Inspired by Last-Minute Panic
Feb. 6th, 2012 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kasihyaOnce again, I am avoiding reading Lazarillo de Tormes by outlining the Doctor Who episode in which the Doctor meets Molly Hooper. Also there are zombies.
Okay, so here’s what happens. There’s this species of small aliens, right? And they’re a parasitic race, which needs a certain enzyme produced in the bodies of several other species in order to breed and raise their children to maturity. And this was disastrous for all involved until the aliens – we’ll call them the Skeert – achieved sentience and realized that hey, this isn’t too nice to do to other species. So now they have this technique where they can reanimate corpses in order to get them to perform life functions and produce the enzyme. They hang out in the corpses until their children are raised fully – about two years – and then they leave them alone again.
But the Skeert have just worn out their welcome at their latest host planet, so they go down to Earth because they’ve heard that humans produce this enzyme as well. They’re polite, like I said – they’ll only use corpses. They don’t have a concept of respect for the dead like many human cultures do; their thinking is that the thing that makes them people is the consciousness, and once that’s gone, in their culture, the meat is fair game.
Of course, this doesn’t translate well to humans, and when you get a race of small aliens infiltrating the bodies of the dying in order to get a grip on things once the person is deceased, what happens?
Well, the dead walk the earth. And where do you find the dead starting to come back to life? Mortuaries.
Naturally, the Doctor is doing a tour of Earth when he happens to hear about an apparent zombie invasion. The Skeert aren’t going to be killing anyone – they just want regular food so that the bodies they have can function – but zombie culture is so ingrained into everyone in this day and age that people are panicking anyway. The Doctor has never heard of these aliens, because cosmically speaking, they’re not around for very long. It’s not a viable way to live, because they’re so destructive that they die off within a hundred thousand years of gaining sentience. So since he’s in London – and he does seem to spend an awful lot of time in London, relative to the entire universe or even the entire earth – he hears about this one place where, after a few days, the dead have started to gather: a mortuary. He pops off to visit this mortuary, thinking that it’s the source, where he runs into one Molly Hooper.
Molly is, understandably, confused by her comfortable dead bodies getting up and walking around in search of food when they should be on the slab. She does go to work, because she’s found that they aren’t idiots, these corpses. They’re not reanimated versions of their former selves, but they pay attention when she interacts with them, and the most frightening thing that they’ve done is take her lunch. She’s even started bringing them food, but after three days of this, that’s a considerable number of bodies requiring a considerable amount of food, and she’s afraid of what’s going to happen when there’s not enough to go around. Moreover, bodies from elsewhere have been flocking to the mortuary, because the Skeert have communicated with each other that this is a place where they can go without causing havoc, because try as she might, no one will listen to Molly when she tells them that all the zombies really want is food and water, and then they’ll go away until next meal.
At this, the Doctor shows up, and Molly is probably relieved that there’s someone who not only believes her, but seems to have an idea of what he’s doing and is willing to take charge. I get the impression that she’s not someone comfortable with being in the spotlight, I mean, she works with dead people for a living. She tells him what she’s figured out, and I think the Doctor would be pleased that she’s handled it like she has, because it makes his job a lot easier and because how many people would look past the fact that oh my god, dead Uncle Frankie is throwing himself against the door, to realize that dead Uncle Frankie isn’t actually hurting anyone? That’s interesting.
They get a corpse to experiment on, Franklin Adams. Nice man, bit weird, he used to stand on the corner advertizing for a gentleman’s club and Molly would talk to him when she was going out for lunch, but then he contracted HIV, never got treatment, and died. The Doctor does some scans on him, and they decide that they need to cut him open in order to see what’s going on inside. Maybe to scan his brain? But the screwdriver isn’t enough, they need to use actual medical equipment, which he has no idea how to use, would she know? Probably not, so that means that they’re muddling about with the scanners and they accidentally fry Mr. Adams. Whoops. Grab a nurse that Molly knows, have her do the scans instead, and find a way to keep her from being suspicious about the man not wearing medical scrubs or apparently having a clue what he’s doing, while claiming to be a doctor. Also, what are they doing with one of the zombies, and how did they kill it? But with a combination of lies from both Molly and the Doctor, she is goaded into doing it.
When they do get the results back – and get back from feeding the thirty or so zombies who are at this point sitting around the mortuary, doing nothing but eating and going to the bathroom – they’re a little blurry, but it appears that there’s parasitic organisms stretched throughout the man’s torso. They cut him open, and what do they find? A family of Skeert, who look a little bit like a legless lizard that’s been incorporated by a paramecium a foot in length when they’re fully grown, but when they’re children they’re only the size of a finger. There are three adults and five children in there, all dead except for one of the adults. Molly is fascinated by these aliens, (possibly horrified fascination, but part honest curiosity) she wants to know how they could possibly be living inside a human being like that, how are they alive and how did they get there? Which the Doctor totally agrees with.
Skeerts are short-range telepaths, which is how they communicated to their fellows that Molly Hooper was a reliable and compassionate food source, and the Skeert infodumps on them most of the information above: that they’re space travelers, that they’re cyclical breeders and they’ve ravaged their home planet completely through five thousand years of aggressive population growth once they discovered the cure for a virus that had, for the history of life before that, kept their population at sustainable levels. Once they got intelligent enough to cure that, that was when they had to expand off-planet, and now they need to inhabit the dead of this planet for their species to continue.
Which, as the Doctor tells the Skeert, is not okay, because this planet hasn’t had any contact with alien species yet, and furthermore, to do so disrespects and disrupts previously established cultural customs concerning dead bodies in thousands of cultures, so no. Not acceptable. You need to leave now.
This is not something that the Skeert are willing to do, but humanity can't just wait around for two or three years until the Skeert are finished breeding and leave, because that means that in another ten years, when the next generation have reached maturity, they'll just come back from floating around in space or wherever it is that they live when they're not temporarily colonizing planets. Molly and the Doctor need to find a way to force the Skeert out of their dead hosts. They can't send out lethal amounts of radiation, because that will also kill the human population and that would defeat the point. They can use Franklin the Skeert ...
... to be continued ...
Okay, so here’s what happens. There’s this species of small aliens, right? And they’re a parasitic race, which needs a certain enzyme produced in the bodies of several other species in order to breed and raise their children to maturity. And this was disastrous for all involved until the aliens – we’ll call them the Skeert – achieved sentience and realized that hey, this isn’t too nice to do to other species. So now they have this technique where they can reanimate corpses in order to get them to perform life functions and produce the enzyme. They hang out in the corpses until their children are raised fully – about two years – and then they leave them alone again.
But the Skeert have just worn out their welcome at their latest host planet, so they go down to Earth because they’ve heard that humans produce this enzyme as well. They’re polite, like I said – they’ll only use corpses. They don’t have a concept of respect for the dead like many human cultures do; their thinking is that the thing that makes them people is the consciousness, and once that’s gone, in their culture, the meat is fair game.
Of course, this doesn’t translate well to humans, and when you get a race of small aliens infiltrating the bodies of the dying in order to get a grip on things once the person is deceased, what happens?
Well, the dead walk the earth. And where do you find the dead starting to come back to life? Mortuaries.
Naturally, the Doctor is doing a tour of Earth when he happens to hear about an apparent zombie invasion. The Skeert aren’t going to be killing anyone – they just want regular food so that the bodies they have can function – but zombie culture is so ingrained into everyone in this day and age that people are panicking anyway. The Doctor has never heard of these aliens, because cosmically speaking, they’re not around for very long. It’s not a viable way to live, because they’re so destructive that they die off within a hundred thousand years of gaining sentience. So since he’s in London – and he does seem to spend an awful lot of time in London, relative to the entire universe or even the entire earth – he hears about this one place where, after a few days, the dead have started to gather: a mortuary. He pops off to visit this mortuary, thinking that it’s the source, where he runs into one Molly Hooper.
Molly is, understandably, confused by her comfortable dead bodies getting up and walking around in search of food when they should be on the slab. She does go to work, because she’s found that they aren’t idiots, these corpses. They’re not reanimated versions of their former selves, but they pay attention when she interacts with them, and the most frightening thing that they’ve done is take her lunch. She’s even started bringing them food, but after three days of this, that’s a considerable number of bodies requiring a considerable amount of food, and she’s afraid of what’s going to happen when there’s not enough to go around. Moreover, bodies from elsewhere have been flocking to the mortuary, because the Skeert have communicated with each other that this is a place where they can go without causing havoc, because try as she might, no one will listen to Molly when she tells them that all the zombies really want is food and water, and then they’ll go away until next meal.
At this, the Doctor shows up, and Molly is probably relieved that there’s someone who not only believes her, but seems to have an idea of what he’s doing and is willing to take charge. I get the impression that she’s not someone comfortable with being in the spotlight, I mean, she works with dead people for a living. She tells him what she’s figured out, and I think the Doctor would be pleased that she’s handled it like she has, because it makes his job a lot easier and because how many people would look past the fact that oh my god, dead Uncle Frankie is throwing himself against the door, to realize that dead Uncle Frankie isn’t actually hurting anyone? That’s interesting.
They get a corpse to experiment on, Franklin Adams. Nice man, bit weird, he used to stand on the corner advertizing for a gentleman’s club and Molly would talk to him when she was going out for lunch, but then he contracted HIV, never got treatment, and died. The Doctor does some scans on him, and they decide that they need to cut him open in order to see what’s going on inside. Maybe to scan his brain? But the screwdriver isn’t enough, they need to use actual medical equipment, which he has no idea how to use, would she know? Probably not, so that means that they’re muddling about with the scanners and they accidentally fry Mr. Adams. Whoops. Grab a nurse that Molly knows, have her do the scans instead, and find a way to keep her from being suspicious about the man not wearing medical scrubs or apparently having a clue what he’s doing, while claiming to be a doctor. Also, what are they doing with one of the zombies, and how did they kill it? But with a combination of lies from both Molly and the Doctor, she is goaded into doing it.
When they do get the results back – and get back from feeding the thirty or so zombies who are at this point sitting around the mortuary, doing nothing but eating and going to the bathroom – they’re a little blurry, but it appears that there’s parasitic organisms stretched throughout the man’s torso. They cut him open, and what do they find? A family of Skeert, who look a little bit like a legless lizard that’s been incorporated by a paramecium a foot in length when they’re fully grown, but when they’re children they’re only the size of a finger. There are three adults and five children in there, all dead except for one of the adults. Molly is fascinated by these aliens, (possibly horrified fascination, but part honest curiosity) she wants to know how they could possibly be living inside a human being like that, how are they alive and how did they get there? Which the Doctor totally agrees with.
Skeerts are short-range telepaths, which is how they communicated to their fellows that Molly Hooper was a reliable and compassionate food source, and the Skeert infodumps on them most of the information above: that they’re space travelers, that they’re cyclical breeders and they’ve ravaged their home planet completely through five thousand years of aggressive population growth once they discovered the cure for a virus that had, for the history of life before that, kept their population at sustainable levels. Once they got intelligent enough to cure that, that was when they had to expand off-planet, and now they need to inhabit the dead of this planet for their species to continue.
Which, as the Doctor tells the Skeert, is not okay, because this planet hasn’t had any contact with alien species yet, and furthermore, to do so disrespects and disrupts previously established cultural customs concerning dead bodies in thousands of cultures, so no. Not acceptable. You need to leave now.
This is not something that the Skeert are willing to do, but humanity can't just wait around for two or three years until the Skeert are finished breeding and leave, because that means that in another ten years, when the next generation have reached maturity, they'll just come back from floating around in space or wherever it is that they live when they're not temporarily colonizing planets. Molly and the Doctor need to find a way to force the Skeert out of their dead hosts. They can't send out lethal amounts of radiation, because that will also kill the human population and that would defeat the point. They can use Franklin the Skeert ...
... to be continued ...
