The good news today is that the pendulum of my weight has swung back down the past two days. It seems like 270 has been a very difficult barrier for me to break through, which is not surprising since that is where I bottomed out the last time I tried to lost weight a few years ago. Hopefully now I have crashed through that wall and can keep making forward progress. At the moment I have a personal goal to have weighed in at least once below 260 before I leave for Last Vegas in two weeks, and to be consistently weighing in the 250's by the time I return home two weeks later. Here's hoping.

And yes, I did watch the end of The Mind of Evil today. I don't have much to say about it, but let's give it a spin.

The Mind of Evil - Episodes 5 & 6

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

So what's the plot? Well, of course the Doctor escapes the influence of the mind-sucking device right away. Then he devises a way to temporarily contain its influence, but of course that breaks down later. The inmates are running the prison, the Master has a nuclear missile with a nerve gas payload pointed at London, and in short order the alien inside of the mind-sucking device somehow defeats the control ring and starts teleporting around the prison sucking up the evil from the minds of the former inmates. One nice thing I can say is that episode five finally ended with a different cliffhanger, with the Doctor apparently shot by the main prison ringleader. Of course it turns out that he wasn't, and that instead the ringleader is shot by the Brigadier who has led a UNIT assault to re-take the prison. In the end all of the prisoners are recaptured, the alien in the brain-sucking device is destroyed when the stolen missile is safely detonated on the ground away from any population center, and the Master escapes with a working TARDIS dematerialization circuit. So, mostly a win but with a huge caveat.

Another nice thing I can say about the story as a whole: the restoration team did an amazing job restoring color to the existing available footage. Episodes two through six exist as 16mm black and white film with color signals embedded therein, and so the restoration team was able to use a custom process the developed in order to bring the footage back for those five episodes to perfectly match the colors as originally broadcast. The first episode, on the other hand, and to be colorized manually using the other five episodes as a reference. They did a bang up job, so much so that I honestly had no idea as I was viewing it that I was watching a colorized product - it looked perfectly natural to me.

So that's a wrap on this story. Tomorrow I move on to The Claws of Axos, which I gather is pretty good. I am really hoping so.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Third
Companion(s): Jo Grant, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Episode(s): The Mind of Evil - Episodes 5 & 6
Steps Walked: 7,046 today, 989,446 total
Distance Walked: 3.75 miles today, 483.85 miles total
Weight: 267.86 lbs (five day moving average), net change -39.44 lbs