I don't have anything interesting or noteworthy to talk about today on the personal front. I did my workout first thing, I weighed in again at the same all-time low of yesterday, and I am about to leave for rehearsal for the show I am doing. I'll be practicing dance choreography for a solid five hours, which pretty well counts as a second workout for the day. This is going to be a pretty brief post because I need to get out the door, and I won't want to stay up late to finish this after.

And on that note, let's talk Doctor Who.

The Pirate Planet - Parts 3 & 4

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

The third episode has the Doctor and company joining forces with the Mentiads, and coordinating an attach against the Captain and his control room and power plant. Along the way, the Doctor discovers the Captain's trophy room where he has on display the remaining collapsed cores of each of the worlds he has exploited. The amount of energy and technical prowess required to keep these artifacts stable and not collapsing into black holes staggers the Doctor, at which he exclaims icily, "But what's it for?!?" Also along the way, he discovers that the previous much-reviled tyrant Xanxia held in a time dam - kept alive and effectively in suspended animation just moments before her death from old age. Following on that revelation, he finds that Xanxia is actually also the Captain's nurse, existing as a kind of sentient holographic projection and pulling the Captain's strings.

The whole thing winds up, in the fourth episode, the the Doctor finally find the answer to his question - it turns out the Captain was aware of Xanxia's treachery, and was plotting on his own a way to contain enough energy to destroy her once and for all. Unfortunately, he needs to consume one more planet to reach that goal, and the planet he has selected is Earth. Oh no! Good news on that front: the Doctor does something tremendously clever that destroys Xanxia, ends the Captains tyrannical rule, reverts Zanek to a real planet instead of a hollow pirate ship, and hands control of the planet back to its own people. Oh, and he figures out that the entire planet Calufrax was the next segment of the Key to Time, and his Very Clever Thing also recovers that segment. A happy ending!

I don't have much else to say about this story that I didn't mention yesterday. It's a mighty good story, with a lot more going on than my bare bones summary. I especially liked the fight between K9 and the Captains robot parrot. It was a fun bit, especially the ending.

Tomorrow: the 100th story. Can you believe it?

STATS:

Doctor(s): Fourth
Companion(s): Romana, K9
Episode(s): The Pirate Planet - Parts 3 & 4
Steps Walked: 7,491 today, 1,681,636 total
Distance Walked: 4.11 miles today, 843.31 miles total
Weight: 252.58 lbs (five day moving average), net change -54.72 lbs