Comets have puzzled astronomers since the space age began turning up surprises that keep upending the textbooks, and this episode of the Symbols of an Alien Sky series argues those surprises point to something more than dirty snowballs. Narrator David Talbott lays out the standard model, in which comets are icy leftovers from the Oort Cloud made of water, carbon dioxide, and primordial dust, then builds a case for an alternative: that comets are electrically charged bodies whose comas and tails are lit by charge exchange with the sun rather than heat and evaporation. NASA's Ed Weiler and Stardust mission investigator Donald Brownlee appear in quoted title cards admitting how often comet observations have contradicted expectation. The film moves through mineral composition, tail behavior, and specific comet events as evidence for its claim that comets formed recently, in an era of planetary upheaval, rather than at the solar system's birth. Motion graphics and space photography carry the argument, aimed at viewers already familiar with comet science and open to entertaining a fringe theory.