Castrovalva

Last night I was watching a four part Doctor Who story from 1982 called "Castrovalva" which marked the debut of the fifth Doctor (Peter Davison). The story picks off directly from the end of the previous one ("Logopolis") with the Doctor having undergone a particularly traumatic regeneration. Once in the TARDIS, the Doctor discovers that his regeneration is failing and his only chance is to go to the planet Castrovalva, a place of complete peace and tranquility, and rest there until his regeneration has stabilised. However the Doctor's arch enemy, The Master (Anthony Ainley), is out for revenge and has set a deadly trap for the Doctor. It wasn't a bad story once it got going. It does start very slowly though, with almost the whole of the first two episodes set inside the TARDIS, but things do pick up considerably in the second half and particularly with the final episode of the story. The city of Castrovalva itself is well done, being obviously based on the prints of M.C. Escher.

Today has been fairly quiet. Work was pretty much the same as usual. I ended up leaving about an hour earlier than I would have normally because the computer systems went down. We did have an e-mail saying that we would be able to do some work after the systems went down, but I checked with the boss and in fact there wouldn't be anything that I could do, so rather than just hang around for an hour doing nothing, I just decided to go. It can get really frustrating because people never seem to know exactly what's going on, and you hear different things from different people, even the bosses.

At least it's the weekend now, anyway. It started out really cold and grey, but it has brightened up a lot this afternoon, which is nice to see.