Aisling Bea

            On Tuesday morning I dreamed I was with my dad looking to pay a bill. I don't know if it was his bill or mine or what kind. We were in a very drab-looking mall that didn't seem to have any stores that one could walk into. There were only counters and we were looking for the one to pay the bill at. My father looked like my father somewhat but he was much shorter and he was walking without bending his right leg as if it was a prosthetic limb. He looked like he was in his seventies but he still had the black hair he'd had before it turned grey. He stopped to ask directions from a much more elderly man but the guy didn't understand what he was saying and told him in an annoyed tone, “Come back and talk to me when you're older!”

            I finished revising my translation of “Chasseur d'ivoire” (Ivory Hunter) by Serge Gainsbourg. I found two sets of chords for the song and copied them down. There may be more so I'll continue to look tomorrow.

            I weighed 87.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday, I washed all of the mugs and cups that hang from hooks under the kitchen shelves and I cleaned about half the utensils that dangle along the back. 

            I weighed 87.1 kilos before lunch.

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Ossington and Bloor and on the way back I stopped at Freshco to get milk, detergent, oranges, and a bag of grapes. I weighed 86.4 kilos when I got home. 

            I edited the video of the wires touching with sparks flying in slow motion and cut it into five one-second clips. I inserted the first three into the video I'm making for my song “Instructions For Electroshock Therapy” to correspond with the line “We dance some sparks through twisted wires.” Following that is the line “and randomly black out the stars.” I tried to synchronize the concert video with the studio audio for that line but I sang it more slowly in concert and so I'll need to look for a video clip of stars going out. 

            I went onto the University of Toronto website to check if my course marks had been posted. I got an A for Introduction to Shakespeare but the Introduction to US Literature marks haven't been posted yet. 

            I went through the fourth file folder of my writing and it contained almost all pages of the group poem The Gumby Bible and my own poems that I referred to as “Commentaries on the Gumby Bible.” But there were a lot of pages of typed transcripts of The Gumby Bible which I've already not only digitized but also published in my blog. So I was able to move those pages into my scrap paper drawer.

            I had a potato with the last of my gravy and a chicken wing and shoulder while watching the New Year's Doctor Who Special. 

            SPOILER ALERT!!! 

            This story makes use of the time loop trope that has been popping up in science fiction shows and movies ever since the X-Files first did it twenty years ago. But it was done in a clever way. It begins with the Doctor, Yasmin, and Dan having to leave the Tardis because The Doctor has triggered it to reset itself. They think they are going to be stepping out onto a beautiful beach but it's the basement of a storage unit business. The facility is owned by Sarah, who inherited it from her uncle. It's New Year's Eve and a few minutes before midnight her customer Nick arrives as he always does on New Year's Eve. Nick goes downstairs to his unit where he encounters a Dalek which exterminates him. Shortly later it exterminates Sarah and a little after that it kills the Doctor, Yasmin, and Dan. Then the Doctor and her friends are alive again, as are Sarah and Nick. Sarah and Nick are feeling a sense of Deja Vu but the Doctor immediately recognizes that they are in a time loop caused by the resetting of the Tardis. The Daleks have zeroed in on the time loop and are trying to use it to take revenge on the Doctor because they believe the Doctor used the Flux as a weapon to kill millions of them. When Sarah sees the Dalek again she knows it is going to try to kill her and is trying to find a weapon. When Nick sees it he runs to try to save Sarah. They are both exterminated again, as are the Doctor and her friends. At the beginning of the next loop, the Doctor notes that each loop begins one minute closer to midnight than the last and that the one before midnight will be the last and so they all have to find a way to survive before the final loop. The Doctor learns a little more with each loop but so do the Daleks. By this time the five of them all know each other and are working together on the Doctor's plans. 

           When they are alone during one of the loops, Dan tells Yasmin that he knows that she has romantic feelings for the Doctor. She realizes it's true but didn't even know it. Meanwhile, Nick confesses to Sarah that he has feelings for her. Sarah later comments to the others that Nick is a weirdo but he's good-hearted and her friend Loren says, “The good-hearted weirdos are actually the keepers.”

            The Doctor plans a decoy loop to fool the Daleks. They all behave in an entirely different way just before the Daleks kill them. They find that one of Sarah's customers, named Jeff has been stockpiling fireworks in her place for years. They put all the fireworks together in the basement and the Doctor has Sarah ask her mother to call her at ten seconds to midnight. She leaves the phone with the fireworks and when it rings the Daleks are drawn to the human presence based on the decoy behaviour. Meanwhile, the five of them escape the building as the Daleks fire on the phone and the fireworks, thus destroying the entire building. 

           Sarah and Nick are now a couple and the Tardis has been reset. The Doctor, Yasmin and Dan travel to their next adventure, at the end of which, I've heard the Doctor will regenerate and it will be the end of Jodie Whitaker's term as the Doctor. I think she was close to being my favourite, although I was very fond of Christopher Eccleston in the role. I think Matt Stone comes in as my third favourite and after him the seventh Doctor from the first series, Sylvester McCoy. 

            Sarah was played by Irish actor, comedian, and writer Aisling Bea, who created and starred in the TV series “This Way Up” for which she won a BAFTA. She won a British Comedy Award for Best TV Comedian and she was the first woman in twenty years to win the Gilded Balloon So You Think You're Funny competition. She was in the cast of the sitcom “Dead Boss.” She currently co-stars with Paul Rudd in the comedy series “Living With Yourself.”