In the season one episode, Shuttlepod One, Trip and Malcom are stuck together in a shuttle when they find that the Enterprise has been destroyed and they have very little chance of survival. Obviously, the Enterprise hasn't been destroyed. What Trip and Malcolm saw was actually the wreckage of another ship that the Enterprise has been assisting when they lost their back door. But, until Malcolm and Trip can get back in touch with their ship, they have to hang out together. They don't know each other particularly well. They don't, at first, seem to have much in common. They get on each other's nerves for a while, have a bit too much of one another, and then, eventually, this happens:
The same thing happened to me. Well, not exactly the same thing. I wasn't in a shuttlepod and my starship hadn't (not) been blown up. I was actually at my graduate program's brief residency. It was eleven days in a hotel and, while my roommate was a friend, we weren't really all that close. The funny thing is that after several (very long) days of lectures, workshops, and readings, we got much, much closer. We walked to classes together, ate meals together, drank together, did homework together, and went to sleep together around 3AM. Through all of that, we got a lot closer and when I went back to my regular life, I realized that I'd suddenly developed one of the most profound relationships of my life.
In fact, we became so close that we did the whole Shuttlepod thing again. And again. And again.
At our last residency, I came in from my recent cross-country move (as sick as I've ever been in my life) and she was about a million years pregnant. We were both graduating so we had lectures, teaching workshops, and readings to deliver. We needed each other more than ever and, luckily, there we were, all the way to the end:
Can I be Trip in this scenario? I mean, who the hell wants to be Malcolm? He sucks.
ReplyDelete