Today was easily the fastest and the furthest I have ever gone on the Time Treadmill in a normal 55 minute session. I went at a straight 5mph non-stop for the entire duration, walking 4.58 miles during that time. I thought that 5mph would be at or near my crossover point, but surprisingly that is still a (very fast) walking pace for my stride. I didn't think I would last the entire session, but by the last fifteen minutes it became a matter of will to tough it out. It felt really good.

Also surprisingly good: Today's episode. Let's talk about that.

Attack of the Cybermen - Part 1

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

As awful as the last story was, I was truly dreading this one. It turns out that during the nine intervening months they course-corrected and made some real improvements. First off, this entire season was written and broadcast as 45 minute episodes instead of 25. The overall runtime of each story remains the same, so they are mostly two 45-minute episodes instead of four 25-minute episodes, but being written for the longer episode length changes the structure of the stories entirely. In the half hour timeslot, by the time you factor in opening and closing credits, setting up the plot, and getting to either the cliffhanger or the resolution, there is very little time left in the middle for any real meat to the story. With the full hour timeslot, it really allows the story and characters to breathe and have some complexity.

Case in point, this story so far has three distinct plotlines, and by the midpoint none of them have come together yet. You have the Doctor and Peri coming to Earth following an alien distress beacon, and then exploring the mystery. You have Lytton, the lone survivor of the previous season's Resurrection of the Daleks in what seems to be a bank heist caper, but turns out to be a scheme to find a group of Cybermen hiding in the London sewers. Finally there is a whole other thread set on the planet Telos with a couple of human slaves trying to escape from Cyberman control and overthrow the Cyberleader.

Where the aforementioned Resurrection felt like it had a dozen different things going on that never meshed or went anywhere, this story feels carefully crafted to move towards a solid endgame (I guess I'll find out tomorrow if that holds true). On top of that, this story contains a lot of nods to the show's history, with references to Totter's Lane where we first saw the TARDIS way back in 1963, plenty of references to multiple Cybermen stories - most significantly Tomb of the Cybermen on Telos and Invasion with all the Cybermen running around the sewers - and name-checks on multiple past companions. It is all done very nicely, and not in a heavy-handed or winking way.

Finally, the Doctor's personality has settled down quite a bit. I still don't love him, but at least he is no longer aggressively and deliberately off-putting. Maybe this next few weeks won't be quite so awful after all.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Sixth
Companion(s): Peri
Episode(s): Attack of the Cybermen - Part 1
Steps Walked: 7,751 today, 2,226,242 total
Distance Walked: 4.58 miles today, 1,145.44 miles total
Weight: 247.24 lbs (five day moving average), net change -60.06 lbs