Just before I woke up, I had the kind of nerd dream I haven’t had since I was a hyper-hormonal 14-year-old. I was a redshirt leading a landing party from the USS Enterprise on a planet they’d never been to before. We were walking through what resembled a Greek temple, but every one of the columns was a 20-foot-tall woman dressed in the flashiest of toga-like garments, a la Maxfield Parrish. (Oh, like you haven’t daydreamed yourself in this episode, or one just like it, too.)
The rest of the party acted as if the women were statues, but every one of them smiled at me with a come-hither look in her eyes. “Do these seem especially life-like to you?” I asked the doctor, and after a pause just long enough for him to give me the side-eye, he told me that he was sending me on mandatory shore leave as soon as possible.
Each member of the landing party had an assignment that took them to various far-away parts of the temple, leaving me alone in the central room with the statue women. One in particular seemed to be admiring me in a way that I hadn’t been admired in years. She hadn’t a stitch of clothing on, and posed knee-bent with her hair gathered up in her hands on top of her head. I stood gazing up at her for longer than my whole adolescence, hardly breathing until she finally cracked a smile and stepped down off her pedestal.
Nothing good ever happened to a redshirted crew member suddenly separated from the landing party, but then no redshirted crew member ever ran from the woman statue who came to life, either, so I followed the script and stood my ground, waiting for the fadeout to commercial and the next scene when my corpse would inevitably be found by the doctor, face covered in blotchy red marks and all traces of one vital element or another leached from my inanimate tissues.
Strangely, that didn’t happen. The dream veered right into the kind of extraterrestrial relations that only Captain Kirk gets to have on a weekly basis, so maybe the costume department got my uniform wrong, or the uniform color was a TOS-TNG crossover. Whatever, I’ll take it.
This Is Drivel 