One fat geek's SUCCESSFUL attempt to regenerate into a not-so-fat geek by watching the entirety of Doctor Who while walking on a treadmill

He Was Wesley Crusher Before Wesley Crusher Was a Thing

Dec 03 2017
He Was Wesley Crusher Before Wesley Crusher Was a Thing

One of the quirks of a five-day moving average on my weight is that, although I have consistently dropped weight for the last three days running, my average has increased on each of those days. The two days I missed while I was sick have really set me back in that regard. But it's all illusory, and tomorrow the moving average will flip back around. It wasn't that long ago I set a goal to weigh in below 250 at least once before Christmas, and now it looks like by the time Christmas gets here I should actually have my moving average well below that number. So it's all good.

On the not-so-good front, today's viewing brings aboard the TARDIS my single least favorite companion in the history of the show. So I guess we should talk about that?

Full Circle - Parts 1 & 2

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

The Doctor and Romana have been summoned back to Gallifrey, about which Romana is not exactly thrilled. She was only supposed to help the Doctor with finding the Key to Time, and since that was all taken care of ages ago they presumably want her back. The TARDIS being what it is, however, their trip home is waylaid when the fall through a Charged Vacuum Emboitment and wind up in E-space (which is kind of like regular space, but with an "e").

The planet where they land is inhabited by the descendants of a spaceship that crash landed generations earlier, and the survivors have spent all of their time ever since trying to repair the ship so that they can return to their homeworld. Or at least, that is what they believe. There is some kind of hidden secret that only the leader (called the First Decider) knows. There are a bunch of rebel teenagers who don't believe their own history, and Wesley Crusher Adric wants to join them. He is very clear about how smart he is, as proven by the star-shaped badge he wears that he earned for mathematical excellence. He mentions this every now and then. For some strange reason, though, the rebels don't want Wesley Adric to join them, possibly because he is a prissy brat who spends most of his time reminding people how smart he is.

I might not have mentioned this, but I don't particularly care for Wesley Adric.

I am sure that actor Matthew Waterhouse is a lovely person, and I don't blame him at all for my dislike of the character. Much like poor Wil Wheaton, he was a teenage actor thrust into a high-profile genre role, and then given terrible scripts. Apparently the though process of the executives making decisions was that, if they want to appeal to the youth crowd then they should add a youthful character. But then they burden the character with being some kind of prodigy, and with having an I'm-smarter-than-you personality, and all of a sudden instead of being a proxy character for the teenage viewers it becomes the annoying nerd they all hate. It just makes no sense.

In the case of Adric, I think part of his character function was to replace the narrative load carried by Romana, who was on her way out. So they bring in the smart kid who can offload some of the Doctor's exposition, and then they bring in a couple of other companions to cover the "but what does this mean, Doctor?" bits. I get it. But I still hate the character. The good news on that front? He'll be dead before Christmas. So... yay?

Anyway, in the story there are a bunch of Marsh-Men who look like low-rent Creature from the Black Lagoon knock-offs, and there are also some hand-sized spiders erupting from watermelons, so plenty to work with on the boogity-boogity front. Romana gets bitten by one of the spiders at the cliffhanger for episode two, so I think it's safe to assume she dies. Or not.

As negative as I may sound, this is actually a pretty decent story. There's a lot of levels going on, with mysteries inside mysteries, and even Wesley Adric isn't that annoying so far. The incidental music is by Paddy Kingsland for this one, and on several occasions I thought to myself "wow, that sounds like something from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy..."  You can imagine my complete lack of surprise, then, when I looked it up and discovered that Mr. Kingsland did, indeed, do the incidental music for the original Hitchhiker's Guide tv show. Go figure.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Fourth
Companion(s): Romana, K9, Adric
Episode(s): Full Circle - Parts 1 & 2
Steps Walked: 7,480 today, 1,860,060 total
Distance Walked: 4.17 miles today, 942.22 miles total
Weight: 251.46 lbs (five day moving average), net change -55.84 lbs


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