I got a bit behind again, but I am catching up here. I still need to double up on two days to finish on schedule, so right now I am targeting Saturday and Sunday to do that. Holy cow, a week from now I will be done with this ridiculous project, can you believe it?!?

So anyway, let's talk about haunted houses.

Knock Knock

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

When this episode first aired last year, I did not think very highly of it. Upon re-watch, I actually liked it a bit better. I still didn't love it, but it did evoke a kind of 70's haunted house horror vibe that I appreciated a little better this time around. The gist of the story is that Bill, being a poor college-age person in a college town, joins a group of five other students to rent a house together. Being poor college-age kids, all of their options are terrible, and they end up settling on the Generic Creepy House with a Creepy Old Man for a landlord, because that never goes badly.

The Doctor helps Bill move her stuff, and then decides to overstay his welcome because he accurately recognizes that the Generic Creepy House is, indeed, creepy. Before long all of the NotBills start getting eaten by the house one-by one, devoured by mysterious alien woodlice that come burrowing out of the walls and floors. Eventually it comes down to Bill and the Doctor facing off with the Creepy Old Man plus the Secret Wooden Woman, who says that the Creepy Old Man is her father and has kept her alive by feeding people to the woodlice. Which, ok, not sure how that works, but cool. And then the big twist: this has been going on for at least seventy years, and the Creepy Old Man is actually the Secret Wooden Woman's son.  So mom decides that her continued existence isn't worth the lives of all of these people, and summons the woodlice to devour her and the son, and also to give back all of the housemates that had been devoured that night. They all stagger away into the night, and the house collapses into itself.

So yeah, actually a fairly creepy story. I feel like if it had been thirty minutes longer with a hard-R rating it would have had more time to build tension and have a few more inventive deaths before the big reveal, but given the constraints of hourly television it worked pretty well. Still not an episode I would ever go out of my way to watch again, but certainly a damn sight better than most of Capaldi's first season.

What do you know, this one actually aged better. What a happy turn of events.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Twelfth
Companion(s): Bill Potts, Nardole
Episode(s): Knock Knock
Steps Walked: 7,608 today, 3,565,509 total
Distance Walked: 4.06 miles today, 1,864.61 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 0 today, 6,747 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 1,029 total
Weight: 247.38 lbs (five day moving average), net change -59.92 lbs