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Under ten minutes of shared screen time in two films, that’s what the 00Q fandom is built upon.  

From the bench before The Fighting Temeraire and the bowels of the hastily reconstructed MI6 and (eventually) relocated Q-Branch to Austria and back again to Q’s lair, James Bond and his Quartermaster spend less time together than it takes to savour a well-brewed cup of Earl Grey, with or without the pajamas. Yet, the brilliant performances of Daniel Craig and Ben Whishaw in those roles sparked more chemistry in those few moments of the storyline than Bond managed to manufacture with any Bond Girl since Vesper Lynd.  

It’s rather amazing in that regard.  

Johnlock, Merthur, Rinch, Spirk, Bagginshield … while the English teacher in me bemoans, at times, the portmanteau names of these ships, these pairings all have hours upon hours of character interaction upon which their shippers fuel their passion and draw their inspiration for fanworks of all kinds: fiction, poetry, visual art, videos, headcanon, and metawork.  

We have under 10 minutes of shared screen time in nearly 300 minutes of film.

We don’t have John Watson pelting after Sherlock Holmes over rooftops and through the narrow streets of London, which is for me the moment Johnlock was born.  We don’t get to enjoy the hours of pranks and sarcastic quips exchanged between Merlin and Prince Arthur through 65 episodes.  We don’t have the concept of T’hy’la underpinning a relationship that spans two different iterations of Spock/Kirk shipping.  

By comparison, ten minutes hardly seems enough, does it?  Goodness knows we crave more.

But 00Q shippers are a hardy bunch of seafarers, and it’s actually this woefully insufficient amount of time that Bond and Q have together that makes our fandom unique.  

To extend the metaphor, the sails of this ship are filled not with the wind of what is suggested by hours of canon.  It has, instead, weighed anchor and successfully trawled the deep almost exclusively due to the brilliant creativity of the shippers themselves: writers and artists who have taken those fleeting moments in Skyfall and Spectre and given new life to a soul-tortured Double-O and a genius boffin in the employ of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.  Along the way, they have gathered up others from the flotsam and jetsam of canon as a whole:  Eve Moneypenny and Bill Tanner,  Gareth Mallory and M, R and a host of beleaguered doctors from Medical and Psych, and of course the retcon-redeemed Alec Trevelyan who stands either as Bond’s brother-in-arms and/or as his lover, often as such in a polyamorous relationship with Q.

This is a ship that is as much about those who ‘ship it’ as it is about the characters shipped.  It is about the connections we have built with one another as we craft the mission adventures and relationship experiences of our OTP or OT3.  Connections that now represent some of the most precious friendships of my life.  

So even though we have only under ten minutes of shared screen time to work with, we’ve taken that priceless resource and have used it to craft the foundation of a vivid and clever brave new world.  

I like to think that both James and Q are rather pleased with our ingenuity.