I ain't gonna lie, I am bothered by my current weight trend. I can argue to a certain degree that I am putting on more muscle mass, but not that much. The fundamental problem is that I have plateaued, but I am committed to finishing this ridiculous project so I am pretty much chained to the treadmill for about another four months. I am going to try to find some ways to work in some other variety, but it's kind of hard with my schedule the way it is. Hopefully I will be able to turn this thing around and stabilize.

As for Doctor Who, the Tenth Doctor kicks off his first full season with a rough start. So let's talk about that.

New Earth

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Up until this episode, every single story of the revived series has either taken place on Earth, or else on a spaceship or station in orbit around the Earth. So where does the show go for its first non-Earthbound story? Sigh. They go to New Earth, home of New New York. Well, technically New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New York. Ha ha.

Lady Cassandra is brought back as the villain, the Face of Boe is brought back as a Mystery Box, and pretty much the whole thing is set inside a hospital run by Cat-faced nuns. The CatNuns are able to heal virtually anything, mostly because they are breeding thousands of human lab rats in the basement and infecting them with everything possible in order to derive cures. Meanwhile Cassandra uses a Whatever Device to jump her consciousness from her trampoline frame into Rose's body. This leads to a lot of Rose walking around in a push-up bra and talking with comical accents. Later this leads to Cassandra jumping out of Rose and into the Doctor, which of course leads to the Doctor swishing around and talking with comical accents. This leads to an entire sequence of rapid-fire body-jumping. It's all very comical dreadful.

Eventually the human lab rats escape from their cells and become a defacto zombie army, until the Doctor does a Very Clever Thing and saves them all. Also: Cassandra dies. Again.

Look, this isn't Planet of Giants bad, it's just... not great. There are some decent moments here and there, but Russel T Davies isn't particularly good at creating the "everybody lives" moment. He is clearly cribbing from The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances. Apparently in the original script all the human lab rats died as well as the Face of Boe, but then Davies read Stephen Moffat's introduction to the book The Shooting Scripts in which Moffat poked fun at Davies for his "kill them all" writing approach. So Davies decided to let everyone live instead, and it just doesn't play well.

Things get better soon, thank goodness.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Tenth
Companion(s): Rose Tyler
Episode(s): New Earth
Steps Walked: 7,703 today, 2,649,890 total
Distance Walked: 4.33 miles today, 1,377.94 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 0 today, 541 total
Weight: 252.46 lbs (five day moving average), net change -54.84 lbs