pull up a stream of the Loose Cannon recon and get perhaps poorer audio quality but far, far superior video content.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Second
Companion(s): Ben Jackson, Polly Wright, Jamie McCrimmon
Episode(s): The Underwater Menace - Episodes 1 & 2
Steps Walked: 6,937 today, 500,742 total
Distance Walked:  3.57 miles today, 236.72 miles total
Weight: 284.18 lbs (five day moving average), net change -23.12 lbs