Sundays at Gally always have their own peculiar flavor. There is still a lot to do and see, but the specter of the end of the con hangs over everything, too. At the beginning of the day, though, it’s relatively easy to pretend there’s another two days of the con to go.

This year I spent most of my day in Program D at the discussion panels rather than in Program A at the main stage big events and interview panels as I have often done. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the day I wanted to be in both places at once. Program A held a live commentary screening of The Waters of Mars with actual NASA scientists giving the commentary. I know I would have loved it, and been nodding along (perhaps even noticing some of the same things as they were said), and both the tweets I read and personal accounts I heard indicated it was a hoot.

Instead, though, I chose to go to the panel about diversity in Doctor Who. It’s unfortunate that programming came down to a single panel encompassing every type of human diversity in a mere fifty minutes (that’s hardly enough to talk about any one, let alone all of them), but it was still good to have the conversation. Interestingly, the only time casting a new Doctor came up was at the end, when it was noted that it felt like this had been the only panel of the weekend that hadn’t discussed it.

It’s Gally time again, and the con has officially been in full swing since Thursday night. Unofficially, though, there have been folks around since at least Monday. I arrived Wednesday afternoon, but only made my way over to the Marriott Lobby (I’m staying elsewhere this year) on Thursday morning. Every year, it seems, things ramp up earlier and earlier as folks make the most of opportunities to play tourist while in town.

On Friday, the non-con story of the day was rain. The local news seemed to be making it out to be fairly apocalyptic—and to be fair, in some parts of the region there have been several inches since the storm broke—but near LAX, and for a Midwesterner, the rain seemed steady but light. I was fortunate enough to make it to the Marriott before the rain started, and I was extremely glad not to be out in it once the wind picked up.

I thus spent a couple of hours in the Lobby chatting with random folks until the con’s opening salvo: the Radio Free Skaro live episode. I sat through the first two sections (interviews with Paul McGann and with Philip Hinchcliffe and Roger Murray-Leach, respectively) before making a couple of passes around the Dealers’ Room to ogle swag and grab some autographs.