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

Ten Thousand Push-Ups

Jan 19 2019
Ten Thousand Push-Ups

This ridiculous project has had a fair amount of ups and downs. The first year was pretty much a consistent free-fall in weight, and then I added strength training. I can't with a straight face look at that graph over there to the right and claim the entire bounce-back has been from building muscle mass, but at the same time I don't feel at all bad about finding a balance between how much I want to work out and how much and what I want to eat. I am not training to be an athlete, I just want to feel better than I used to. I have accomplished that in spades. Case in point: as of this morning I have now done a cumulative ten thousand push-ups. When I started I could barely do three. Now pretty much at any time I could drop and do twenty without breaking a sweat, and I consistently do a hundred (in five sets of twenty) during every other workout. I am damn proud of that, especially as a middle-aged guy over fifty with no sports experience. I got me some guns!

Aeolian

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

I can't believe I am saying this, but... I enjoyed this episode. It had it's issues, sure, but thirteen episodes in this was the first one where I felt like the story was a proper Doctor Who plot. It wasn't "something has come through the time space portal", it wasn't "K9 might be evil (but isn't)", and it wasn't even "Security Chief Drake is up to something nefarious". Instead, the "A" plot involved an alien (the titular Aeolian) causing mass mayhem by using the acoustics of a cathedral coupled with some WhateverTechnology in order to play a massively-amplified piece of music. The fact that the sound waves are causing hurricanes and tornadoes is only a side-effect (granted, about which she does not particularly care). She is potentially the last of her race, and she is sending out a mating call in order to find her long-lost partner. The resolution comes by the main characters having empathy with her, and assisting her in reuniting with her mate. If that is not the most Doctor Who thing ever then I don't know what is. Or, as Craig Ferguson so artfully put it, "It's all about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism."

There was also a "B" plot, which involved Jorjie being pinned under a slap of concrete debris in her bedroom when the storm causes her home to partially collapse. She is able to use the dog whistle to call for help, and Darius comes to assist her while Starkey and K9 carry on with the main mission of the story. There is nothing here that particularly breaks new ground, but in comparison to the previous dozen episodes it makes for a huge step up in drama. Darius is not able to free her himself and has to resort to calling in the assistance of a couple of the Cockney Police Robots, but even they are used surprisingly effectively. There is also some nice character growth, with Jorjie admitting out loud that she loves Starkey, and with Darius very nearly admitting his love for Jorjie before making up a Girlfriend Who Lives in Canada. (Well, ok, France, but the trope remains.)

Is the episode perfect? Not even. There is a stupid bit of drama involving Darius struggling to remember which medical injector to use, because instead of being clearly labeled which was which they are simply colored red and blue. Also, in the denouement of the episode when Jorjie is reunited with her mother, instead of saying "Mom, we are homeless because our house collapsed and I was pinned under a slab of concrete," she pretty much just says, "Oh, I'll tell you about my day later." In a similar vein, the episode casually mentions that both the Royal Albert Hall and Hyde Park were destroyed by tornadoes, but this wide scale disaster seems to have no lasting repercussions in the next (or presumably any future) episode. Finally, the song of the Aeolian somehow immediately reaches her mate, who is located ten thousand light years away. Think about that. Light waves would take ten millennia to travel that distance, let alone any kind of sound waves, and yet there we have it. Just sloppy, sloppy writing.

But overall, staggeringly, the plusses in this episode far outweighed the minuses for the first time. It is truly a red-letter day.

The Last Oak Tree

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Astoundingly, today's second episode was also comfortably out of the Doctor Who playbook. The titular Last Oak Tree in England is stolen, and it turns out to have been stolen by a giant Space Caterpillar who needs that particular wood pulp in order to create the proper cocoon in order to hatch her young. Once again the crux of the story involves our heroes having compassion for the creature that is causing fear and chaos. Again with the "romance and intellect" thing. Sure, most of the story takes place running around in the sewer sets, but again I can't think of anything more quintessentially Doctor Who than having our heroes chasing aliens around endless corridors. There is even a nice coda where it turns out the SpaceCaterpillar has left behind a handful of healthy acorns in order to grow new oak trees. The only possible complaint I have about this episode is some dodgy CGI on the giant bug, but that's just par for the course and not particularly egregious.

So, amazingly, two consecutive episodes of K9 that didn't make me want to die. I can only hope that this trend continues throughout the back half of this show, because it is an extremely welcome development.

STATS:

Companion(s): K9, Starkey, Jorjie Turner, Darius Pike, Alistair Gryffen
Episode(s): Aeolian / The Last Oak Tree
Steps Walked: 7,131 today, 4,290,251 total
Distance Walked: 3.45 miles today, 2,244.82 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 100 today, 10,000 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 3,665 total
Weight: 264.66 lbs (five day moving average), net change -42.64 lbs

 


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