Last night's Doctor Who, “Dark Water,” featured the death of a prominent character. He then wound up in a sort of waiting room for the afterlife with a pleasantly efficient administrator, a soothing trope to anyone who's familiar with films like Here Comes Mister Jordan, or its remake, Heaven Can Wait.
But in our story, the dead still have contact with their bodies. So our hero is cold because his body is in the morgue. And as he's chatting with the bureaucrat — who is charming, but no Claude Rains — we hear a blood-curdling scream. The bureaucrat says, "Oh, sounds like someone donated his body to science."
Later, we hear the dead all saying, "Please don't cremate me."
Y'all, my mom died suddenly last summer. We donated her body to science, because she was always doing whatever she could to make the world a better place, and this was one more way she could contribute.
When your loved one's body is donated to science, the, um, leftovers, so to speak, are cremated. So we're two for two there.
It really freaked me out.
