The bad news:  Ugh, I feel fat. Which is stupid, but true. The ground I gained a few weeks ago was completely lost between a mild illness and a near-brush with GI troubles, and having only been back on the treadmill for two days in a row the trend has not turned back around yet. Much like poor Verruca Salt, I want the world and I want it now. The good news: today I did a hundred and forty six freaking sit-ups. I am back up to my maintenance level of doing a hundred push-ups every other day, and it seems I am within a week of hitting my goal of two hundred sit-ups every other day. So, you know, a day of plusses and minuses. Speaking of minuses, there were some conspicuous absences from today's viewing.

The Eternity Trap - Episodes 1 & 2

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

This one is your basic "Doctor Who does a haunted house" story, with all the familiar trappings. By which I mean, it is a ghost story where the ghosts shockingly turn out to actually be an alien plus the side-effects of his alien WhateverTechnology. If this was Scooby Doo it would be Old Man Jenkins trying to scare away people from his property so he can get the buried treasure, but this is the Whoniverse so of course we get aliens instead. Ok, whatever.

The first interesting thing about the story is who isn't there - Luke is completely absent from the story, having conveniently stayed back at home on standby. Which I took to mean that actor Tommy Knight need the week off for some reason or another. As a side effect, since the entire story takes place in situ at Creepy Gothic Manor, this makes it the only one to not include any scene at Sarah Jane's home or any appearance by alien supercomputer Mister Smith. So... that's kinda weird.  I mean, it's also cool in that at least it is different, but also weird.

The next interesting thing about the story is that it features actor Donald Sumpter in the role of baddie Erasmus Darkening. He would later go on to play the role of Rassilon in Hell Bent. Granted, that happened a full six years later, but I never watched these SJA stories when they first aired, so my response to seeing him in the pre-credits sequence was, "Hey, that's Rassilon!!" Interestingly, there is some debate over whether or not his character in this story is actually a Time Lord - with solid arguments on both sides. And certainly, Colin Baker showed us that sometimes the same face can end up on two different Time Lords, so who knows?

As for the story itself, it's your bog-standard "creepy stuff happening in a gothic manor turns out to be caused by an alien device". It wasn't awful, it wasn't great, it just kinda was. I did notice Clyde and Rani seeming to grow closer, although nothing overtly romantic happens. But certainly taking Luke out of the mix has the side effect of pairing those two up pretty much continuously. I am more than happy to be a Clyde/Rani shipper, and I wish them the very best in their future long and strange marriage. I hope their wedding goes better than Sarah Jane's did.

Tomorrow: the Mona Lisa is the baddie. Really? Well, this could be brilliant or it could be awful. We'll see...

STATS:

Featuring: Sarah Jane Smith, Clyde Langer, Rani Chandra
Episode(s): The Eternity Trap - Parts 1 & 2
Steps Walked: 7,328 today, 4,142,675 total
Distance Walked: 3.61 miles today, 2,169.68 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 0 today, 9,000 total
Sit-ups Completed: 146 today, 1,899 total
Weight: 261.80 lbs (five day moving average), net change -45.50 lbs