Redshirts

Death happens. It happens to everyone. It’s going to happen to you. What we’re pissed off about is that our deaths are so completely pointless. When you killed us off, Nick, it doesn’t do anything for the story. It’s just a little jolt you give the viewers before the commercial break, and they’ve forgotten it before the first Doritos ad fades off the screen. Our lives had meaning, Nick, if only to us. And you gave us really shitty deaths. Pointless, shitty deaths.

FINN
You don’t get it. None of us are pissed off at being dead.

REDSHIRT #4
I am!

FINN
(to REDSHIRT #4)
Not now, Davis!

You know what it’s like? It’s like waking up one morning, going outside and finding a Tyrannosaurus rex in your front yard, staring at you. For the first five seconds, you’re completely amazed that a real live dinosaur is standing in front of you. And then you run like hell, because to a T. rex, you’re a chewy, crunchy bite-sized snack.

No, no, I’m just fucking with you.
They all lived happily ever after.
Seriously.

Q’eeng looked at Dahl appraisingly. “I sometimes get the feeling there are things happening on the Intrepid that I’m not meant to know about,” he said. “I suspect this is one of them.”
“Sir, and with all due respect,” Dahl said, “you don’t know how right you are.”

“But you’re making it bad science fiction,” Hester said. “And we have to live in it.”

“Jesus,” Kerensky said, looking around. “You people. I have one of the most incredible experiences I’ll ever have, talking with the one person who really gets me—who really understands me—and you’re all down here thinking I’m performing some sort of time-traveling incestuous masturbation thing. Thanks so very much for crapping on my amazing, life-altering experience. You all make me sick.”

“The way I’m dealing with it right now is this: I don’t care whether I really exist or don’t, whether I’m real or fictional. What I want right now is to be the person who decides my own fate. That’s something I can work on. It’s what I’m working on now.”

“The red shirt,” Abnett said. “You know, in the original Star Trek, they always had Kirk and Bones and Spock and then some poor dude in a red shirt who got vaporized before the first commercial. The moral of the story was not to wear a red shirt. Or go on away missions when you’re the only one whose name isn’t on the opening credits.”

“Sometimes, Dill, I wonder what the hell is going on with this ship. It’s like it has a goddamned curse.”

“First day on the bridge, then,” Abernathy said.
“It is,” Dahl said.
“Well, don’t worry, it’s not always like this,” Abernathy said. “Sometimes it’s worse.”

This is what happens when the Narrative takes over. Things quit making sense. The laws of physics take a coffee break. People stop thinking logically and start thinking dramatically.

“But think about what we’ve seen go on in this ship. Think of how people act here. What’s messed up here isn’t that this guy thinks we’re on a television show. What’s messed up here is that as far as I can tell, at this point, it’s the most rational explanation for what’s going on. Tell me that I’m wrong.”

“They don’t exist,” Jenkins said, and pointed back at the ship. “And neither does this. This is the starship Enterprise. It’s fictional. It was on a science fictional drama series. And so are we.”

“Then it’s bad luck,” Finn said. “The Intrepid has the worst karma in the known universe.”
“That second part might be true,” Jenkins said. “But I don’t think luck has anything to do with it.”

“Everyone on this entire ship is afraid, Maia. They hide and they disappear and they find ways to not think about how much time they spend hiding. And then comes the moment when they can’t hide and they have to face themselves. And they hate that. That’s why Collins assigned me to the bridge. Because otherwise every time she looked at me she’d be reminded that she’s a coward.” H

Dahl weaved through the trees, screaming for Q’eeng and Taylor. Some part of his brain wanted to know if he was running in the right direction; another part wanted to know why he wasn’t using his phone to contact Q’eeng. A third part reminded him that he had a pulse gun of his own, which might be effective against whatever was currently eating Cassaway and Mbeke.
A fourth part of his brain was saying, This is the part where you run and scream a lot.
He was listening to the fourth part.

“When the captain tells me I’m going to be on an away mission, it’s like some other part of my brain takes over,” Kerensky said. He sounded like he was trying to puzzle through something. “I get all confident and it seems like there’s a perfectly good reason for a goddamn astrogator to take medical samples, or fight killer machines or whatever. Then I get back on the Intrepid and I think to myself, ‘What the fuck was I just doing?’ Because it doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“It feels like whenever the captain and Q’eeng have an away mission they know is going to be all fucked up they say, ‘Hey, Kerensky, this is a perfect away mission for you,’ and then I go off and, like, get my spleen punctured. And half the time it’s some stupid thing I have no idea about, right? I’m an astrogator, man. I am a fucking brilliant astrogator. I wanna just … astrogate. Right?”