First off, so I don't bury the lede: Today my five-day moving average weight was under 290 lbs for the first time since I started this project. Can I get a what what? I am mightily pleased. On a day-to-day basis it seems like nothing is happening, and then I look at the chart and hit this kind of milestone, and I am re-invigorated.

Today was the first half of perhaps the most lost of all of the lost episodes. For most of them, at least some footage remains if only a fragment from a television capture or some such. But for The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve there is literally nothing except the audio track and some still photographs. There is not even a clear consensus on what the closing credits said. It's not surprising, in that this story comes on the heels of what some (not me) consider the greatest Dalek story of all time, and is instead a purely historical story with no science fiction of any kind to be found aside from the TARDIS materializing at the beginning and dematerializing at the end. In between, the story recounts a historical event that is not nearly as notorious as any of the other ones portrayed in these early historicals. On top of that, the Doctor disappears from most of the story so that it becomes a tale of Steven encountering a group of Huguenots in a tavern and being swept up in the impending wave of violence.

For me, though, I am pretty jazzed about the story. I have already said how much I enjoy the pure historicals, and this is the third one written by John Lucarotti (Marco Polo, The Aztecs). It is a foregone conclusion that this story is not going to have a happy ending, but along the way there are some things to be learned about the French Religious Wars.

Let's talk about that.

Today was the big finish for The Daleks' Master Plan, and also the big finish for Sara Kingdom. Is the universe saved?  Does the Dalek Time Destructor work? Does William Hartnell come back from his unexpected vacation right at the climax of the story?

Let's talk about that.

In the entire fifty-four-year history of Doctor Who there is precisely one episode that initially aired on my birthday.Escape Switch first broadcast on January 15th, 1966 -- two years before I was born -- and, as luck would have it, is one of the few surviving intact episodes from The Daleks' Master Plan. On top of that, the two episodes I watched this morning really played well together as a single unit, both taking place during a side trip to ancient Egypt at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Oh, also: this morning marks my 100th episode watched since starting this project.

Let's talk about that.

I know, I know, it's Easter. But the two episodes I watched this morning were originally aired on Christmas Day and New Year's Day respectively. So they've got me in the holiday mood. And hey, it must be Christmas because tonight I get the awesome present of the first new regular Doctor Who episode in over a year. So that's pretty cool. But getting back to The Daleks' Master Plan, half of this morning's viewing was worth watching. The other half? Not so much.

Let's talk about that.

This morning was the first day back on my own, now fully-repaired, treadmill. It was a comedy of errors. Part of repairing it was to spray some silicone lubricant underneath the new belt, and apparently a small bit of silicone got onto the front of my right shoe. I had to stop and change shoes after five minutes because every time I would stride forward, my right foot would lose traction and slip out from under me. Then somehow the magnetic key became jostled, and the whole thing cut out again thirty minutes later. Ultimately I made it through, and I think I have worked out the kinks and gotten the refurbished treadmill back into proper shape. Oh, and... I kid you not, at one point during the second episode this morning Sara Kingdom made a crack to Steven about treadmills. It's like the show was speaking directly to me across a gulf of fifty two years!

Let's talk about that!

This morning the treadmill pretty well kicked my butt. I had pushed the speed up yesterday, and I pushed it up another notch today. That turned out to be a notch too far. On top of that, while I already knew about one of the major plot points in today's viewing I was completely caught off guard with the second big moment. While watching the reconstruction of the second and third episodes of The Daleks' Master Plan (which primarily consists of audio and still images), I was not fully prepared for it to cut to real footage for the first big moment. It was a huge gut-punch that left me reeling.

Let's talk about that.

I dove into The Daleks' Master Plan this morning with some trepidation. As I have said before, "How can I miss you if you won't go away?" The good news is, this story is a vast improvement over the previous outing. The better news is, I completely forgot that this story marks the first appearance of Nicholas Courtney on the show. The director liked working with him so much that he asked him back the next year to appear in The Web of Fear, and the rest is history. So yeah, sure, he isn't the Brigadier yet, but that's just fine. His calm demeanor and stiff-upper-lippedness in the face of adversity shines through and raises the level of the story immensely.

Let's talk about that.

Much like the Thunder Dome, on Doctor Who when one companion leaves another companion must soon come aboard. In these early days, the swap is clearly in service to future stories already written -- teenager Susan leaves, and so teenager Vicki slots right in. Man of Action Ian leaves, and so Man of Action Steven slots right in. Arguably Barbara fails this mold, to which I would say: 1) Barbara was a goddess, and cannot be replaced, and 2) More likely, whatever future scenes had been written for Barbara could have been picked up easily by Vicki, so the same principle still applies. And so, with today's departure of Vicki also comes today's arrival of Katarina. Of course, Katarina won't be around all that long... But that's a conversation for another day (specifically: Wednesday). But today we have Trojan horses and Achilles tendons to discuss.

I am deep into recon territory now. It looks to me like it will be nine more days before I watch another non-reconstructed episode, and fully nineteen of the next 24 stories I watch will be either fully or partially reconstructed. As for today's story, it was the first half of The Myth Makers. We did the Romans in the second season, so it's only fitting that we should do the Greeks in the third. More specifically, the story is centered on the climax of the ten-year siege of Troy. It does help, when watching the story, to be familiar with The Iliad, since all of the major characters are there and some are played against type for irony. But it is another pure historical, and those are my favorite type of First Doctor stories.