This has been a slog of a day. I barely slept last night, having been awakened by a thunderstorm in the middle of the night. As a result, I didn't get my workout done until evening. On the upside, I did a hundred sit ups tonight. Tomorrow I am shooting for 55 push ups, we'll see how that goes. I am just having some sleepy time tea while I write this, so hopefully tonight I will get some decent rest.

Of course I also watched some Doctor Who while on the treadmill, so let's talk about that.

The Woman Who Lived

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Although not properly a two-parter, this story is very much the aftermath of the previous episode. The Doctor is off having an adventure without Clara (who is busy taking her students to a Tae Kwan Do class), and finds himself in the countryside of Seventeenth Century London. There, he finds Ashildr (who now simply calls herself "Me") acting as a roadside bandit simply for the thrill of it.

There is a secondary plot about an impending alien invasion from the Planet of the Lion People, but that's really just window dressing to kick up a bit of action. Really this whole thing is about the weight of immortality, and of eternally watching the people around you live and die while you continue on. The really interesting notion, though, is that because Ashildr/Me is not biologically meant to be immortal, her human brain lacks the capacity to hold onto memories much beyond a normal lifespan. Thus she has journals of her (at this point) eight hundred years of life, but she doesn't really remember much of it at all. She has become detached and jaded, viewing her unending life as a hellish existence. At some point she had children, and then watched them die during a plague (but not the Plague, which won't happen for another hundred years). She also fought at the Battle of Agincourt as a man. (As an interesting side note, this episode originally aired on the night before the 600th anniversary of that historic battle.)

And so, the meat of the story is the Doctor and Ashildr/Me discussing the burdens of an apparently infinite life, and very much is made of the fact that whereas the Doctor jumps ahead to the interesting bits, Ashildr/Me is forced to endure the ages hour-by-hour. Writer Catherine Tregenna really does an excellent job crafting a script that focuses on the emotional lives of the main characters, and of course Masie Williams brings real depth to her role as Ashildr/Me.

This story is notable as being the first Twelfth Doctor story not to prominently feature Clara. She shows up at the end for a coda, but for the bulk of the running time she is off doing her own thing. It's ok, she'll be dead by the weekend anyway.

Oops, spoilers.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Twelfth
Companion(s): Clara Oswald, Ashildr
Episode(s): The Woman Who Lived
Steps Walked: 7,541 today, 3,472,269 total
Distance Walked: 4.10 miles today, 1,815.43 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 0 today, 6,632 total
Sit-ups Completed: 100 today, 1,029 total
Weight: 245.92 lbs (five day moving average), net change -61.38 lbs