I really surprised myself this morning, after my 55 minutes on the treadmill I did 48 pushups. I expect on Friday I will break 50. How wild is that? Other than that I pretty much spent my day heads-down writing code, and don't have much of anything interesting to talk about. 

So let's talk Doctor Who.

The Long Game

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Prior to this morning's viewing, I mostly remembered this story as being "the one with Simon Pegg". This was less than a year after Shaun of the Dead had come out, and so at the time I recognized him from that (having at that point never seen the TV series Spaced). What I forgot about this story is that it is a damning commentary on the news media. Interestingly, the story was based on an idea that Russell T Davies first pitched to the Doctor Who production team all the way back in the early 80's.

In a nutshell, the Doctor and Rose arrive on  a news satellite station in the distant future. Adam from the last story is also there, but he is useless and barely worth mentioning. Ultimately it turns out that for the last 90 years the station has been under the control of a giant alien beast who has stunted mankind's development by manipulating the news broadcast throughout the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. 

It's a pretty decent story, especially when it gets to Pegg's big monologue at the climax:

"For almost a hundred years, mankind has been shaped and guided, his knowledge and ambition strictly controlled by it's broadcast news [...] Create a climate of fear and it's easy to keep the borders closed. It's just a matter of emphasis. The right word in the right broadcast repeated often enough can destabilize an economy, invent an enemy, change a vote."

Given the state of the world here in 2018, it's depressingly remarkable how salient the message still is.

As for Useless Adam, he's so useless that at the end of the story the Doctor dumps him back at his mom's house. This makes him the first and only companion to have been just straight-up kicked out of the TARDIS. Heck, Turlough was actively a villain for a good portion of his time on board, and even he didn't get chucked out the door. The thing is, although he certainly deserved it (he tried to enrich himself by using Rose's Magic Cellphone to send himself valuable technology information back home), it wasn't really that which caused the Doctor to throw him out.

No, it was because Adam was a romantic rival for Rose.

Can I just say again? Ew. I like Rose just fine. But there is no point at which I am going to get on board with the nine-hundred-year-old alien getting all romantic with a teenage human girl. Just... Ew.

But that was a very minor element in this story. On the whole it was a good one, certainly better than the farting alien episodes. And the next three episodes are really really good, so I have that to look forward to.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Ninth
Companion(s): Rose Tyler, Adam Mitchell
Episode(s): The Long Game
Steps Walked: 7,733 today, 2,587,615 total
Distance Walked: 4.37 miles today, 1,343.94 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 48 today, 371 total
Weight: 249.30 lbs (five day moving average), net change -58.00 lbs