Doctor Who: The Sensorites

The Whoathon returns! After a bit of a hiatus, it’s back. A friend of mine watched this one with me. Well, we weren’t in the same place, but we watched at the same time and texted each other about the episode. It was fun. I highly recommend watching Doctor Who with a friend. I don’t think I would have enjoyed this story if it weren’t for my friend making comments about the Doctor being a wanker and the Sensorites looking like they're wearing pajamas and one of the guest characters being incredibly boring. So, this post will be on the short side.

The 1st Doctor is being cranky again.

Incredibly brief summary! The TARDIS gang arrives on a ship that is stuck in orbit around a planet. The crew of the ship is subjected to occasional mind control by the Sensorites, inhabitants of the planet below. They aren’t allowed to leave, and one of them has gone kind of nuts. The Sensorites steal the lock of the TARDIS, so the Doctor, Ian, Barbara, and Susan can’t leave, either. We discover that Susan can communicate telepathically with the Sensorites. Funny how Susan being telepathic has never come up before and how at the end of the episode it is explained away and her telepathic ability is gone.

How is he breathing outside the ship? What is he standing on to look through the window?

The Doctor, Ian, and Susan go down to the planet to see about getting that lock back and leave Barbara on board the ship. Barbara wasn’t in a few episodes of the story! I missed her. Ian OBVIOUSLY missed her. He’s the one who was asking that she be brought down from the ship, of course. One of the Sensorites on the planet doesn’t like the humans and makes mischief. Ian gets deathly ill, which leads the Doctor to solve a serious problem the Sensorites were having and couldn’t figure out themselves. The solution was obvious to the point that I called it before it was revealed, so I don’t know why the Sensorites didn’t see it.

Lapels!

There's more mischief and lots of time wandering around in an aqueduct, and everything turns out okay in the end. Even the crazy boring guy gets a happy ending. They deal with the main baddie offscreen, which seemed odd. He wreaks havoc for several episodes, and they just mention what happens to him like an afterthought. Oh, that guy. Yep, we punished him.

Next up is "The Reign of Terror." I remember that being a good one. I hope that turns out to be right.

THE RUNDOWN

Doctor: First

Companions: Barbara, Ian, Susan

Episode: #7, "The Sensorites," six parts- 'Strangers in Space,' 'The Unwilling Warriors,' 'Hidden Danger,' 'A Race Against Death,' 'Kidnap,' 'A Desperate Venture'

Adversary: the Sensorite city administrator

Classic Lines: the Doctor: "Beau Brummel always said I looked better in a cloak."

Tuck This Away to Impress Your Friends: Susan talks about their home planet but doesn't mention its name. She says that the sky is burnt orange and the trees have bright silver leaves.

Next Up: "The Reign of Terror"

Oatmeal raisin cookies

A quick post on oatmeal raisin cookies! This recipe is from Joanne Chang's cookbook Flour. Yep, once again I have returned to this book that doesn't disappoint.

I messed up these cookies. I baked them for too long. Completely my fault! Each cookie sheet I baked for less time, and the final one had the tastiest cookies. The flavor was excellent, but I could tell they were overbaked.

Something I didn't realize was how enormous these cookies would be. They were huge! Only six fit to a cookie sheet.

I don't think their size is adequately expressed by the above photo. Anyway, in the future I'll bake them for a shorter period of time. They were good, but next time they'll be better.

New Hope and NYC - huzzah!

I visit my friends in North Jersey quite a bit, but one weekend recently was extra special because a mutual friend was visiting from out of town. I headed up Saturday night, and Sunday we all went to New Hope, a small town on the Delaware River in Pennsylvania. I had never been there, but my friends all said great things about it. It did not disappoint. It’s a pretty town filled with fun little shops. Kenobi benefited from there being a pet store - I got him a giant dog treat that looked good enough for me to eat. One friend bought some spicy chocolate that was so hot my mouth would not stop burning. Thankfully, another friend had some gum to soothe the fire. Another friend let me have one of his chocolate covered caramels. YUM.

On the way back, we took the scenic route along the Delaware. I regaled them with the tale of my grandfather and John Glenn. Two friends confirmed a third’s opinion that I look like Claire Danes. They are wrong. That night my friends made Indian food for dinner. Delicious!

The next morning, my friend from out of town and I went to New York for the day. He suggested going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I was excited to see the museum. It was huge and amazing and wonderful. We only ended up going through the medieval and Egyptian sections because there was so much to see. They were fantastic. My friend happens to be a medieval scholar, and he was translating the Latin for me. Pretty cool. He may protest being called a medieval scholar, but too bad! My blog, my rules. Should medieval be capitalized? Who knows? Not me. (This is not the time for anyone to point out that I make my living as a writer or that I could probably google that.) He and I both speak French, so we enjoyed eavesdropping on native French speakers who were walking through the museum. Too bad we didn’t hear anything interesting, comme, “J’ai tué ma femme, and sa corps est enterrée dans le jardin.” Heh. The horse armor was great. I think the Book of the Dead was the highlight of the Egyptian section for both of us. It was cool. Why is there a spell for not stepping in excrement? They expected excrement in the Egyptian afterlife? How is the afterlife so great if you have to worry about stepping in poo?

My friends showed me the movie Frozen. It was awesome. My friends’ daughter knows the words to the songs and sang along, which was really very cute. They also had me watch Clone Wars, the Star Wars cartoon. I have been hesitant to watch Clone Wars because the prequels are utter crap and I thought it would be similar. I was happy to be wrong. The cartoon is entertaining.

I played chess for the first time in years. That was a lot of fun, if slightly challenging as a couple of the pieces were painted blue. My friend from out of town had his Cairn terrier along with him. She is adorable. There was some discussion as to whose dog is the cutest dog in the world, mine or his. Kenobi is the cutest dog in the world. Of course. (Again- my blog, my rules!)

No, this post doesn’t have any photos. I should have taken some with my phone, but I wasn’t thinking. I wish I had remembered. I never end up bringing my DSLR camera or taking photos with my phone when I’m with my friends. I’d like to have some photos of the people who are important to me. I need to remember next time.

What happened to March?!

March has been a crazy month. Lots of fun. Lots of work. No time for blogging. The Whoathon is not over! The baking is not over! April will be a better month for the blog.

Flour's famous banana bread

This post will be short and sweet due to the fact that I am both tired and feeling lazy. I will also be using bad phone photos instead of nice DSLR photos. Huzzah! Way to discourage people from reading…

I made banana bread from Joanne Chang’s book Flour. Quick breads like this are always fairly easy. The smell was incredible. It made the entire house smell of bananas. The banana bread was moist and tasty. It was also very dense. That about sums it up! I can’t really get enthusiastic about banana bread the way I do about pumpkin bread, but this was good.

Doctor Who: The Aztecs

I feel like I’m already falling behind on the Whoathon. This time I watched “The Aztecs.” This story suffers from coming immediately after “The Keys of Marinus.” I like it, but it doesn’t compare to the previous one. It’s only four episodes long. I’m glad it wasn’t any longer. It already didn’t have enough plot for the four episodes. However, it has an interesting premise that elevates the story above mediocrity- if you have a time machine, can you change history? 

The four travelers arrive in a tomb. Barbara and Susan bound out of the TARDIS. Barbara identifies it as Aztec. (Remember, she is a history teacher.) She then does something that I thought was weird. She takes a bracelet and puts it on! Her grave robbing ends up being the action that drives the story, but it still seems strange that a historian would take jewelry from a tomb and wear it. She and Susan leave the tomb and are captured by Aztecs. Lo and behold, the Aztecs see the bracelet and think she is the reincarnation of the god Yetaxa. All is well. Otherwise, the Aztecs were going to kill them. That’s convenient. Ian and the Doctor eventually leave the TARDIS and discover the situation. Barbara claims they are all her servants, so the Aztecs won’t kill them, either. 

Incidentally, the tomb door closed behind them, so they are stuck there until they can find a way inside. Here lies the main problem with the episode. There is no menace. There is no sense of urgency. The villain of the piece, Tlotoxl, is ridiculous. He ineptly keeps trying to expose Barbara as a false god. The only real trouble they face is that they can’t get back to the TARDIS. Come on. The viewer knows that they are definitely going to get back to the TARDIS at the end. 

As mentioned above, the interesting issue raised by this story is the ability to change history. Barbara admires the advanced aspects of Aztec culture while abhorring the human sacrifices. She believes that she can use her influence as a reincarnated god to stop the human sacrifices and in turn, help the good facets of Aztec culture survive through Cortez’s conquest. Ian and the Doctor both try to convince her that she is wrong. The Doctor yells at her to the point of making her cry. That’s typical 1st Doctor. 

I’ve never seen the upcoming episode, “The Sensorites.” I don’t know anything about it. I’m looking forward to going into one of these serials completely blind. There aren’t many existing episodes of Doctor Who I’ve never seen. Once I get past the 1st Doctor, I think I will have seen them all at least once.

THE RUNDOWN

Doctor: First

Companions: Barbara, Ian, Susan

Episode: #6, "The Aztecs," four parts- 'The Temple of Evil,' 'The Warriors of Death,' 'The Bride of Sacrifice,' 'The Day of Darkness'

Adversary: Tlotoxl

Classic Lines: the Doctor, to Barbara: "You can't rewrite history! Not one line!"

Tuck This Away to Impress Your Friends: The Doctor accidentally gets engaged to one of the Aztecs when they share some hot chocolate.

Next Up: "The Sensorites"