I ain't gonna lie, I was pretty frustrated when I got on the scale this morning and was back over 250. I hadn't actually been on a scale since the morning I left for Denver last week, I expected some backsliding, but not quite that much. Hopefully tomorrow will be better. Still and all, as long as it is not a trend that continues then it is all good. I took more than half a week off without any serious exercise, the numbers will start moving back in the right direction shortly. This isn't the end.

But it almost was for Doctor Who. Let's talk about that.

Revelation of the Daleks - Part 2

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

I have to admit, the second half of this story was much better than the first. Where part one spent all its time leisurely introducing all of the characters and setting up the conflict, part two spent all its time rapidly killing off most of the characters and escalating the conflict. Virtually every named guest character dies by the end, some quite horrifically. The homely assistant murders the egotistical funeral director at Davros' bidding, and then is promptly gunned down by a pair of Daleks. The owner's assistant is similarly shot down, and the owner herself is lanced through the heart by NotDonQuixote. The DJ actually winds up in in the main plot, side-by-side with Peri until he too is felled by Daleks, but not before taking down a few himself with a Rock-n-Roll laser cannon. Davros himself turns out to have been using the head-in-a-jar as misdirection, and shows up in the first hovering Dalek craft before getting  his only working hand blown off by NotSanchoPanza. Shortly thereafter he is captured and frog marched out by black-bodied Daleks sent by the Dalek Supreme, who sees Davros as a war criminal. NotSanchPanza dies in a blaze of glory, and NotDonQuixote sacrifices his own life to detonate a bomb that destroys all of Davros' creations.

Although the Doctor and Peri were more directly involved in the action in part two, the truth is that neither of them really did anything to affect the outcome of the story. By which I mean that Peri did absolutely nothing useful, and the Doctor himself mostly stood around trying to be witty while allowing events to unfold. Over the course of this season I have grown to like the Sixth Doctor much more than in his initial story, but here at the end he reverts back to his initial form that I so disliked.

I and I really do mean "here at the end". This story very nearly was the end of Doctor Who. After the story aired the BBC halted production on the show, in what eventually turned out to be an eighteen month hiatus. When I come back to the show tomorrow morning it will have reverted back to the 25-minute episode format with a new arrangement of the title theme, and shot only on video with no film elements whatsoever. The serious cheapening of the series begins now, and even worse for the next fourteen episodes it is a damned Space Trial. Goody.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Sixth
Companion(s): Peri
Episode(s): Revelation of the Daleks - Part 2
Steps Walked: 7,592 today, 2,317,309 total
Distance Walked: 4.21 miles today, 1,195.80 miles total
Weight: 246.90 lbs (five day moving average), net change -60.40 lbs