29 April, 2023

Ow! My mitochondria!


It is 1906 and a gentleman named Isiah is in a town watching a group of morris dancers (I think) pass him as they perform their ceremony. They carry a pole and atop it is a crude doll house which holds the wren. I see that there is (or was) a wren ceremony that took place in some parts of the UK on Boxing Day in which a wren was sacrificed. A few of the dancers collapse and the Doctor's diagnosis is that their mitochondria have lost their metabolic energy.

It turns out that Isiah is an electrical engineer and that the wren is not what it seems. Instead of being a dead bird, it is a sentient being that looks like a small round ball. It is starving for energy and, like E.T., just wants to get home. The Doctor and Isiah take the creature to the latter's lab and discharge all of his primitive batteries into the ball which gives it enough energy to burst through a window and fly up into the firmament.

I am beginning to warm to these short stories with a Christmas theme. This is a simple, straightforward tale that compacts a normal TV story into just a dozen or so pages. It's slight but I liked the appropriation of folklore and the happy ending.


No comments:

Post a Comment