After eighteen solid months of being on the treadmill dang near every day, it's not especially surprising that I am not all that eager to hop back on after basically two weeks off. But here I am. I decided that, rather than jump right into the next spinoff (Torchwood), I am going to take some time to enjoy the recently-released BluRay of Tom Baker's fantastic first season as the Fourth Doctor. So I started in on a re-watch of Robot. So let's talk about that.

Robot - Parts 1 & 2

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

(My previous watch)

It's been about eleven months since the last time I watched this. The first time around I was coming at it as the natural progression of the series. Now I am coming at it in more of a time-wimey look back, having met three times as many future Doctors as I had met past Doctors at this point. It properly feels like forever ago. I had already spent time with Sarah Jane Smith just the other day, so she slotted right in for me. It was funny, though, seeing the Brig and Benton and Harry Sullivan again, and being right back in the UNIT glory days (if the very tail end of them).

Also: Bessie!

It's just weird seeing Tom Baker drive that car. It is so intrinsically a Third Doctor thing. 

Anyway, there's not much to say about this story that I haven't already said before. As for the presentation, the BluRay version is as high in quality as you can expect from the source material. It's not like they could do a full 4k restoration and make it look like a theatrical release, the pixels just aren't there. But the presentation is nice, and the packaging takes up about 20% of the space that the same set of DVDs consumes on my shelf. I don't expect they will do any more classic releases like this, as much as I wish they would. 

What I really wish they would do is go back and do animated reconstructions of the missing stories (especially Marco Polo and The Massacre). But I don't suppose that they will do that either.

Ah, well.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Fourth
Companion(s): Sarah Jane Smith, Harry Sullivan, Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart
Episode(s): Robot - Parts 1 & 2
Steps Walked: 7,335 today, 3,645,623 total
Distance Walked: 3.85 miles today, 1,905.35 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 0 today, 6,747 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 1,029 total
Weight: 250.64 lbs (five day moving average), net change -56.66 lbs