I somehow managed to up my speed again a notch today, and set a new record for the number of steps and distance in one session. So that's pretty cool. I had a fantasy that today would be the day I finally hit the fifty pound mark for total weight lost, but alas that was not to be. How tragic. It's ok, though, I'll get there. Today's viewing was the second half of Revenge of the Cybermen and it was pretty nifty.

Let's talk about that.

Revenge of the Cybermen - Parts 3 & 4

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

The gist of part three is that the Doctor, along with the two surviving Nerva Beacon survivors, are turned into unwilling suicide bombers by the Cybermen. Each has a high explosive strapped to their back using a harness with an explosive charge that will detonate if it is tampered with. They are told that once they deliver the bombs to the core of Voga, the harnesses will be disarmed and they will have fourteen minutes to escape back to the transmat and beam off the asteroid before it is destroyed. Of course, none of them really believe that.

Meanwhile Sarah Jane and Harry are caught up in the internecine battle between the two Vogan factions. Sarah briefly transmats back up to Nerva Beacon and overhears the Cybermen's plan to kill all three bombers, and then rushes back to Voga to warn them. This leads to a plan where the two companions will try to intercept the Doctor and the other two walking bombs. This leads to the cliffhanger of part 3, and the funniest moment in the story at the beginning of part 4.

You see, in trying to intercept them, Harry inadvertently causes an avalanche that nearly crushes the Doctor to death and knocks him unconscious. Then when Harry sees the Doctor lying there with the bomb strapped to him, Harry goes to unbuckle the still-armed harness and very nearly kills both himself and the Doctor before he is stopped. 

"Harry," the Doctor says, gesturing to his bomb harness, "were you trying to undo this?"

"Well, naturally."

"Did you make the rocks fall, Harry?"

"Er, well," Harry mumbles, "I suppose I must have done, yes..."

At this point the Doctor laughs hysterically and shouts at the top of his lungs, "HARRY SULLIVAN IS AN IMBECILE!!!"

It is a truly glorious moment.

Anyway, of course everything gets resolved in the end. The Cybermen are destroyed, Voga is saved, no Vogon poetry is read, and the TARDIS finally arrives in time for a timely departure by the Doctor and companions. Speaking of the TARDIS, these few seconds of it at the very end of the story are the first time it has been seen since the very beginning of The Ark in Space. That is four full stories and sixteen individual episodes without the TARDIS there, which is definitely a record. Even with the Third Doctor was Earthbound for so long, the TARDIS was still there in virtually every story. I think it is really interesting that Tom Baker spent his entire first season effectively only taking one trip in the TARDIS with his initial jaunt at the end of Robot.  I also think it really shows up how the TARDIS is simultaneously a curse and a blessing when it comes to storytelling. It opens up tremendous opportunities for placing the characters into new settings, but then it becomes the obvious thing that must be somehow disabled for the duration of the story in order to maintain drama. Script Editor Robert Holmes did an excellent job of neatly threading that needle throughout the Fourth Doctor's first tour.

Another bit of trivia for this story: In several of the scenes with the Vogans there is a symbol that is featured prominently on the walls, in the costumes, and even inlaid into tables. It looks like this:

It is notable because this symbol eventually gets re-used in The Deadly Assassin when the Master finally returns, and becomes known as the Seal of Rassilon. For the slow kids in the back of the room, Rassilon was the first Time Lord, the engineer who actually harnessed the power of a supernova in order to make time travel possible. You would be forgiven for not knowing that, since it hasn't come up yet in my viewing. But that's my point -- the symbol shows up in this story, and the real-world truth is that it just looked nifty and got repurposed a few years later on the premise that nobody would notice or care. But it absolutely makes me want to have a story that explains how the symbol of Rassilon somehow became embedded in Vogan mythology, perhaps with him somehow being involved in the background of the great Cyber-War that led to the original fragmentation of Voga. But that's just me being geeky. 

Speaking of me being geeky, I actually recently commissioned an artist to combine my two obsessions of Doctor Who and octopuses, by taking the Seal of Rassilon and turning it into a tribal octopus design. Check this out:

Pretty nifty, huh?

STATS:

Doctor(s): Fourth
Companion(s): Sarah Jane Smith, Harry Sullivan
Episode(s): Revenge of the Cybermen - Parts 3 & 4
Steps Walked: 7,449 today, 1,374,741 total
Distance Walked: 4.12 miles today, 682.35 miles total
Weight: 259.28 lbs (five day moving average), net change -48.02 lbs