Aug
02
2017
Over the past few weeks, something has become readily apparent to me: I am not a young man anymore, and perhaps going from zero to five hundred miles on a treadmill over the course of just a few months might potentially be a problem. Case in point, both of my knees have started having weird pains in which if a particular spot gets bumped then another spot feels like it is on fire. I went to the doctor this morning, on the presumption that if I might be crippling myself then I should probably find that out before I put myself in a wheelchair. The doctor gave me a topical analgesic, and also sent me out for x-rays (as seen above). Of course it will take a few days to get any results back, which is complicated by the fact I am going to be out of state for work for the next two weeks, but I presume that if the news is bad my doctor will let me know right away. Hopefully I'm just being paranoid, or at worst I need to take some particular precautions or procedures while working out. For the time being, though, the Time Treadmill marches on. Speaking of which, I watched the first two episodes of Day of the Daleks this morning.
Let's talk about that.
Day of the Daleks - Episodes 1 & 2
(TARDIS Data Core recap)
Have you ever heard the old Monty Python routine where a husband and wife are out at a restaurant, and much to the wife's consternation every single dish has Spam in it? At one point the waiter recommends, "...Spam, eggs, bacon, and Spam -- that's not got much Spam in it..." Well, that's how I feel about Daleks. On the upside, it's been five years since the last damn Dalek story. On the downside, it's still another damn Dalek story. But as a small mercy, at least the first two episodes don't have much Dalek in them. The genocidal pepperpots are constrained to a single room for the first half of the story, right up until the final shot of the second episode where one finally appears in the primary story location. So that's not so bad.
As for the story itself, it is your basic "Let's kill Hitler" storyline in which soldiers from a disastrous 22nd Century future come back in time to assassinate the 20th Century English politician who is apparently responsible for the downfall of mankind. That being the case, the primary setting is the politician's country estate with a secondary setting two hundred years in the future.
I know this is a fan favorite story, I think primarily because it is the first time the Daleks appear on television in color. I don't think it's a bad story, but thus far it isn't really grabbing me. I do recall that it is one of the first Target novelizations I read way back in the late 70's before I had ever actually seen the show. As a matter of fact I still have that book on my shelf, although I haven't read it in something like thirty five years. From what I gather, the book is better than the broadcast version primarily because the book does not have budgetary constraints.
It's only a four-parter, so I will wrap it up tomorrow before moving on to more interesting stories later in the week. Assuming, of course, that my knees don't give out on me.
STATS:
Doctor(s): Third
Companion(s): Jo Grant, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Episode(s): Day of the Daleks - Episodes 1 & 2
Steps Walked: 6,210 today, 1,044,933 total
Distance Walked: 3.16 miles today, 512.14 miles total
Weight: 267.47 lbs (five day moving average), net change -39.83 lbs