If you could touch the alien sand...

Reading: The Crawling Terror by Mike Tucker. Twelth Doctor and Clara novel. I've only just started it but its already obvious that it's Giant Bugs in Rural England.

Listening: Just finished an episode of the Machine Ethics Podcast with which I have a somewhat frustrated relationship. It's proved very useful for keeping tabs on the AI Ethics landscape, but there are definitely times I want to shake the interviewer or interviewees, and a couple of times I've just had to nope out entirely because SO MUCH NONSENSE. This was a slightly odd episode, the interviewee had clearly reached out, requesting an interview in order to talk about/promote her biocomputing company. Clearly outside of the interviewer's comfort zone, and hard to know to what extent this was crossing the line from science communication into advertising.

Watching: Three weeks late we realise Have I Got News for You has started up again. It does what it does and we're the target demographic. I laughed a lot at Armando Iannuci's exasperation at people claiming that Winston Churchill was being replaced by a badger.

Late last year, maybe early this? Toby Hadoke asked various people he knew what 17 missing Dr Who episodes they would pick if they were the only 17 left to be found. It now transpires he almost certainly knew, at that point, that 2 episodes of The Daleks' Masterplan had been found, but it got me thinking. My list is something as follows:

1. & 2. The Tenth Planet episode 4 and The Web of Fear episode 3. These both complete stories and are significant, in the first case for the regeneration of William Hartnell into Patrick Troughton and, in the second, for the first meeting with the Brigadier.

Then I have a string of picking one episode from any story for which no episodes exist so.

3. Marco Polo - there are three episodes in contention for this: episode 3 (which features Ping-Cho giving a storytelling performance something not attempted elsewhere in Doctor Who, or much at all these days), episode 5 which features Tutte Lemkow who is mildly (in)famous for having been in Doctor Who three times, none of which survive and having provided choreography for a fourth episode which also doesn't survive, and episode 7 (which is believed to have good fight scenes which, obviously, don't survive well on audio). I'm going to go for Marco Polo episode 3 for the storytelling - alas poor Tutte Lemkow.

4. The Myth Makers episode 1 - the choices here were episode 1 which sets the scene or episode 4 which pivots from farce into tragedy and introduces new companion Katarina. Doctor Who rarely enough does outright comedy that I've picked the introductory episode and it also features Tutte Lemkow so yay!. Also, with the recent returns we have 3/5 of Katarina's episodes and I've no real desire to see more.

5. The Massacre episode 4 - on the other hand, I'd rather see the conclusion of this one, which seems to have been pretty grim throughout, but I'd be interested to see how the Massacre of St. Bartholemew's Eve portrayed via woodcuts worked in practice. It does mean we miss out on William Hartnell's turn as the Abbot of Amboise however.

6. The Savages episode 4 - Episode 4s are tempting in and of themselves, but in this case we get Frederick Jaeger's impersonation of aspects of the first Doctor - seems well worth it.

7. The Smugglers - lots of choices here. Episode 4 once again has a lot of fighting that doesn't work well on audio, but I'm going to go for The Smugglers episode 2 where Polly convinces the stable boy that she can do voodoo.

8. The Power of the Daleks episode 1 - the other side of the regeneration of William Hartnell into Patrick Troughton.

9. The Highlanders episode 2 - in which the Doctor repeatedly bangs a man's head on a desk in ruse to convince him he is ill with a headache.

10. The Macra Terror episode 1 - because it includes the scene in which the Second Doctor is neatened up by a machine - which was cut from the animation.

11. Fury from the Deep episode 3 - which ends with Maggie walking out into the sea.

So now I have 5 left.

12. The Space Pirates epsiode 5 - The Space Pirates is not much loved but people hypothesise this is because the only episode we have involves the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe stuck in part of a disintegrated space station for the whole episode. So let's have another and I've picked one that features the character Dom Issigri because no one seems to know what he looks like.

13. The Power of the Daleks episode 4 - for no other reason that it would be nice to have a later episode of this, after the Doctor has ceased to be quite such a stranger to everyone, and episode 4 of 6 seems as good a place as any to stick the pin.

14 & 15. Marco Polo episode 7 and The Smugglers episode 4 for the aforementioned fight scenes.

16 & 17. The Daleks' Masterplan episodes 4 and 12 for the deaths of Katarina and Sara respectively.