How an Ancient Alchemy Recipe Inspired Mackenzie Crook’s Strange New Comedy

Hello. Welcome to the weirdo world of Apple TV’s Small Prophets, where teeny-tiny humanoids can predict the future, and growing your own bite-sized fortune-teller is apparently a perfectly reasonable response to a midlife crisis. Warning: Spoilers ahead for Episodes 1 and 2 of Small Prophets. 

Meet Michael Sleep (Pearce Quigley). Michael is a lonely, eccentric man who has spent the past seven years waiting for his missing girlfriend, Clea, to come home. His house is falling apart, his garden is wildly overgrown, and his crappy car isn’t doing much better. But Michael has essentially frozen his life in place since Clea disappeared on Christmas Eve seven years ago.

Michael works the night shift at a DIY store called the Toolbox, where his ponytailed boss Gordon (Mackenzie Crook) keeps watch over the place with an eagle eye. Michael isn’t exactly employee-of-the-month material. He’s a bit of an anarchist who believes a DIY store telling people how to do things defeats the entire purpose of DIY.

At least he has Kacey (Lauren Patel), a younger coworker who shares his opinion that Gordon is the biggest tool of the Toolbox.

Sir Michael Palin in “Small Prophets,” premiering October 7, 2026 on Apple TV.

When he’s not working, Michael visits his father, Brian (the great Sir Michael Palin), at his retirement home every day. Brian spends his time building elaborate Rube Goldberg-style contraptions and entering competitions, with Michael dutifully mailing off his entries.

But Clea is never far from Michael’s mind. At home, he has kept a room almost exactly as it was during a long-gone Christmas, recreating a faded photograph from happier days.

“His life has completely stopped,” Pearce Quigley told Radio Times. “He’s able to function, he’s able to keep his job going, but all the joy has gone out of his life. His only joy, I suppose, is seeing his dad, who he goes and visits [in a care home] every day, because he loves his dad very much.”

Michael is confronted by Roy (Paul Kaye), Clea’s brother, whose own life has fallen apart. Clea’s car was found abandoned on a bridge, and with the seventh anniversary of her disappearance approaching, Roy wants to have her legally declared dead. More importantly, he wants his house back. Michael refuses. As far as he’s concerned, Clea could still return.

Brian, however, thinks there may actually be a way to find out.

He tells Michael about the homunculi, a story Michael loved as a child. During his National Service in Egypt, Brian claims he became an apprentice to a man who created six tiny humanoid prophets that lived inside glass jars: a king, queen, monk, knight, peasant, and seraph.

Once the creatures reached the “State of Divination,” they could predict the future and were required to truthfully answer any question asked of them.

Brian even wrote down instructions for creating them in a journal that Michael may still have. Michael initially seems to treat the whole thing like another one of his father’s stories. Then he finds the journal — along with a photograph showing what appears to be a tiny humanoid creature floating inside one of the jars.

Suddenly, homunculi don’t sound quite so ridiculous.

In Episode 2, Brian finds himself in a bit of trouble at the retirement home after Hilary discovers a box filled with vials of what looks like poison, because, well, they say “POISON” with a skull and crossbones on them. Brian explains that it’s actually an antidote capable of dissolving the homunculi, which isn’t exactly more reassuring.

When Michael shows him the photograph, Brian insists the creatures were real — and that they could help him find Clea.

That’s enough for Michael.

He finds the jars, cleans up a room in his disaster of a house, and begins gathering the bizarre ingredients needed to create six tiny prophets. Each jar requires a “mineral seed” corresponding to its occupant: a brass key for the knight, the rib of a pen for the monk, a plain button for the peasant, amethyst for the seraph, a gold ring for the queen, and an old silver coin for the king.

Naturally, all this activity attracts the attention of Michael’s nosy neighbor Clive (Jon Pointing), who begins spying on him.

Meanwhile, Kacey convinces Michael to join his coworkers at the pub, where we learn his reputation around the neighborhood isn’t exactly glowing. After Clea disappeared, rumors spread that Michael had murdered her and buried her in his garden. His increasingly neglected house and jungle of a yard haven’t helped dispel the idea that he’s the local loon.

Apple TV

Michael gets thoroughly hammered, and his stories begin falling apart. Brigham (Ed Kear) calls him out on his supposed underwater-welding career, forcing Michael to admit he made the whole thing up. And because he’s already on a roll, he drunkenly tells everyone about his plan to grow magical little people in jars who can predict the future.

Kacey eventually walks him home, where Michael checks on his experiment.

Something has changed. There’s something growing inside the jars.

According to creator and star Mackenzie Crook, the show’s wonderfully bizarre premise actually began with a very real piece of alchemical history.

Apple TV

“The seed of the idea came from a footnote in an old book about Paracelsus, a 16th-century Swiss philosopher and alchemist,” Crook told Radio Times. “It told of a mystic who had grown eight homunculi, magical spirits able to predict the future, in glass jars full of water.”

It was an idea that I found in an old book about an old alchemist. And I found it about 10 years ago, And I sort of realized

“I think it’s perfect, really, it’s the perfect TV show,” Quigley added. “It’s beautiful. I’ve watched it so many times now – and I hate watching myself. I’ll avoid it at all costs. But I’m in love with it. I just adore it. I think Mackenzie is an absolute genius, and I know that word gets bandied about, but honest to God, I just think the way it unfolds so slowly and unexpectedly, I love it.”

Small Prophets, Wednesdays, Apple TV