I love Short Trips. Anthologies and short stories are perhaps my favorite expanded media to come out of Doctor Who.

Today’s story comes from Short Trips: The History of Christmas. As you may guess from the title the theme of the anthology collection is Christmas and it’s surrounding holidays. There’s actually quite a few such Yuletide themed anthologies within the franchise.

This particular outing involves the First Doctor, Barbara, and Ian landing in Scotland in 1950, shortly after Susan has left them. What starts off as an extended holiday, to give them time to move on from their loss, turns into a heist caper to steal the coronation stone on Christmas day.

Apparently the story is based off a real event. On Christmas Day, 1950, four college students stole the Stone of Scone, a Scottish relic that was used for royal coronations for centuries, from Westminster Abbey where the English had stolen it centuries before to use in their own coronations. They had planned to return the stone to Scotland but accidentally broke the stone in half during the theft. They had a stone mason fix it and left the stone in Arbroath Abbey, a church in Scotland, where the English authorities just picked it back up anyways.

Since then the real stone has been returned to Scotland and rests with the Scottish crown jewels, but the English royalty still gets to ‘borrow’ it whenever they want to, like for King Charles' recent coronation. I wonder how well that arrangement will work out if Scotland votes to become an independent country again.

Anyways, back to the story. Barbara, Ian, and the Doctor replace the four students within the historical timeline of this retelling. However their reasons for doing so is less political and more extra-terrestrial. Turns out the stone is an intelligent alien space rock and they’re rescuing it.

What I really like about the short trips is that they don’t have to be these grand action packed adventures. Some are, but just as many are small character studies or world building exercises. This is a small, sweet story, where the most climatic, tension filled thing is a flat tire. Nothing is in danger of blowing up, no one dies, and the main conflict is whether or not Barbara and Ian want to continue traveling when they’re so close their own time; only 13 years too early.

It’s delightful. Utterly delightful, and I highly recommend it along with the rest of the anthology. Especially as Christmas nears.

it was perfect ... perfect everything down to the last minuet detail