I saw a chiropractor today related to my floppy right arm, and it seems to have helped. I see them again on Wednesday, along with my primary doctor. I am deliberately holding off on any more strength training for several more days to give it all time to settle. But hopefully by this time next week I will be back on top of things. So that's nice.

As for Doctor Who, today's episode would have fit very comfortably in the Holmes/Hinchcliffe era of the show, which is pretty cool. So let's talk about that.

The Crimson Horror

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Set in Victorian Yorkshire, today's story marks the 100th episode of the modern series. It also brings back the Paternoster Gang first introduced in A Good Man Goes to War and subsequently featured in The Snowmen. I am on record as being all in favor of a Paternoster Gang spinoff series, but clearly that is never going to happen at this point. Ah, well.

First, the bad: there is a god-awful gag in this episode that only serves to show how quickly pop culture references and technology goes out of date. At one point Strax is lost while looking for the town of Sweetville (where all the crimson-related evil stuff is happening). Fortunately for him he comes across an extremely helpful street urchin who is able to give him very detailed turn-by-turn directions to his destination. The urchin's name? Thomas Thomas. This being a not-very-sly reference to Tom Tom Go, which... does that even exist anymore? Hasn't smart phone integration with Google Maps (or, I guess, Apple Maps?) pretty much put a nail in their coffin? In any case, it is a wretched attempt at humor that fails miserably. Strax already pushes the limits with his regular confusion of people's genders and constant recommendations of heavy firepower for the most trivial of circumstances.  Where Vastra and Jenny are fairly complex characters, Strax exists purely to be the oblivious punchline and he really doesn't need any help scraping the bottom of the humor barrel.

That being said, I like this episode a lot. Not least because the Doctor doesn't even show up until the end of the first act, so the entire setup is a mystery as to where the Doctor is and why his face was burned into the retinas of a crimson-colored corpse. The evil plan afoot involves a hag of a Puritan woman who has been symbiotically feeding a prehistoric leech who secretes a deadly venom that turns its victims red. Her plan is to wipe out all of sinful humanity, leaving behind only the deserving pure who have been inoculated against the plague.

Needless to say, the Doctor is able to foil the plan with the assistance of Clara and the Paternoster Gang, the hag dies a horrible death, and the crabby leech gets pounded into goo by the hag's blind daughter. Good stuff. It's not surprising this is a Mark Gatiss story, it's right up his alley. It is also notable that the villain was played by Dame Diana Rigg, best know for her role as Emma Peel in The Avengers (the cool sixties British spy one, not the comic book one). Also notable is the fact that the character of the daughter was played by Ms Rigg's actual daughter, Rachael Stirling. That's a pretty cool bit of casting right there. Both of their portrayals really lift the quality of the episode, just by their presence.

That's it for tonight. Tomorrow is Neil Gaiman's other story, and that's always something worth waking up for.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Eleventh
Companion(s): Clara Oswald
Episode(s): The Crimson Horror
Steps Walked: 7,111 today, 3,295,460 total
Distance Walked: 3.56 miles today, 1,722.54 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 0 today, 6,529 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 929 total
Is Anything Cool?: Time travel is cool.
Weight: 249.78 lbs (five day moving average), net change -57.52 lbs