Good lord, it's a quarter to midnight and I still haven't written this blasted thing. I've been buried in work all day and only just came up for air. The good news is I did fifty five push ups this morning, and my arm still feels fine. Alternating days seems to be making a difference. For now at least I will keep on that track, and see how it goes.

As for Doctor Who, it was a mighty good one today. So let's talk about that.

The Zygon Invasion

 (TARDIS Data Core recap)

This episode originally aired on Halloween night in 2015, and served as a sort-of sequel to the fiftieth anniversary special. It turns out that the peace accord that was struck between the humans and Zygons led to roughly twenty million Zygons being repatriated into human society undetected by humanity at large. A central part of keeping the peace involves the two Osgoods -- nobody knows which one is (was) human and which is (was) Zygon. In fact, both of them insist that they are each both because they have become so intimately matched.  Unfortunately, when Missy murdered one of the Osgoods in Death in Heaven it caused the other Osgood to have a complete breakdown. This then led to a fracturing of the Human / Zygon peace accords.

Really, though, the entire episode reads as a treatise on the complexities of a society absorbing a large immigrant population. Especially when a very small subset of that population becomes frustrated and radicalized. The legitimate dangers presented by the small number of radicals fosters fear and violence aimed at the entire immigrant population despite the fact that the vast majority of them are peaceful.  It is a very timely story, even more so not even three years later.

The big, shocking reveal at the climax of the episode is that Clara has been a Zygon for most of the story with the real Clara imprisoned in a Zygon capsule beneath London. The last shot has ZygonClara firing a missile from a portable rocket launcher directly at the airplane in which the Doctor is flying.  Uh-oh!

Given that this was written by Peter Harness, who previously gave us the execrable Kill the Moon, I am shocked at how much I enjoyed this episode. I could have done without some of the bits with the Doctor referring to himself as Doctor Disco or Doctor Funkenstein, but those are minor quibbles. On the whole it is another very solid episode in a particularly solid season. (Until Thursday. Ugh, I am dreading Thursday.)

STATS:

Doctor(s): Twelfth, War (briefly), Tenth (briefly), Eleventh (briefly)
Companion(s): Clara Oswald, Petronella Osgood, Kate Stewart
Episode(s): The Zygon Invasion
Steps Walked: 6,755 today, 3,479,024 total
Distance Walked: 3.66 miles today, 1,819.09 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 55 today, 6,687 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 1,029 total
Weight: 245.64 lbs (five day moving average), net change -61.66 lbs