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

Chekhov's Gun

Feb 06 2019
Chekhov's Gun

Well, that's it. As of today I have now watched every single episode of any official BBC-licensed Doctor Who related television program ever broadcast. It has taken my just shy of two years. I still have a few other things to watch, like the two Peter Cushing movies, a couple of animated web productions, and then some random half-licensed or unlicensed things like Shakedown and The Stranger. Tomorrow I will start watching the most recent season with the Thirteenth Doctor, which I have already seen but have not yet seen while walking on the treadmill. But the bottom line is that I can honestly now say that I have seen literally every Doctor Who television story ever. That's dang near a thousand episodes covering over fifty five years of broadcasting, and that includes watching complete reconstructions of the lost episodes (and God would I love to see the original broadcast versions of Marco Polo and The Faceless Ones). So... how cool is that?

The Lost

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Wow. I can honestly say I did not see this one coming. How many swerves, just in the first few minutes?

Well, Miss Quill is extremely, visibly pregnant. It would seem that she spent more relative time inside the Cabinet of Souls than it appeared, and that she and Ballon got up to a little sumpin' sumpin' before their battle to the death. This turn of events is a wee bit distressing for Miss Quill, in that in her species the children eat their mother as a part of the birthing process. Oops.

Then right off the bat Ram's father is killed by the Shadow King. Also, Tanya's mother is killed by the Shadow King. Boom, boom, two big deaths right off the bat before the opening titles, and neither one was in any way reversed by the end of the story. They are both dead dead.

The whole plot circles around the inevitable showdown, with the Shadow King having resumed control of his kingdom and threatening to kill everyone on Earth unless April (with whom he shares a heart) surrenders and returns with him to the Underworld. It ultimately comes down to Prince Charlie accepting that he has to use the Cabinet of Souls super weapon to commit genocide against the Shadow Kin, which is exactly what Miss Quill has wanted from day one. The problem is, if he does that then April will die and so will he.

Also, the mysterious Governors are finally revealed, at least in part, and it turns out they are in league with....

Holy shit, the Weeping Angels! For reals. And, I must say, it is the first time the Angels have been genuinely scary since their first appearance in Blink. Their arrival comes out of nowhere, using them to perfect effect without any excess. Along the way, poor evil Headmistress Dorothea dies. Boo hoo.

And so, since writer Patrick Ness showed us Chekhov's Gun in the first episode, in the form of the Cabinet of Souls, the weapon finally gets fired in the last episode. The good news: the Shadow Kin are destroyed. The surprising news: Charlie is spared from death, but only as a punishment so that he must live with the genocide he chose to unleash. The what-the-what news: April dies, the Shadow King does not, except the final moment has the Shadow King turn to the rest of the group and say, in April's voice, "What are you all looking at?"

Huge cliffhanger, left wide open for the second season that never happened. So...  wow.

I really, really liked this entire show from start to finish. It didn't necessarily feel like Doctor Who, with its darker tone, but it didn't go off the rails with that like Torchwood. Of course it really helped that the entire series was conceived and scripted by one person, which makes the whole thing fit together tonally and with solid consistency from episode to episode. 

And that's it for Class. Tomorrow I move on to the Thirteenth Doctor. Woo hoo!

STATS:

Companion(s): Charlie Smith, Matteusz Andrzejewski, April McLean, Ram Singh, Tanya Adeola, Miss Quill
Episode(s): The Lost
Steps Walked: 7,711 today, 4,389,059 total
Distance Walked: 4.31 miles today, 2,297.99 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 100 today, 10,700 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 5,065 total
Weight: 262.72 lbs (five day moving average), net change -44.58 lbs

 


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