Graham Strong is not a name that would be familiar to any but the most die-hard Doctor Who fans. Although he never worked on the show in any capacity, he is directly responsible for my being able to include all 97 missing episodes in this ridiculous project. You see, back in 1963 Mr. Strong was a fourteen-year-old electronics geek, as well as being a science fiction fan. Back then there was no such things as reruns, home video recording, or any other kind of repeat market. With no way to revisit a show, a few fans like Mr. Strong would record the audio from each episode as it was broadcast. Strong, though, went one step further -- he directly wired the audio output from the family television into a reel-to-reel recorder, and starting with episode 7 of The Daleks' Master Plan he gathered pristine audio recordings.These were in fact so clean that, back in the mid-90's, he loaned his recordings to the BBC including more than 100 early episodes of Doctor Who. Because his recordings were superior to anything the BBC had in their archives, many of the DVD's of early episodes from the show use his audio. As it relates to this project, it is his audio recordings that allowed for the reconstructions of lost episodes that I watched. That's almost fifty days' worth of treadmill time that I put in listening to Mr. Strong's recordings while watching corresponding photos from the missing episodes.

Sadly, Graham Strong passed away yesterday at the age of 69. He was my kind of geek, and I applaud his ingenuity. My condolences to his family, he was a remarkable man and he will surely be missed.

Also: today I watched the return of both River Song and the Weeping Angels. So let's talk about that.

The Time of Angels

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

This story opens with a bonkers sequence in which River Song uses a blowtorch to burn a message into a metal box on board a spaceship, and then taunts her captors before deliberately blowing herself out an airlock. Meanwhile, twelve thousand years in the future the Doctor has taken Amy to a giant museum where he encounters the same metal box, and reads the message carved into it written in High Gallifreyan: "Hello, Sweetie." This leads to him stealing the box, which turns out to be a flight recorder, and then followign River Song's instructions to show up at a specific time at specific coordinates, and rescuers her from deep space. It's all very bold and different, and it acutally works well.

All of which leads to them following the spaceship Byzantium to the planet Alfava Matraxis, where the ship has crash landed into an ancient temple filled with statues that totally won't turn out to be an army of Weeping Angels. There is also a squadron of soldiers from a 51st century church, there at River Song's request to help her safely secure a Weeping Angel that was being held on the Byzantium. Along the way the Weeping Angel mythology is expanded (to it's detriment, in my opinion), and Amy gets infected with some kind of Angel disease. Being the first half of a two-parter, this one ends with our heroes surrounded by Angels and surely about to die.

On the whole this is a fairly decent story, and the catacombs are properly creepy. I just wish writer / show runner Stephen Moffat would have left the Weeping Angels as a one-off monster. By bringing them back here he weakens the bold simplicity of their conception. Some other monster would have been just fine in this story. But maybe I'm just being cranky. There is also a lot of fun banter and off-kilter dynamics between the Doctor, River Song, and Amy. Knowing now where it all leads, it is especially fun to see the subtleties that were present right from the beginning of this story arc. Alex Kingston is always fun to watch when she shows up as River Song, and she and Amy bounce off each other nicely.

That being said, this episode is actually the first one that was filmed for this series, and you can see where Matt Smith and Karen Gillan haven't quit settled into their roles yet. Nothing terrible by any means, but there is definitely a difference between their performances here versus the ones in The Eleventh Hour and The Beast Below.

So that's it for today. Tomorrow I finish this story, and then the rest of this season ranges from Really Good to Holy Freaking Cow That Was Amazing (I'm looking at you, Vincent Van Gogh).

STATS:

Doctor(s): Eleventh
Companion(s): Amy Pond, River Song
Episode(s): The Time of the Angels
Steps Walked: 7,425 today, 3,025,051 total
Distance Walked: 3.87 miles today, 1,577.74 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 100 today, 3,864 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 929 total
Is Anything Cool?: Nothing new is cool today, sadly
Weight: 255.44 lbs (five day moving average), net change -52.40 lbs