Finally, after being around for fifteen episodes, Jo Grant gets her "bigger on the inside" moment in Colony in Space - the first color Doctor Who story to take place away from contemporary Earth. Poor Jo isn't really mentally prepared for it, but to her credit she steps up and rolls with the situation. As for me, I barely staggered through the situation. I had what might be described as a "disrupted morning", which means (among other things) that I didn't get around to hitting the treadmill until I had taken care of a couple other physically demanding things. Honestly, I almost quite halfway through. But I forced my way through it just for you, my beloved Imaginary Readers, because I knew you would be so disappointed in me if I didn't. So there's that, anyway.

So let's talk about today's episodes.

Colony in Space - Episodes 1 & 2

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

The setup for the story is that the Time Lords have discovered that the Master has stolen a doomsday weapon, and they decide to send the Doctor in to do their dirty work, because of course they do. The Doctor is unaware of this, he just thinks he has finally built a working dematerialization circuit and takes the TARDIS for a spin. He winds up in Colonial America on a newly-colonized planet that does not at all look like an English rock quarry. There he finds some British settlers Earth settlers, some Native Americans indigenous peoples, and eventually he bumps into a group of rapacious miners rapacious miners there to exploit the mineral resources of the New World this new planet.

I joke, but the allusions are pretty clear. Especially when we discover that the Interplanetary Mining Corporation (IMC) is more than happy to murder colonists in fake giant reptile attacks in order to scare them away so that the company employees can get their bonuses. It also seems clear that there is some outside force that is preventing the colony's crops from growing properly, although at this point it is unclear whether this is also being done by IMC or if there is another force at play. By the end of the second episode the Master has not yet revealed himself, although given his Mission Impossible style rubber mask wearing expertise, I have my suspicions about who he might be. It is true that, as I mentioned yesterday, I have read the Target novelization of this story, but that was roughly thirty years ago so I don't really remember many of the details.

There is lots of really nice stuff going on here. The new TARDIS set doesn't look materially different from the old one, other than the fact that it is no longer falling apart. There are a good variety of characters, and enough different factions to be interesting. There is unrest within the colony itself, due to the ongoing failure of crops. There is unrest within the IMC crew, with at least one high-ranking crew member who is decidedly not on board with the "let's just kill the colonists" strategy. There is a mysterious survivor from another colony who has wandered in, and is particularly racist against the natives, and whom I suspect is actually the Master in disguise. Finally, there appears to be a giant Gila monster - twenty feet high - who is wandering around at night wrecking things. I say "appears" because I think that last bit might be a hallucination of some sort.

So all in all it is good fun, and exactly what I think of when I imagine proper Classic Who. This one is a six-parter, so I expect that at some point tomorrow the Master's devious plan will be revealed.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Third
Companion(s): Jo Grant, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Episode(s): Colony in Space - Episodes 1 & 2
Steps Walked: 5,778 today, 1,008,071 total
Distance Walked: 2.72 miles today, 493.01 miles total
Weight: 265.54 lbs (five day moving average), net change -41.76 lbs