In  year-and-a-half of this ridiculous project, I have never gotten this far behind in the writing. The past few days has been a perfect storm of work deadlines plus show performance dates, and while I have stayed current in getting my workouts done (aside from completely missing on Wednesday), I just haven't had the time to write my daily posts. So this is the first of three back-dated posts. Hopefully I will be current again by the end of the day.

So let's get down to it, and talk about the futility of war.

The Zygon Inversion

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Where The Zygon Invasion focused on big-picture ideas, hopping around the globe from London to New Mexico to whatever fake Fauxraquistan country they used for the Terrorist Training Camp sequence that I can't be bothered to look up, this episode very smartly focuses on the individual. The global threat has been established, and so this episode spends its time focusing on the struggle between Clara's mind and that of her Zygon impersonator Bonnie, and on the Doctor's battle of wills not only with Bonnie but also with Kate Stewart as they barrel towards all-out war and global bloodshed.

Doctor Who is always at its best when it tackles questions about the morality and futility of war, and this is most definitely Doctor Who at its finest. The whole thing comes down to a scene at the UNIT Black Archives at the Tower of London, where ZygonBonnie has tracked down the Osgood Box. Except, just like there are (were) two Osgoods, there are actually two Osgood Boxes. This is the peace-keeper, the failsafe device designed by the Doctor and entrusted to Osgood. UnitKate and ZygonBonnie take their positions at the boxes, and each side is presented two possibilities.

For the Zygons one button will unmask every Zygon in the world for an hour, while the other one will permanently bind every Zygon to their human form. On the Human side, one button will unleash the Whatever gas that will horrifically kill every Zygon in the world by turning them inside out, but the other button will detonate a nuclear bomb beneath the Black Archive and destroy London. With each side having a fifty/fifty chance of either getting what they want or losing horribly, the Doctor monologues. Oh does he monologue.

As you may or may not know, I live in Florida which is a region known for its thunderstorms. When this episode initially aired, we got a huge storm right as that scene began, and the storm knocked out our television reception. It was... frustrating. There was no repeat for me to catch at the time, and so I had to read recaps on that particular scene to find out what exactly had happened. A few months later I bought the season on disc, but I had never actually gotten around to re-watching this full episode until today's viewing. Thus, even though I knew what was going to happen this was a pretty unique experience at this point of this ridiculous project: for the first time since March I was actually watching something I had never seen before. Pretty cool!

Anyway, of course in the end it turns out that the Doctor has done a Very Clever Thing. Neither of the boxes actually do anything, the entire point of the exercise is to get people to actually talk, and to listen. The Doctor isn't a pacifist because of some kind of high-minded ideals, but because he has personally lived the horrors of war and of the need to make impossible decisions with deadly consequences. The war is averted, the peace is maintained, and in a surprising twist ZygonBonnie becomes one of the Osgoods. Which one, we will probably never know.

This pair of stories is just so great. I'd say it was the peak of the season, except that Heaven Sent / Hell Bent is still ahead. Tragically, before I can get to those I have to suffer through Sleep No More. Weep for me.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Twelfth
Companion(s): Clara Oswald, Petronella Osgood, Kate Stewart
Episode(s): The Zygon Inversion
Steps Walked: 7,654 today, 3,486,678 total
Distance Walked: 4.13 miles today, 1,823.22 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 0 today, 6,687 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 1,029 total
Weight: 246.3 lbs (five day moving average), net change -61.00 lbs