Nothing awfully exciting to report today. Had a good day at work. Did a hundred push-ups. Walked four miles on the treadmill while watching K9. Not a single one of those things is profound, it's just that kind of day.

Lost Library of Ukko

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Inspector Thorne is up to something nefarious. On the upside: Where Drake was just a low-rent Draco Malfoy with his sneering, evil posturing and yet so very callow, Thorne actually has gravitas and menace. Any time Drake was on the screen I just begged for the sweet release of death because the character was so awful. Here, though, Thorne has a plot that actually makes sense and carries real threat. The titular librarians of Ukko have a technology that can scan in an entire world and store in in a virtual space (not entirely unlike Doctor Moon and his database in Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead). Thorne is exploring the idea of using an Ukkon compressed world to serve as a prison planet where he can just dump untold numbers of criminals and thus spare the expense of physical prisons. Unfortunately Starkey gets caught up and trapped on the compressed planet, and is later (unwillingly) joined by Thorne himself while the rest of the crew figures out how to rescue them. If the basic setup is same-old same-old, the execution was actually watchable. I legitimately like Thorne as a character, he is exactly the right level of menace that this show so desperately needed.

Mutant Copper

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Inspector Thorne is up to something nefarious. Again. On the upside: Thorne's involvement is really the tiniest part of the story, serving only as an explanation and not really as a driving part of the plot at all. An experiment in blending a human consciousness with the cybernetic brain of one of the Cockney Robot Cops leads to the existence of the titular Mutant Copper (who is nicknamed Birdie due to his express fascination with birds). Most of the story is effectively a morality tale, the struggle of Birdie being not-quite-human and not-quite-cybernetic, and so not fitting properly into either world. In today's woke parlance you might even consider him to be non-binary. He comes under the protection of our heroes, as Thorne tries to hunt him down and destroy him since he is evidence of an unsanctioned experiment gone wrong. There is also a subplot with Jorjie briefly having a new boyfriend, and it is not even the least bit shocking when he turns out to be an opportunistic creep and not at all worthy of Jorjie's affections. A bit ham-handed, but given the target audience not terrible. In the end Birdie is set free outside of London and Thorne's influence, to go seek his own life. Which, surprisingly, is not at all where I thought it was going. So, good on you K9 - eighteen episodes in you finally managed to swerve on me.

STATS:

Companion(s): K9, Starkey, Jorjie Turner, Darius Pike, Alistair Gryffen
Episode(s): Lost Library of Ukko / Mutant Copper
Steps Walked: 7,433 today, 4,297,684 total
Distance Walked: 3.89 miles today, 2,248.71 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 100 today, 10,100 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 3,865 total
Weight: 264.28 lbs (five day moving average), net change -43.02 lbs