Scott Pearson | The Incredible Shrinking Shuttle

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved movies like The Incredible Shrinking Man and Them! For some reason, changing the size of people, animals, and everyday objects just reels me in, so I had a lot of fun writing about the Deep Space Nine episode “One Little Ship.” In the episode, O’Brien, Dax, and Bashir, and the runabout they’re in, are all turned teeny-weeny, to use the scientific term. Count me in!

“The Incredible Shrinking Shuttle” appears in Outside In Can Live With It, edited by Stacey Smith? (yes, the question mark belongs there, just look at the cover). Each mini review/essay/fever dream covers an episode of Deep Space Nine; the title comes from a line of dialogue in the episode “In the Pale Moonlight” as Captain Benjamin Sisko realizes he can live with ethical compromises he’s made in wartime. The excerpt below is from the opening of the piece.

The Incredible Shrinking Shuttle

From the incredible shrinking man in, well, The Incredible Shrinking Man, to the giant ants of Them!—or, to be more current, from the MCU’s incredible shrinking Ant-Man to the giant Ant-Man—who doesn’t love when matters of scale get their polarities reversed and high jinks ensue? I know I sure do. In fact, I say what “One Little Ship” really needed was more little runabout Rubicon—it’s the title of the episode, for Morn’s sake!—because the exciting adventures of O’Brien and Bashir in the circuit housing (yep, that’s a Help! reference) was only the tip of an ice cube of possibilities (yep, that’s a miniature iceberg joke).
Granted, that circuit-housing scene sorta scratched my actors-on-an-oversized-set itch, but since they were dealing with relatively unrecognizable sci-fi odds and ends, it didn’t have the same fun factor that, say, watching them swim in a giant glass of tranya in Quark’s would have had. Okay, maybe that would have been a bridge too small, but you see my point. . . .