Episode 62: Help! I'm in Love with My Starship!
Rip Hunter falls in love with Gideon on Legends of Tomorrow
You can't really be a starship captain without falling in deep romantic, and possibly sexual romances with your ship. From Star Trek to A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, starship computers take on personalities and even humanoid bodies. Why do we fantasize so much about love affairs with our vessels?
Notes, Citations, & etc.
The ship's computer has a body in Andromeda
Rip Hunter falls in love with Gideon in Legends of Tomorrow
The ship's computer in Alien is "mother"
In Michael Chabon's first Short Trek, a man has a romance with the Discovery
In the Doctor Who episode "The Doctor's Wife," the TARDIS gets a female body
The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey features a woman's brain in a ship
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers features a humanoid in love with a ship AI
In Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, the Minds have bodies all the time
In the Ancillary trilogy by Ann Leckie, the ship takes over people's bodies
In Her, a man falls in love with his phone
In Blade Runner 2049, something similar happen
In Upload, a dead man falls in love with a holographic assistant (who's a living human)
In 2001, HAL tries to kill people
In Knight Rider, Michael is best friend with his car
In Star Trek: the Original Series, Kirk loves the ship until the computer gets flirty
LEXX features a sentient starship
The Asshole Research Transport in the Murderbot series is snarky as hell
In Star Trek: Picard, the ship has many holograms of its captain
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy features neurotic male starships
In Red Dwarf, Holly is just sort of a weird dude (who is occasionally female)
Pat Murphy's There and Back Again features a ship with the brain of a cat
In Blake's 7, the ship's computer Zen is part of the crew
In Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler, the sentient ship eats planets
In Farscape, the starship has a kid
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Galaxy's Child," creatures decide the ship is their mom
In Star Trek: Voyager, the ship is partially organic
In Star Trek's "The Ultimate Computer," the ship's computer tries to take Kirk's job
In John Varley's Titan, the sentient ship is a Wizard of Oz-like caretaker
In the final season of Blake's 7, Zen is replaced by a computer called Slave