Last year, Andrea Phillips gave me a present. As we were working on the final cycle of episodes in season three, she sent me a picture of a certain item from the British Museum catalogue she was using in episode 10 that she knew I’d be following up with in episode 11:
(In case you’re curious, here’s the link.)Because when Andrea writes a scene about a supernatural entity growing a tiny demon inside an ancient artifact and feeding it with the flesh of a stolen host body, she doesn’t just make something up. No. That is not how Andrea Phillips rolls.But while the members of Team Three dash around the world (and beyond it) as a matter of course, the most traveling I generally do for the series is an annual flight east for our story summits. I thought it was cool that Andrea had done to research to reference a real artifact, but I figured a picture on the Internet would be the extent of my involvement with the Punic Egg. I didn’t think I’d actually, you know, lay eyes on the damn thing.Until this summer, when where should I find myself but…
…London. Dragging my jet-lagged but obliging father on a field trip to the British Museum. Bear in mind that my father has never been to the British Museum before. And there I was insisting that our first stop was not going to be the Rosetta Stone or the Parthenon Marbles, but a decorated ostrich egg.
“Our” egg is the one on the left. It’s on the third floor: gallery 71, display case 20. If you’re ever in London, you can see it yourself. And while the official description contains no information about its usefulness as a place to incubate a baby demon you’re trying to tempt into this dimension, to be fair to the curators, they were working with very limited space.When my dad asked what was so interesting about this particular egg, I told him he’d have to wait for Season 3 …And then I took him to see the Parthenon Marbles.
Thanks for riding with us for another year, everyone! See you in Season 4!
