Treadmill kicked my butt this morning. Okay, maybe it had something to do with me being out late last night, then getting up this morning and mowing the lawn, then doing a full set of pushups, and then hitting the treadmill, but it still kicked my butt. The funny thing is that because I was dragging so much and went a little bit slower than usual, I missed hitting the 1,500 mile mark today by two-hundredths of a mile. Like, if I would have just gone a tenth of a mile per hour faster for a few minutes I totally would have hit that milestone today. Oops.

What I did do, though, was see the first mention of the DoctorDonna. So let's talk about that.

Planet of the Ood

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

This story makes it three-for-three so far this season in which the Doctor and Donna are mistaken as a married couple. They arrive on the snowy Ood Sphere, home world of the Ood, and discover that they aren't quite the voluntary servants they seem to be. The entire story is a treatise on the horrors of slavery, and how easily humans ignore the brutality as long is it happens out of sight. The gist is that the Ood have been enslaved for more than two hundred years, bred like livestock and having their external hindbrain removed and replaced by a communication sphere, turning them into docile servants. For those two centuries their communal primary brain has been sealed away behind an energy barrier, preventing the telepathic Ood from joining their minds and singing their song.

Interestingly, again at the ending it is not the Doctor who does a Very Clever Thing but rather Ood Sigma who has been slowly poisoning his master over a period of years and ultimately transforming him into an Ood, thus allowing for the entire species to be freed once the energy barrier circling the primary brain is finally removed.

It's a really nicely done story, with Donna going through a wild chain of emotions as she is exposed to her first alien planet and discovers that intergalactic time travel isn't all fun and games. There are several points where the Ood refer to the Doctor and Donna together as "the DoctorDonna", which totally won't become a major plot point in the season finale, I'm sure.

The role of the main villain Klineman Halpen, CEO of Ood Operations and grandson of the man who first enslaved the Ood, is played by Tim McInnerny. I initially recognized him as being "that other guy from Notting Hill" (a movie that is packed to the gills with past and future Doctor Who actors, btw). Only just now did I realize that many many moons ago he was also one of the regulars on Blackadder, seen here using alchemy to create a nugget of purest Green:

Anyway, great episode today. I only wish I had enjoyed it 2/100ths of a mile more.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Tenth
Companion(s): Donna Noble
Episode(s): Planet of the Ood
Steps Walked: 7,335 today, 2,875,984 total
Distance Walked: 3.76 miles today, 1,499.98 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 100 today, 2,414 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 929 total
Is the Doctor So, So Sorry?: Surprisingly, no
Weight: 250.06 lbs (five day moving average), net change -57.24 lbs