When I went to bed last night I was still basically a kid. I awakened this morning to greet my 50th birthday. I am officially over the hill.

Kind of like the Tenth Doctor, but older

I somehow managed to drag my ancient body out of bed and stagger through my day, and even put in my four miles / fifty five minutes on the Time Treadmill, because I may be old but dammit I'm still going strong. Honestly, I feel great and I could not be happier with the changes I have seen this past year. This ridiculous project has transformed my physically in a way that I have never before experienced. I am sixty five pounds lighter to day than I was on my 49th birthday, I have much more energy, and my health in general is fantastic. I couldn't ask for a better birthday present to myself.

I also watched the first half of Frontios today, so let's talk about that.

Frontios - Parts 1 & 2

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Behind the scenes, Frontios was a troubled production. Aside from script and budget issues, an actor cast in one of the lead guest roles was brutally murdered in his own home prior to production and the part had to be re-cast at the last minute. I halfway expected this story to wind up similar to Warriors of the Deep, but happily that has not been the case thus far.

The story takes place on the titular planet of Frontios, where the last human survivors of an expedition from the Great Human Diaspora crash landed forty years earlier. Since then the colony has been under siege, with almost non-stop ballistic assaults from the sky whittling the population down to almost nothing. In fact, the Doctor has effectively written them off as already being past the point of surviving as a colony with too few people remaining to grow a genetically stable population. Even so, the Doctor comes to the aid of the injured following an attack, even as the paranoid leaders of the colony accuse the Doctor and companions of being spies and saboteurs.

Unexpectedly, at the end of the first episode, the TARDIS appears to be completely destroyed during a ballistic attack. There is literally nothing left but some scrap scattered around the ground and a lonely hat stand that used to stand in the control room. The big switcheroo, though, comes at the mid-point cliffhanger. After setting up the story to be about the colonists struggling against an unknown enemy from above, it turns out the real threat is actually deep underground in the form of the Tractators -- a race of six-foot-tall pill bugs.

Fear me!

I suspect that the creatures themselves are where the production issues will come into play tomorrow. That being said, the story so far has been rock solid. It is unusual for writer Christopher Bidmead to do a creature story, his previous two contributions being Logopolis and Castrovalva. He is very much a heady-science-fiction-ideas kind of writer, with a heavy emphasis on the science. He was specifically asked to write a story with monsters in it, so I am very interested to see where he goes with the Tractators tomorrow.

Tomorrow I will wrap up this story. The following two days should be interesting indeed, being as I am now an old man and will be having a colonoscopy on Thursday. That means that on Wednesday I will be on a clear liquid diet. I will certainly do my treadmilling first thing Wednesday morning before I have time to become faint from hunger. Thursday, on the other hand, I am not sure. My intention is to hit the treadmill in the late afternoon once I have recovered from the procedure and have had something to eat. Wish me luck. I have some particular thoughts on this subject that I want to talk about on Thursday.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Fifth
Companion(s): Tegan, Turlough
Episode(s): Frontios - Parts 1 & 2
Steps Walked: 7,543 today, 2,150,038 total
Distance Walked: 4.30 miles today, 1,101.99 miles total
Weight: 245.98 lbs (five day moving average), net change -61.32 lbs