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.