When I started this project over eight months ago, I was wearing 46" waist pants whereas my son was wearing 36" ones. Last week my wife got me some new 40" pants, and now this weekend I had to go out and get my son two new pairs of 40" pants. For the last two weeks he has literally been wearing my clothes. It's obvious why I am excited to have dropped a full six inches in waist size. It is worth noting that, as well as being autistic, my son has a history of severe digestive issues. Only a few years ago ne was so thin and malnourished that we were starting to have discussions about having a feeding tube placed. It is absolutely astonishing to me that he has grown so much. It is also a little worrisome, in that he is clearly headed on the same trajectory I was, and we need to figure out how to put on the brakes, but that's a whole other issue. For this weekend, though, my son and I have met in the middle and I am both pleased and perplexed.

I also started a new Doctor Who story, so I guess I should talk about that.

Underworld - Parts 1 & 2

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

This story marks the point where Anthony Read had completely taken over as Script Editor from Robert Holmes, and as such is the first story in which Producer Graham Williams and Script Editor Anthony Read were in complete control. I am now firmly in the Space Opera era of the show, and it is also worth noting that the production of this story was heavily influenced by Star Wars which had been released in the U.S. a few months earlier and was due to finally be released in the U.K. just ten days before the airing of Part 1. Unfortunately, this story also marks a point where, due to extreme budgetary constraints, most of the locations were shot on green screens against model backgrounds instead of building practical sets. So, there's that.

The plot of the first episode happens entirely on a spaceship at the very edge of known space. The TARDIS arrives there, and discovers a small crew of Minyans (who appear completely human) who have been on an impossible quest for the past one hundred thousand years. They are searching for a ship called the P7E, which contains a genetic race bank of their entire civilization which was wiped out millennia ago after the Time Lords attempted to help them - an effort which obviously went badly, and which also led to the Time Lord's strict non-interference policy. The crew aboard the ship have been using a piece of Gallifreyan technology which allows them to not so much regenerate, but rejuvenate; keeping the same four crew members alive for a hundred thousand years and a thousand lifetimes in the same repeating bodies, memories, and personalities. The episode ends with the Doctor correctly identifying the location of P7E at the core of a nebula.

In the second episode the ship finally arrives at the titular Underworld after crashing through the layers of the nebula and delving deep into the planetary body that has formed around P7E. There we discover civilization of slaves and overlords, the apparent descendants of P7E living deep underground and surviving off of the radiation energy (which leads to my favorite quote of the story so far, when Leela comments on how lucky the survivors are that the radiation is there, to which the Doctor replies, "Physics isn't luck, physics is fact. Are facts. Is fact!")

The second episode ends with the overlords pumping gas into the tunnels, causing the Doctor to collapse as he tries to reverse the flow.

So far I really don't know what to make of this story. It's got some world-building on Time Lord history in order to explain their current society, so that's nice. It is also built on the kind of big ideas that really make the show work. On the other hand, I am halfway through the story and the Big Bad hasn't materialized yet. I like the performances of the four Minyans who have been on this hopeless quest for so very long, each of them bearing the weight of existing for so long for such a fruitless purpose thus far. So lots of good ideas here, but it really isn't gelling for me. It's not bad, it's not good, it just.... is. Maybe it will pick up in the second half. I hope so.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Fourth
Companion(s): Leela, K-9
Episode(s): Underworld - Parts 1 & 2
Steps Walked: 7,498 today, 1,621,717 total
Distance Walked: 4.03 miles today, 810.35 miles total
Weight: 256.98 lbs (five day moving average), net change -50.32 lbs