Sometimes I think about the fact that Rocky was out there alone for 46 years and then Grace shows up and just… fuckin solves the problem that's been plaguing two entire species in, what? A matter of weeks??
And like yeah, obviously there's more to it than that. They're a team, a Grace alone would have probably died trying to get the samples from Adrian. Or, tbh, might have never got out of his original Mental Breakdown phase and just gone fully crazy.
But from Rocky's perspective, this has to feel insane. Like we talk a lot about Grace feeling inferior to Rocky, but there's no way that Rocky wouldn't have a similar (or worse) complex about Grace.
And this isn't getting into the fact that (from Rocky's perspective) the moment he leaves Grace, everything goes to hell again. Goes to hell again because, as he later finds out, Grace bred the taumoeba in xenonite breeder tanks that Rocky designed.
Do we think he wondered, on the way back to Erid, whether things would have been fixed 46 years ago if it had been one of the Blip-A scientists who survived, and he'd just succumbed to the radiation?
Do we think Grace had to reassure him, over and over, that it was if anything Grace's fault for not foreseeing that the taumoeba would adapt to the xenonite, and that there was no way that Rocky could have designed the tanks better?
Do we think he felt like an imposter when they got back to Erid and were both hailed as saviours, because it was Grace who had done the science, Grace who had made the sacrifices, while all Rocky did was wait for him to get there?
