One fat geek's SUCCESSFUL attempt to regenerate into a not-so-fat geek by watching the entirety of Doctor Who while walking on a treadmill

Sing to Me, Roy Orbison

Nov 20 2018
Sing to Me, Roy Orbison

Every summer I spend two weeks working out of a room at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, helping to run a huge convention. Part of what I do is managing what essentially amounts to speed dating for travel professionals, with travel agents meeting with different travel suppliers every four minutes for four consecutive days - over three hundred thousand individual face-to-face meetings. Also every year, after the very last appointment in this grueling schedule, I put together an appropriate musical playlist to celebrate the end, and it always begins with Roy Orbison plaintively singing, "It's Over."  Well, as of this morning Torchwood is finally over for me. I started on September 9th, so it has taken me a little over two months to get through it all. It started poorly, got progressively better, peaked with Children of Earth, and then shit all over itself for Miracle Day. I am delighted to put this damn thing behind me.

Miracle Day: The Blood Line

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Torchwood began its very first episode by shockingly killing a lead character in the final moments. Then they decided to kind-of kill another lead character halfway through the second season, and definitely kill that character plus another in the season finale. By that point, it apparently became baked into the show's DNA that at least one lead character has to die every season (but not Jack or Gwen). So on the third go-around poor Ianto gets offed, and here at the end of the fourth both Esther and Rex bite it for no other reason than they are the only Not-Jack-Not-Gwen lead characters available. It is weak and fully predictable.

Somewhat less predictable, but still eye-rolling is the the coda to the story that serves no other purpose than to tee up another season that never had any chance of happening. Children of Earth had the good grace to end with an air of finality, leaving the possibility of future stories without putting any real weight on that possibility. Miracle Day, on the other hand, finishes by suddenly making Rex apparently-immortal (because somehow getting a full-blood transfusion from Jack would do that) and spending time showing the surviving second-tier bad guys plotting for "Plan B". Instead of that coming to fruition, Doctor Who just seemed to pretend that the Miracle never happened (certainly neither Amy nor Rory ever mention it, nor does Clara seem to be living in a post-Miracle world that had just recently been on the verge of complete economic collapse and totalitarian government rule). You can't even write it off as having been erased by the events of The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang, because those happened a full year before the Miracle.

Miracle Day is like that gross uncle that everybody in the family just pretends doesn't exist, and avoids at holiday parties, but who still manages to linger around and stink up the joint.

The good news is, I never, ever have to watch it again. Tomorrow morning I make the radical shift to watching The Sarah Jane Adventures, and I couldn't be more delighted to be spending the next month or so hanging out with Elisabeth Sladen again. I only ever watched the very first episode, so the entire series will be new to me. I can hardly wait to get started.

STATS:

Featuring: Captain Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, Rex Matheson, Esther Drummond
Episode(s): Miracle Day: The Blood Line
Steps Walked: 7,725 today, 4,021,042 total
Distance Walked: 4.22 miles today, 2,105.39 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 0 today, 8,296 total
Sit-ups Completed: 62 today, 1,280 total
Weight: 257.40 lbs (five day moving average), net change -49.90 lbs


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