Oh, such a day today. On the happy and productive side, I made good progress in our master bedroom remodel. Three of the four walls are painted, most of the baseboards are pulled. and a good chunk of the carpet is pulled. Tomorrow we will finish clearing the room and puling carpet, I will get the accent wall painted, and I will start laying the new hardwood floor. Ideally by Thursday afternoon everything will be done and back in place, including my new Time Treadmill setup. So that's pretty cool. On the unhappy and slightly terrifying side, I spent four hours at the emergency room this evening with my (autistic) son Benjamin and his mother. Oh Christmas Eve they were driving on the freeway when an erratic driver changed lanes directly into their car. The collision, at full freeway speed, caused the car to shoot across all lanes of traffic, leave the pavement, go up a tall embankment, and then come back down and briefly re-enter the high-speed lane before finally stopping on the shoulder. How they managed to not roll over or collide with any other vehicles, I have no idea. Nobody was seriously injured, but both Ben and his mom really needed to be checked out. Since the accident happened when it did, it took until today to make it into the emergency room. Good news: after several x-rays, both of them are cleared as having no structural injuries. They are both sore and taking muscle relaxers, but hopefully the soreness will pass. The car has been dropped of at the auto shop, and I will be shocked if it is not totaled. Cosmetically it is not in terrible shape, but I am sure the suspension and frame are completely wrecked from the off-road jaunt at 50+ mph. I am just grateful that it wasn't worse, because it could have easily been the very worst case indeed.

So anyway, quite a day. I did, however, manage to squeeze in my treadmill time. So let's talk about that.

Time-Flight - Parts 1 & 2

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

This is another one of those "I'm sure I've seen it, but I don't remember it" episodes. Given how poorly it is ranked in polls (Doctor Who Magazine ranked it 237th out of 241 stories in 2014), I didn't expect much from it. Perhaps because of my significantly lowered expectations, I was pleasantly surprised. It is actually a decent story so far. It opens with a Concorde en route to London Heathrow airport, when it starts to flicker and then completely disappears from the air traffic control radars. At the same time the TARDIS is jolted by some kind of turbulence in the time vortex, and they are forced to make an emergency materialization. Initially they wind up on a runway, and then they hop over to appear inside a terminal. From there the Doctor name-drops UNIT and Brigadier Lethbridge-Steward to avoid police entanglement, and winds up being roped in to help find the missing aircraft. From there the Doctor has his TARDIS loaded onto a second Concorde and has them replicate exactly the flight path of the missing plane. The end result: the plane falls through a time warp and ends up in Jurassic England. Oops!

There, a mysterious Asian baddie is doing baddie stuff, hypnotizing the passengers and crew of the two supersonic planes, and working them towards some unknown end.There's a bit of running around, and then at the second episode cliffhanger it is revealed that the mysterious baddie is actually the Master in disguise. Oh no!

Look, I'm not going to say this is the greatest story ever, but it is not actively awful (at least not so far). The setup is interesting and imaginative, the product placement is not too terribly in-your-face, and the Master reveal was pretty good. For that matter, the first episode was the highest-rated episode of the decade in terms of viewership. For better or worse, this was John Nathan-Turner's peak right here. No doubt the shocking death of a companion in the previous episode drove a good number of those viewers, and the story bled two million viewers by the final episode, but seriously -- this is no Planet of Giants.

The first scene in the TARDIS very clearly deals with Wesley Crusher's Adric's death, and the way the Doctor and his surviving companions are handling it. It's a solid bit of writing that showcases Peter Davison's deft and complex portrayal as the Doctor. Similarly, the Jurassic mind-control scenes are well done and not your typical bland hypnotic drek. There is solid writing here. This has been a strong season, particularly for introducing a new Doctor, and this story fits right in to the rest.

I dunno, maybe something will happen in tomorrow's viewing that will lessen my opinion. We'll see. But so far, it's pretty okay in my book.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Fifth
Companion(s): Tegan, Nyssa
Episode(s): Time-Flight - Parts 1 & 2
Steps Walked: 7,757 today, 2,019,004 total
Distance Walked: 4.40 miles today, 1,030.94 miles total
Weight: 246.36 lbs (five day moving average), net change -60.94 lbs