I barely slept last night (for no good reason), didn't work out this morning, but finally got in my treadmill time this evening. I don't mind missing a day if I am sick, or traveling, or something like that. I hate to miss a day just because I am being lazy. The pleasant side effect is that right now I am exhausted, and I hope to be sound asleep within fifteen minutes of posting this entry.

To that end, let's talk about the second half of Frontios.

Frontios - Parts 3 & 4

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Ok, sure, the creature costumes for the Tractators were laughable. Not quite to the level of a pantomime horse lizard, but you can certainly see where available budget was not large enough to adequately serve the script. You know what, though? I will forgive the weaknesses of a low budget all day long if the story is there, and in this case the story was definitely there.

With the giant sentient pill bugs revealed, the real depth of the story shines. The Tractators are a swarming species that burrows into a planet and then uses gravitational energy to plunder the available resources, including enslaving the brains of other sentient life forms on the planet. In this case, they deliberately caused the Earth colony ship to crash forty years earlier, and then allowed the colonists ten full years of respite to establish themselves and grow to a sufficient size to be exploited. Ever since then, the insectoids have waged a deceptive war from above, using their gravitational powers to draw in swarms of meteors to bombard the colony and then pulling weak and isolated human survivors below ground. There they are wired into an excavation machine that is slowly carving out a precise series of tunnels that will ultimately turn the planet itself into a vehicle driven by gravitational waves.

Layered on top of that, there are the human colonists who at first seem to be led by paranoid power-mongers, but ultimately they are revealed to be working in what they truly believe is the best interests of the colony.

And layered on top of that, it turns out that Turlough himself comes from a planet that had been previously plundered by the Tractators, giving him some back-story and nuance that informs his entire personality and explains why he was stranded on Earth in the first place. Mark Strickson gives easily his best performance to date in the second half of this story, shell-shocked by the realization that he has come back face-to-face with the creatures that destroyed his homeworld.

In the end, of course, the Doctor does a Very Clever Thing and the bugs are defeated. The colony is still the very last of humanity, but at least now they have a fighting chance at survival.

This is exactly the kind of story that defines the Fifth Doctor era -- smart, complex, emphasizing the science in science fiction and focused more on ideas than cheap action. Sure, it has giant rubber-suited bug people, but it works very much like the way The Web Planet surprised me way back in the First Doctor era. After a wobbly start, it's nice to see the show back on a solid footing.

Tomorrow: Well dang it, it's more damn Daleks. Weirdly, the format changes just for the next story, which aired in two 45-minute episodes instead of the traditional four 25-minute episodes. Then the format shifts back for a few more stories, It just gets all crazy going back and forth as the eighties roll on and the show goes into its death spiral.

Also tomorrow: I'm on a clear liquid diet all day in preparation for a medical procedure on Thursday morning. I'll probably be cranky by the time I write tomorrow's post.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Fifth
Companion(s): Tegan, Turlough
Episode(s): Frontios - Parts 3 & 4
Steps Walked: 7,598 today, 2,157,636 total
Distance Walked: 4.40 miles today, 1,106.39 miles total
Weight: 246.10 lbs (five day moving average), net change -61.20 lbs