As you may (or may not) know, in addition to this blog I also have a mostly-daily blog about my obsession with all things octopus called Octopodal Motion - Tenticular Gesticulation. You can imagine my excitement,then, when the climax of Spearhead from Space featured the Third Doctor being assaulted by the gloriously-tentacled body that the Nestene Consciousness has grown for itself. It was a good morning, is what I am saying.

Let's talk about that.

Spearhead from Space - Episodes 3 & 4

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

The guy from the last episode's cliffhanger does manage to escape, running away from the factory and directly into the arms of UNIT where he tells his ridiculous tale. Then later, he winds up being killed anyway -- mostly because he had served is purpose in the story, so why bother keeping him alive? 

Also, UNIT is able to recover the last glowing meteorite from the old poacher. The Doctor and Liz have some amount of time to examine it, but it gets subsequently stolen by a plastic replica of a ranking military officer. Speaking of which, it turns out that the Nestene Consciousness is churning out copies of important figures in government and security and then for some unexplained reason delivering them to the Madame Tussauds waxworks museum in London. I mean, it makes for a nice filming location and all, but the ultimate plan is to bring them all to life and replace their human counterparts. They could have just as easily been stored in a closet at the plastics factory, but ok whatever.

So of course we get the big nightmare-fuel sequence in which all over London the shop mannequins come to life and start terrorizing England. And also of course, we get the big showdown at the plastics factory between the Doctor and the Nestene Consciousness. It may shock you to learn that the Doctor wins, and immediately all of the Autons drop to the ground and become plain old dummies again.

All in all it is not a bad story, and it certainly serves its primary purpose of introducing the new Doctor and setting up the new status quo. The Doctor is stuck on Earth as the Time Lords have rendered his TARDIS inoperable. He accepts a position with UNIT as their scientific advisor with Liz Shaw as his assistant, and as payment he ask for proper facilities for him to try to repair the TARDIS and also a new car similar to the one he stole from the hospital. As I say, it all serves its purpose although the threat itself seemed a little under-cooked because it had to make room for all of the other setup. Hopefully now that that's taken care of, we can get to the good stuff.

Tomorrow: Silurians! Yay!!

STATS:

Doctor(s): Third
Companion(s): Liz Shaw, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Episode(s): Spearhead from Space - Episodes 3 & 4
Steps Walked: 6,031 today, 873,625 total
Distance Walked: 2.96 miles today, 424.28 miles total
Weight: 269.02 lbs (five day moving average), net change -38.28 lbs