Good news: I am on the upswing, health-wise. I actually did fifty pushups this morning, although I still took an easy pace on the treadmill. I am at the point where I feel substantially better than I sound. That "sounding" part could be an issue, though, in that I have my debut performance at the Orlando Fringe Festival tomorrow in which I need to sing and talk non-stop for a full hour. Oh, and play guitar. Still, two consecutive nights of solid sleep have done me a world of good, and hopefully I'll get another tonight.

As for Doctor Who, well... you can probably already guess how I feel about this one. So let's get it over with.

Victory of the Daleks

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

It's crap. Have a nice night, I'll catch you tomorrow.

...

...

Ok, I guess I should expend a little bit of effort explain why it's crap. In all fairness, though, at least it's not absolute rubbish like Daleks in Manhattan. It's not wretchedly awful, it's just not any good.The entire point of the story is to do away with the Russel T Davies era Dalek "barely surviving" plot line and reset the Daleks as an ongoing galactic menace. A side point of the story is to hand-wave away a bunch of the big flashy alien invasion general knowledge from contemporary Earth history. Both of those are laudable goals from a storytelling standpoint, in that continuity can get to be a real beast over time. That's why Marvel and DC routinely wipe out huge chunks of their own continuity every decade or two in order to keep their big titles afloat.

So what's the problem?

It's that, in addition to resetting the Dalek plot line they also decided to completely redesign their look in a naked cash grab to sell toys. The Daleks are supposed to be the most feared creatures in the universe, space Nazis whose very presence should generate intense dread. The prop design for the entire modern series has been spectacular on that front, starting with Dalek and continuing right up through the Tenth Doctor era. They look like battle tanks, dark and foreboding with a pervasive menace to them. What do we get here? Brightly colored plastic toys with gigantic backsides. They look ridiculous.

Interesting side note: the previous NuWho Daleks were specifically designed so that their eye stalks were at eye level with Billie Piper. These new ones were made taller, so their eye stalks would be level with Karen Gillan's eyes. Which: cool.

So anyway, the plot basically has the Doctor called to WWII London by none other than Winston Churchill (who ridiculously uses the catch-phrase "KBO - Keep Buggering On" at least twice). There the Doctor finds a group of Daleks working as servants to the British Army. Of course it's a ploy. Their real plot involves getting the Doctor to say out loud that they are Daleks, so that they can prove their bona-fides to a bit of Dalek regeneration technology that no longer recognizes them as being genetically pure. So they use the Doctor to get their proof, the Dalek Whatever Machine kicks into gear and creates five new Toybox Daleks, and the new models promptly destroy the old ones and then bugger off down the time corridor to rebuild the Glorious Dalek Empire.

I mean, there's some other stuff going on there with a scientist who turns out to be a robot and such, but that's the gist. The Daleks have a plan, their plan works, and the writers room can go back to churning out more damned Dalek stories. Lucky me.

Another thing that annoys me about this story: On this, her second adventure actually traveling with the Doctor, Amy pond for the second time recognizes a crucial detail that the Doctor misses such that it is Amy who does the Very Clever Thing instead of the Doctor. Now, I'm all for changing things up, and Amy is certainly an awesome companion, but come on - a twenty-two-year-old human outthinks the Doctor twice in a row? Sure, whatever.

On the upside, I don't have to sit through another Dalek-focused story again for nearly a month, and it's actually a pretty decent one.

On the downside, tomorrow Steven Moffat starts down the path of ruining his single best creations, the Weeping Angels. 

Argh!

STATS:

Doctor(s): Eleventh
Companion(s): Amy Pond
Episode(s): The Victory of the Daleks
Steps Walked: 7,237 today, 3,017,626 total
Distance Walked: 3.66 miles today, 1,573.87 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 50 today, 3,764 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 929 total
Is Anything Cool?: Absolutely nothing about this episode is cool. Nothing
Weight: 254.90 lbs (five day moving average), net change -52.40 lbs