What is your history of failed ships? Please share!
WELL. Let me give you a full rundown. I’ll go in chronological order.
1. George and Kate, Mathnet. Yes, Mathnet, which was part of a PBS kids’ math show called Square One TV. Mathnet was the first TV show I was obsessed with when I was a youngster. It was a dry parody of Dragnet and my friends, it was hilarious. And Kate Monday (Monday…Friday…get it) and George Frankly, the two mathematician-detectives who used mathematics to solve crimes for the LAPD (later the NYPD), were VEEERRRRYYY proto-Mulder and Scully. I HAVE entertained a crackpot theory that CC somehow saw this show and it informed his creation of XF. I can go on about this another time. But anyway – I loved George and Kate. I did not really ever expect them to “get together” – George was married (probably so little twerps like me wouldn’t get any ideas), and it was a kids’ show. (I, also, was a kid.) But OH, they were fun together and every moment of married bickering that they had, I treasured. I taped the Mathnet episodes (on our extremely new VCR that none of us knew how to work), and folks, I invented fanfic. That is, I felt compelled to write stories about Kate and George, which I did, A LOT, and I had no idea this was a thing that other people did. I certainly wrote stories about Kate and George falling in love and getting married, among other topics.
After 3 seasons the woman who played Kate left the series (she later said that she literally could not afford to continue to do the job because the pay was so low and she couldn’t support her family – public television, y’all), and was replaced with a new character. Let me tell you, this was the first true HEARTBREAK of young myassbrokethefall’s life. DAMN YOU, PAT TUESDAY. (Some people fall on the Pat side of this divide. GO AHEAD AND BLOCK ME IF THIS IS YOU. KATE FOREVER)
2. Picard and Crusher, Star Trek: TNG. Seven years I shipped the living fuck out of those assholes. (I wrote quite a lot of fanfic for them as well.) (And also a spec script, for nerdly funsies.) Seven years I was teased. Seven years Beverly Crusher was extremely underutilized, to my everlasting frustration. (Actually: six years! For one of the years, Season 2, Gates McFadden was randomly fired, and I had another life crisis the likes of which I had not seen since Kate Monday was written off of Mathnet. Luckily she was reinstated the following year.) They did actually kiss a couple of times! And I learned that a videotape WILL eventually get worn out if rewound enough in a single spot.
The final episode? A flash forward in time, in which it’s revealed that they did get together, and got married, but then got divorced; in the future timeline in which most of the episode took place, they were exes. So: offscreen. Story of my life. CUTE, FOLKS. Cute.
3. Mulder and Scully, The X-Files. From TNG I leapt right into this shitshow that you may have heard of. Cut to: everything, forever, for the last 20-some years of my life. I hate them so much. (I love them so much)
4. Monk and Sharona, Monk. I didn’t really ship them either; I just liked watching them together and I loved their married-y back-and-forth relationship. This was a show that I got into after XF ended (the first time) and it was fun to have the ol’ obsessive fires starting to spark for a TV show again. It was not a great show necessarily, but it had its moments, and the chemistry was good, and I was excited to watch the relationship grow and change over the life of the show. I even dabbled in fanfic. Then the actress who played Sharona got fired in the midst of contract disputes after 3 seasons and was replaced with a new character. Having just experienced Season 8 and 9 of XF, I cold-turkey quit watching the show immediately because I wasn’t about to be going through another Doggett scenario (or Pat Tuesday scenario, or Dr. Pulaski scenario). (Again, among the approximately 11 people left alive who remember Monk, there are Sharona loyalists and Natalie loyalists. Natalie loyalists, do not interact.)
5. Benson and Stabler, Law & Order: SVU. Despite the sexual tension oozing from their every pore for every moment they were on screen together (and hilariously played up at every possible opportunity by the actors, who were bros 4 lyfe offscreen), those fuckfaces HUGGED TWICE in the entire, what, 13-YEAR span that Chris Meloni was on the show? Then he left. Kill me.
6. Ichabod and Abbie, Sleepy Hollow. UST, UST, UST, UST, adorable chivalry, they were super precious and delightful and I was all good and settled in for a slow burn that IT WAS CLEAR they were the end game for (and Ichabod’s wife didn’t even bother me; I was like guys, they’re obviously going to kill her off at some point, they’re choosing their moment and y’all just need to be patient, would you like to hear about how I have suffered with TXF by any chance, you’re all amateurs and you know nothing) – then the show went down in flames when they killed off Abbie and tried to reboot everything. (Are you counting? This was the SIXTH. TIME. that had happened to me.) As with Monk, I immediately and permanently peaced the fuck out, but it only lasted one more season anyway, because so did everyone else.
7. Back to Mulder and Scully. I think it’s fair to count them twice. Because, as you might know, there’s been this revival. Sigh. Sigh.
We won’t even get into The Gillovny Corollary, which was its own special, separate shitshow. ✌️
So, anyway. As you can see, I’m cursed. Sorry about that.
