Logan, she/they🪐 | 21y/o | Ao3 :) Keep on queerin' #Logan talks | #ramblings of a lunatic Bones enthusiast Magnum Opus (so far): Study on Kirk/Bashir similarities
(I figured it was time for an introduction post so if you don't know me, hi, welcome! (and if you already do, go on!))
⭐️Hey! My name is Logan (she/they), 21. ✨
⭐️This blog is mostly TOS and DS9, although there might be some other flavours of ST sprinkled here and there.
⭐️I sometimes pretend to be a writer on Ao3
⭐️I’m a certified yapper, I love talking about ST-related stuff, so please feel free to drop a line about whatever, whenever!
⭐️Most of what I post here will be tagged under the following:
#logan talks = random ST thoughts that cross my mind / everything.
#ramblings of a lunatic = long posts in which I start rambling (including fic-related stuff)
#Kirk honey your true colors are showing = for the millions of images in which hearteyes Shatner is looking at Spock or Bones with the rainbow in his eyes, good for archive.
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Genuinely kind of wild to me that the two TOS episodes that are like "so. about Nazis. because they're still around and we keep finding them so we still have to think about them" are one of the greatest Star Trek episodes of all time and one of the most absolutely, unforgivably godawful ones.
"The Conscience of the King" is deeply thoughtful in how it integrates the concept of "so there would still be Adolf Eichmann types in a better world, and they're going to try the same shit for the same reasons, and it's a better world because it has the will and infrastructure to shut that down much earlier, but it's still something you have to engage with" in with Shakespeare and theatre and proto-Empire Strikes Back level cinematography. It's smart about the limits of understanding atrocity via gut empathy and the comfort of denial and minimization vs the place of intellectual rigor in emotionally registering horror and outrage appropriate to what actually happened.
The way that both Kodos and Lenore can't shut the fuck up long enough to not give themselves away, and both openly suggest Kirk is subhuman, and his refusal to play that game while struggling with nuclear rage and yearning for justice, is profoundly true to the people involved. Kodos's attempt to separate his own daughter's life from his atrocities to other people's children and families is pure Nazi shit, and it's sharp about how this is something you don't get to do, with the ultimate result that Lenore, even more of an apologist for Kodos's genocide than he is, ultimately is forced to experience a small part of what Kodos inflicted on so many others (Spock: "families destroyed, children watching their parents die...").
Kirk and Riley have been able to keep themselves from being completely defined by Kodos, however narrowly at times, by building other lives and their connections to their communities. Both survive the episode because of their ties to other people. Kirk is fucked up enough that he's laser-focused on protecting Riley physically, by isolating him from others; however, it's actually Riley's connections to others that saves him. He's lonely and depressed by Kirk's inexplicable treatment, and reaches out to his friends in communications for comfort and Uhura ends up singing to him. The only reason the communications system was already open and his pleas for help got heard in time as he was poisoned is because he'd reached out to his friends.
Meanwhile, it's Kirk's ties to McCoy and especially Spock that actually save him. McCoy and Spock confront Kirk about his nervous isolation and, despite him lashing out, press long enough for him to reveal that he's thinking about just murdering Kodos, but also clinging to uncertainty. McCoy finally gives up and leaves, but Spock stubbornly stays to keep pushing, and it's because of his reluctance to leave Kirk alone that he catches the sound of the charged phaser in Kirk's quarters, allowing them to prevent the destruction of that entire deck (which certainly would have killed Kirk, along with many others).
Then Kirk saves Riley, and himself, in a deeper sense by reaching out to him rather than isolating them from each other and those who care about them in the short-sighted-via-trauma way he's done throughout the early episode. It's less about physically protecting Riley than stopping him from binding himself to Kodos for the rest of his life through unnecessary extrajudicial murder, and stopping himself from doing it in the process—not for Kodos's sake, but theirs. I recently saw someone insisting that the only moral takeaway of COTK is "revenge bad," and it's such a banal poor-faith reading of what's going on there that I was just like... damn. That's a level of media illiteracy you have to work at.
For Kirk and Riley, Tarsus IV haunts them at times, it informs their (esp Kirk's) reactions, it's not something they overcome so much as something they live with. But they can. They have lives beyond that, and people beyond what they've lost. Tom Leighton was never at peace (something also stated of Kirk multiple times in the show), but that was not the totality of his life, either. He loved his wife, his field, he cared about people. But Kodos has turned Lenore into someone isolated, mentally fragile, entirely identified with him. Experiencing a small part of what Kodos inflicted on his victims breaks Lenore. The best they can hold out for is that she'll receive compassionate treatment that, perhaps, will let her become her own person someday.
I also really appreciate the contrast between Kodos and Lenore playing at grand tragedy, neither of them more than adequate actors at it, while Kirk is smiling, smiling, smiling throughout so much of the episode, then utterly solemn when not protecting himself, all of this resting on the jarringly wrong notes embedded into Barbara Anderson's performance of Lenore and Arnold Moss's of Kodos (both fantastic), and William Shatner's unexpectedly spectacular performance of Kirk's brittle charm as performance vs the somber gradations of trauma when he lets the mask drop or can't help it (few ST actors do a haunted stare better, tbh). Then there's the accidental re-casting of Bruce Hyde turning Kevin Riley into one of the most buckwild minor character concepts in the show. There's even the strain of specifically ecofascism in Kodos's rhetoric and specifically dehumanization, absolutely true to his Nazi inspirations and a compelling context for Kirk's kneejerk hostility to culty escapist back-to-nature fantasies as well as technocratic tyranny, qualities about him that persist throughout the entire show.
One season later, we then get "Patterns of Force." It's ragingly antisemitic trash that is not only broadly antisemitic, but custom-tailored to Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner specifically—both the sons of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, both born shortly before the Holodomor and old enough to remember the effects of the Holocaust on their families—and it's also the reason the list of uncredited people appearing in TOS includes Adolf Hitler. It has basically one idea that doesn't suck (Hitler was not some unique monster, the same systems produce the same shit and it could happen all over again, anywhere, any time), executed in about the worst possible way imaginable, up to and including Spock wrongly Vulcansplaining Nazi Germany to Kirk, but also just finding a different One Bad Guy to pin it all on.
Just a few things that happen in it: Nimoy and Shatner are put in Nazi uniforms (just them, for some reason), Nimoy has to tell Shatner that he looks like a Nazi (yeah, as Spock, but the context is Shatner's actual RL appearance), they're sexily whipped by Nazis (the whole James Somerton Nazi fetish just happens here), the actual Nazis break down the racial inferiority of Nimoy's features detail by detail (Nimoy's actual features, not just made-up Vulcan things), and the Jewish analogues are called Zeons. Nimoy refused to do any publicity for the episode, and more power to him.
I don't know why anyone would go on about "Spock's Brain" as the actual low point when this and "Elaan of Troyius" (written and directed by the same person who wrote "Patterns of Force") exist. I mean, I do know, but still. I'm not sure anything encapsulates the best and worst of Star Trek like getting both episodes in one show.
#rlly good analysis#doesn’t deforrest kelley also get put into a nazi uniform?#doesn’t detract from how pointedly horrible the ep is for nimoy and shatner specifically (via @kvothes)
Eventually, but it's at a completely different part of the episode. The first part only includes Kirk and Spock of the regular characters; unusually, there's no other landing party, even split off, just them alone, and they're the ones to get easily caught by the Nazis, "sexily" whipped by them, etc. That whole sequence is entirely concentrated on Nimoy and Shatner.
J and I watched one of my favorite episodes this week, "Tomorrow is Yesterday," purely because it contains a reference to a manned flight to the Moon (in addition to being superb, that is).
There's so much I love about it (it's actually one of the most beautifully made TOS episodes IMO, everyone looks spectacular, flawless comedic beats and genuine pathos, the culture clashes are pretty much immaculate, etc). But my favorite scene is always going to be the one where Kirk is captured by insecure macho assholes from the US military of the literal 60s and talks circles around them with a bit of genuine fear (he does understand the danger he's in), but mostly a mixture of telling the truth in the most annoying way possible and pushing their buttons by dialing up his standard campy theatricality to comfortable effeminacy. Their bluster vs his sultry assurance is good as written but utterly delightful onscreen.
Also, one nerdy detail: the military assholes try to intimidate Kirk by listing off all the crimes he's committed, and Kirk basically responds by morphing even more fully into Cher Horowitz mode than usual and being all "sabotage? who, me??? O_O" about it with this obviously faux confusion/dismay that's just mocking them and not even trying to hide it.
But it's funnier because— okay, it's actually a quick small thing and I'm fully explaining the joke here, but:
Pretty much the only respect in which William Shatner applied zero effort in his performance was in his usual accent as Kirk. If you pay attention, it's just 100% his own Anglophone Montrealer 40s kid accent, which actually retains some features that were already dying in some Anglophone communities in Montreal, but apparently often retained in heavily Jewish neighborhoods and suburbs of Montreal for whatever reason— most notably the heavy use of the TRAP vowel. That vowel is the tensed vowel in words like trap or bath [æ] and many other words, which in this accent is sometimes used where most Canadian and US accents would use a different vowel such as [ɑ] (the vowel in lot) as in a word like ... well, sabotage.
If you pay attention to how Kirk speaks in TOS, you'll notice him using [æ] much more than North Americans usually do, or even did then, and in particular that he almost always pronounces the third vowel of sabotage with [æ] rather than [ɑ].
So in this scene, the douchebag US soldiers accusing Kirk of sabotage and other crimes pronounce it with the usual long [ɑ], as I would. And he gives them his doe-eyed, blatantly fake innocent look and mockingly asks, "Did I sabotage something?"
But this time, very unusually, he pronounces the final vowel of sabotage the way they do, with [ɑ] rather than his usual [æ]— pretty obviously because he's mocking them, echoing the way they talk back at them, but in this super effeminate way that's going to freak them out and short-circuit their brains.
Of course, they don't know that he's imitating their accent specifically. They've only briefly spoken to him and they don't know anything about him or how he usually talks. But Kirk seems to enjoy adopting aggressively fake US accents for trolling purposes, and he's in particularly fine form here.
(I'm not sure anything will surpass his extremely fake Chicago gangster accent in which he deliberately mispronounces his own name for shits and giggles, but he's definitely warming up here.)
Reblogging in honor of the other moon landing episode; one of my favorite light-hearted episodes, "Tomorrow is Yesterday," is even earlier than "Return to Tomorrow" and our heroes discover to their shock and horror that they've been throw back to the benighted dark ages of........the sixties by way of an announcement related to the moon landing (that of course was even more distant IRL when the ep was written by DC Fontana).
As a byproduct of missing the right screenshot moment for one I was trying to grab from "I, Mudd," I instead caught my blorbo Jim Kirk's starship/T'Pring eyeshadow palette in the wild. So yes, the left is the make-up he's wearing while doing, uh, well:
Shout-out to my fave beating no accusations any time soon
#Slay slay #He also wears eye liner I just know this #I couldn't give you a certain image bit his bottom end of his lower lid is far too dark and defined to not have eyeliner (via @bunny-wouldnt-say-that)
You're right! It's usually comparatively subtle, but the contrast with his lighter eye and hair color tends to make it more noticeable, as well as the very sharp, fine line. In shots like these, you can see that Kirk and Uhura are both wearing the very modern style of glossy neutral tones for the make-up on their skin with dark eyeliner & mascara, female characters are just allowed to be more obvious about it:
And we do see a portion of the beauty products he left out before the plot struck in "The Enemy Within": the tub in Evil Kirk's hands is his foundation, while we're not told what the rest is, or that this is all he owns (pretty evidently not), but I imagine this long narrow thing is mascara or eyeliner.
Both Good Kirk and Evil Kirk inherit Kirk's fondness for mascara and eyeliner at any rate, but evidently Good Kirk alone got the ability to blend:
While Evil Kirk:
The evil Korbybot machine in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" also duplicates Kirk's make-up as well as his naked body (as you do) onto the android body (an evil Kirk who can blend!). These are all the real Kirk, however.
Going into an underground cave system on an unendurably cold planet is no excuse for forgetting his beauty routine!
You can also see it, though a bit less clearly, in many other episodes:
It's probably worth particularly mentioning "Tomorrow is Yesterday" is a good one for make-up shots, btw, because the color and lighting really bring it out and there's an extended Kirk-Sulu sequence which means even more shots of modern, fashionable make-up on younger men who clearly care about looking snazzy at work:
But anyway, the very fine line of the eyeliner can make it hard to exactly make out at times along with the femme fatale noir shadows, lavish colors for much of the show, and emphasis on mascara/eyelashes, but it's definitely there.
As a byproduct of missing the right screenshot moment for one I was trying to grab from "I, Mudd," I instead caught my blorbo Jim Kirk's starship/T'Pring eyeshadow palette in the wild. So yes, the left is the make-up he's wearing while doing, uh, well:
Shout-out to my fave beating no accusations any time soon
#Slay slay #He also wears eye liner I just know this #I couldn't give you a certain image bit his bottom end of his lower lid is far too dark and defined to not have eyeliner (via @bunny-wouldnt-say-that)
You're right! It's usually comparatively subtle, but the contrast with his lighter eye and hair color tends to make it more noticeable, as well as the very sharp, fine line. In shots like these, you can see that Kirk and Uhura are both wearing the very modern style of glossy neutral tones for the make-up on their skin with dark eyeliner & mascara, female characters are just allowed to be more obvious about it:
And we do see a portion of the beauty products he left out before the plot struck in "The Enemy Within": the tub in Evil Kirk's hands is his foundation, while we're not told what the rest is, or that this is all he owns (pretty evidently not), but I imagine this long narrow thing is mascara or eyeliner.
Both Good Kirk and Evil Kirk inherit Kirk's fondness for mascara and eyeliner at any rate, but evidently Good Kirk alone got the ability to blend:
While Evil Kirk:
The evil Korbybot machine in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" also duplicates Kirk's make-up as well as his naked body (as you do) onto the android body (an evil Kirk who can blend!). These are all the real Kirk, however.
Going into an underground cave system on an unendurably cold planet is no excuse for forgetting his beauty routine!
You can also see it, though a bit less clearly, in many other episodes:
It's probably worth particularly mentioning "Tomorrow is Yesterday" is a good one for make-up shots, btw, because the color and lighting really bring it out and there's an extended Kirk-Sulu sequence which means even more shots of modern, fashionable make-up on younger men who clearly care about looking snazzy at work:
But anyway, the very fine line of the eyeliner can make it hard to exactly make out at times along with the femme fatale noir shadows, lavish colors for much of the show, and emphasis on mascara/eyelashes, but it's definitely there.
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Speaking of the bizarre levels of William Shatner lore (CW for a reference to RL sexual assault in the link), I genuinely find something weirdly charming about the Takei-Shatner feud in 2026.
It seems like basically everyone else made up at some point or another, but those two ancient men are like "oh yes I do recall the Horrors of the 1940s..." while also carrying on the silliest feud in show business for 60 years. It's got so many layers at this point that it's like discovering a rare and beautiful sedimentary rock formation. I feel like it'll survive them both unless Shatner's unfathomably endless well of energy is actually just derived from being George Takei's personal immortal snail.
They are both wildly campy chaos gremlins, very obviously. There was a point where Trump and Elon were feuding to the point that Takei just remarked that he and Bill were practically picking out wedding rings compared to them and I'm pretty sure I choked on my tea. He was insisting Nimoy and Shatner weren't ever real friends and it was all a public fiction after Nimoy's death while Nimoy's own children had described the relationship as complicated but certainly real. Shatner's earlier public statements and memoirs make it clear that his prima donna bubble kept him blissfully oblivious to Takei's seething hatred for years. Takei seems to be the main source of the legend that Shatner's share of the TOS dialogue increased over the show and the other cast just knew he was campaigning for it behind the scenes (Shatner's and Nichols' proportions of lines were actually the ones most sharply reduced as the show went on; Scotty's, Chekov's, and McCoy's parts were the ones beefed up over the later seasons, for lbr obvious reasons).
They're both like "I don't ever voluntarily talk about HIM, my NEMESIS, I don't even THINK about him most of the time, I just want to talk about important things like GOP evil/saving the environment, but people are always asking" and then just start practically villain monologuing about each other at the slightest opportunity. Takei has a genuinely beautiful and I think spot-on description of why Kirk/Spock in the original series has specifically been so meaningful to so many gay Star Trek fans and how Kirk's and Spock's scenes together genuinely capture so much of the distinct gay experience of passion and anguish, and on an acting level I'm not sure if it's simply a rare compliment in a sensitive context, or given what they're like, also another dig in a four-dimensional chess way.
(Also, frankly, shout-out to Takei for rightly criticizing Gay Sulu as the table scrap it is amidst a sea of heteronormativity, and insisting Sulu is straight while Kirk and Spock aren't. I adore straight metrosexual swashbuckler!Sulu + closeted-in-glass zany androgynous bisexual!Kirk.)
I read once that Takei was actually a bit of a fanboy of Shatner as an actor prior to TOS, and was royally enraged when Shatner pretended to recognize him while obviously having no clue who he was after multiple TOS episodes. The level of continuing drama into the 2020s is beautiful and pristine. I kind of wish they could live forever and snipe at each other through the heat death of the universe.
The way that even within the full context of his quote, this comment still comes completely out of left field and then never explained further. Like Shatner just drops a nuke and casually moves on.
Pretty much everything he's said out loud or personally published reads this way, as far as I've seen. I remember reading a passage from a memoir where he casually mentions discovering gay people existed by being sexually assaulted as a teenage boy by the star of the theatre he worked at, adds a genuinely harrowing couple of paragraphs describing the context, then breezes right on to the next thing. But he'll talk about trying to befriend hippopotamuses the same way.
So, TOS famously does this thing with the many attractive women of the show of filming them in soft, flattering light and illuminating their eyes with hints of sparkles or stars. The context often doesn't even matter, this can be any attractive woman at all (or sometimes Kirk, who is far and away the one eroticized most similarly to sexy ladies of the week). Sometimes it's jarring in context, sometimes it adds to the atmosphere, but it's mostly just a silly relic of the era like the musical sting that goes with it.
However, I had actually forgotten that one of my favorite early scenes involves the whole soft-lit gorgeous lady with the starry-eyed close up shtick, and is actually my favorite instance of it in the whole show. Unsurprisingly, it's Uhura.
More specifically, it's the scene in "The Naked Time" where they're trying to get control back from a drunken Riley before he endangers the whole ship, and Kirk (unfairly) snaps at Uhura out of general frustration and tension. Uhura (quite fairly) snaps back:
Sir, if I could cut him off, don't you think I—!
And she's right, and he knows she's right, and he immediately apologizes to her on the bridge with very evident sincerity. Uhura is so startled and touched by his immediate apology that the episode halts mid-disaster for a moment just to linger on her reaction. Her expression goes from indignant to soft with full starry-eyed glamorous lighting:
It then backs away so we can see them pausing to exchange tense but warmly affectionate smiles in the middle of everything:
What I had also forgotten is that this heartwarming scene of platonic respect and affection (all the more by 1966 standards) immediately cuts to the inhibition-stripped Chapel hitting on a viscerally uncomfortable Spock as he pulls away multiple times, while increasingly infected by the virus.
He then runs off to cry about his mom.
This is also the context of his famous confession that he's ashamed of his feelings for Kirk (and for Kirk specifically, not for feeling friendship or affection at all), and desperately wants him to understand why. Kirk's mixture of desperation at the crisis and, pretty obviously, being upset and angry about hearing this (which tbh I find both justifiable and kind of weirdly overlooked as a motive) drive what I can only think of as a fight driven by the thin, thin line between internalized homophobia and violence.
Anyway. I had remembered how intensely stunned and unenthusiastic Spock seemed, and how little this required any "oh no they totally had a consensual relationship in the past" explanation, but I had not remembered that it was spliced right up against Kirk and Uhura platonic bonding because they actually know and respect each other.
And it's doubly interesting because these scenes introduce both the foundation of the largely unspoken Kirk-Uhura friendship and rapport, and Chapel's unrequited fixation on Spock that will last for multiple seasons. And the latter in particular is finally resolved in "Plato's Stepchildren," through the coerced kisses not only between Spock and Chapel but, much more famously, Kirk and Uhura—with Uhura specifically loathing it because she's always found Kirk a soothing presence, and ultimately refusing to be cowed into fear, vs the particular horror for Chapel of finally getting what she's always wanted from Spock, in a way she never would have wanted it, but realizing at last that some override to his will is the only way it was ever going to happen—it mirrors the splicing of the original Kirk-Uhura + Spock-Chapel scene all the way back in "The Naked Time."
Of all the many starry-eyed fantastically lit gorgeous lady shots of the show, this is just unmatched: not just her eyes literally lighting up as she realizes her boss is delivering an entirely sincere apology to her on the bridge without making an uncomfortable deal about it, the lights of the ship and the cosmos caught in her hair, the warmth of everything about her face balanced with the cold bright red of her uniform, the command-green hoop earrings she's still wearing, the whole beat given to her reaction and the look of silent understanding and sympathy between them that hits all the harder and more pointedly in context. I can absolutely see why Nichelle Nichols considered Jerry Finnerman the MVP of TOS.
I find it a little annoying that Kirk's personality has become like "golden retriever sunshine boy" in fandom spaces because it feels like a crazy over correction in retaliation to his mainstream reputation of being a macho womaniser. He is a nice person, and we see him being friendly with his crew, but people make him wayyyy too happy go lucky in fics. Like he's kind of a bitch sometimes too you know, like he's snaps at people when he's stressed out all the time! Dude loses his cool like pretty often tbh, he does apologise for being a bitch tho which is nice. I know people do it, so Spirk can be like those sun and moon, black cat and golden retriever kind of ship but it's too muchhhhh. Let Jim be a bitch pleaseeeee, let him yell at people it's his enrichment
I feel that the chilly, calculating, extremely tense edge to TOS Kirk's personality (even when he's not being outwardly bitchy or trolling for shits and giggles) is really lost in this, tbh. Personally, I find the "there is no fire in your mind ... you are using me" -> "Why not? You've been using me and my crew" / "I did what was necessary. I hope someday you'll understand" etc side of him one of the most intriguing aspects of his personality, both as written and as performed. It's such a contrast with characters like Riker who superficially can look like Kirk figures, but are far more straightforwardly warm and direct. And combined with the very deep intensity of Kirk's convictions and ideals, it adds this really compelling aspect to his characterization beyond just being pleasant and cheerful and giving (which TOS goes to lengths to repeatedly remind us is not his default personality at all! he was humorless and grim at 18, consumed with guilt at 23, bookish and scarily harsh later on in ways that still absolutely bleed through when he metaphorically lifts his foot from the brakes).
Kirk can be gentle and tender and emotionally supportive for real—especially with Spock, someone he is rarely sharp towards and takes a lot of care to just tease lightly and affectionately, while being typically protective and affirming towards him. But that has as much to do with Spock's hang-ups as Kirk's own personality, and he's not nearly so patient and generous with, uh, pretty much anyone else, even people he's deeply fond of like McCoy or Uhura.
Like! Kirk cares deeply, for sure, and is generally emotionally intelligent and expressive (doesn't always feel what he expresses, but still, emotive). He has a powerful sense of principle and compassion about the fundamental personhood of others, and what people need and deserve. He can be sweet and charmed and is quick to smile or laugh, yes. But he's also quick to calibrate his performance of himself to whatever he thinks is useful for [Situation] unless he's too annoyed to bother. He can be charming, friendly, aggressive, righteous, seductive, whatever, and he's very capable of emanating cold menace with little warning if he doesn't bother tamping it down (the other side of the correct femme fatale comparison!). The Lieutenant Kirk terrorizing Philosophy 101 cadets who didn't feel like critical thinking is still alive and well in him, he just has a lot more control over how he comes across to others these days. And a starship.
And he can be icily cutting with his own friends when he doesn't have the patience for certain kinds of emotional nonsense, as much as he can be intuitive and sweet ("How your lost love affects your vision, doctor, doesn't interest me. I've lost a man. I want to know what killed him"). His preferred method of processing the horrors in his own life is That's a Problem For Future Jim and moving on without dealing with it, often isolating himself and defensively lashing out when some particular horror comes back home to roost. We more often see Spock hovering in concern while Kirk has a moment's lapse of staring blankly into the void before pulling himself together than the other way around.
Kirk is bad with children and he hates AI and he torched his best friend's career by refusing to cover for his mistakes. He gets regular tension headaches and has a tendency to anxiously fiddle with his hands while controlling his voice and often his facial expression. He'll flirt/seduce for the mission and enjoys serious sweeping romance, but is absolutely opposed to fraternizing with anyone on his crew (though it's allowed) and doesn't have unforced casual flings. He seethes with jealousy when Spock seems like he might admire someone/thing more than him and has strong feelings about Why Misogyny Is Stupid and Wrong and sometimes is tempted to just murder. He has survived or been directly impacted by massacres including being targeted in a genocide, he survived starvation and is repeatedly preoccupied with hunger/food, he's experienced sexual coercion/assault and less well-defined but obviously inappropriate sexual/romantic/abusive behavior and mind rape and so on. He can be a petty trolling bitch because he's having a mildly annoying day or, alternatively, a very fun one. He loves flowers, and his friends and crew, and peeking up through his (long, visibly mascara'd) eyelashes, and holding hands and waltzing. He likes watching Spock do anything adorable (like existing) with hearts in his eyes and winning at chess and helping overthrow oppressors and knowing regulations better than the regulators and sometimes fucking with gender norms and sometimes using chemistry for Explosions. It's just... there's a lot more going on than contrasting with Spock!
(If anything, McCoy is Spock's opposite, not Kirk, who is often more aligned with Spock and inclined to favor his perspectives because he fundamentally shares many of Spock's values and admires his ways of thinking, not only because he loves him. Spock argues that Kirk is essentially perfect for the same reason.)
It's not the only difference, but every time I watch TOS I end up just kind of laughing at how much of a contrast it is to the comfy 80s ST that's like... the sacred bond of father and son is such an essential part of becoming a fully-fledged man, obviously our hero has to have a son, he TOTALLY had a son the whole time and has been so sad about not being able to be the father-figure he yearned for and losing his son is such a great tragedy...
Meanwhile Kirk in the 60s is like "you know what a real hero does? RESPONSIBLY USES CONTRACEPTION. the only possible way I would get a woman pregnant I'd have to be stranded for months without access to contraception and married and an amnesiac the whole time. but in a better world it's easily accessible at all levels of society and only a total asshole would rather jeopardize women's lives than take responsibility for his own dick"
And any time someone (or even a general situation) is like, look Jim, you need to be masculine and paternal for this poor vulnerable boy to have a proper role model, his response is pretty much:
#not sure i've encountered ANY iconic hero who was more comically opposed to anything like being a father figure masc role model to boys #much less one whose heroism and responsible sexual practices are specifically used for an unsubtle pro-contraception message #kirk's baffled outrage at the gideonites refusing his offer of the easily accessible federation birth control: you will always be famous <3 #in fairness to the films: nimoy's and shatner's films collectively rush to kill off the 80s masculinity obligatory ~male scion~ #and tvh and tff aggressively ignore the whole bad idea as much as possible. it's only once meyer is back that it's like 'but my oc!!!' #but holy shit. no one has ever been less credibly a father than 60s tos james kirk. #it's all the funnier because shatner already had three children irl then. the little girl he's carting around in 'miri' is lisabeth shatner #who apparently struggled to play along because she kept smiling whenever she saw him instead of pretending to be angry lol #when he befriended eddie paskey (his stage double) and insisted on paskey's recurring minor character getting a consistent name #they were like...if you care so much YOU name him. and in the most shatneresque mark of honor possible he named his bro's character leslie #after his own rl eldest daughter. mr. lemli is named after shatner's custom plate (lemli) so also his kids: le(slie)m(elanie)li(sabeth) #nimoy joked about how shatner was an obnoxious morning person who would breeze in and start babbling about his daughters #and said daughters wearily answered questions for decades about what kind of father he was with 'just like anyone else's pretty much' #so this isn't bleedover from some rl hang-up or something. it's just an active choice that tos made lol #is tos jim kirk a distinctly maternal figure to 430 crew & one homicidal robot? yes! is he a father? fuck no.
Reblogging my own tags because I'll probably be thinking about this forever. In the context of TOS as its own thing, it's just ... incredible to imagine the very obviously carefully childfree Jim Kirk who doesn't have a paternal bone in his body and is viscerally repulsed by anything even remotely like a father-figure role realizing he does have a maternal side.
newly minted Captain James Kirk, age 29: I don't know why other captains are always going on about being fathers to their crews or having literal children, gross
Captain James Kirk, age 32: I have had the Enterprise for two months and if anything takes out my 430 children I would kill everyone in the quadrant and then myself
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From Voyages of Imagination, by Jeff Ayers.
Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath talk about their novel "The Price of the Phoenix":
They had a story to tell: “Once when we were having lunch with Bill [Shatner] and Leonard [Nimoy], Bill had read our then forthcoming novel The Price of the Phoenix in manuscript. Bill told Leonard, ‘I don’t know why Paramount is still looking for a script. Their novel, The Price of the Phoenix, should be the script for the Star Trek movie. It would give us a chance to play things no two actors have ever played before.’
Bill, Bill... BILL!! Did you really read The Price of the Phoenix!? The single most slashy ST novel ever published!? Where Spock mind-melds with a naked Kirk? And then Kirk rubs ointment on a naked Spock!? Did you really want to film that!!?
I was thinking about "Journey to Babel" for whatever reason, and about how I find Sarek and Amanda super intriguing both as Spock's parents and as a couple.
Like, before watching, I had the vague fandom-osmosis impression that Sarek is Spock's shitty, judgmental father who actually does care about him deep (deep) down and will come through in a pinch, but not much more than that. I'd gathered that his emotional world mostly revolves around being crazy about his wife while refusing to admit he has feelings about anything (and everyone sees through this).
I also had a vague fandom-osmosis impression that Amanda is the normal, supportive, emotionally healthy parent to Sarek's distant, disapproving one and that it's not entirely clear why she even stays with this asshole except some vague "well, she loves him, I guess."
But upon watching the actual episode, I was quite surprised by Amanda—not at first, when she does seem more or less as reported, but later, as the stakes rise and we end up with Spock anxious about Kirk's health (because he got stabbed nearly to death) and insistently upholding his responsibility to take up Kirk's role, while Amanda is anxious about Sarek's health (because he's nearly dead of a congenital problem) and insistently trying to use whatever influence she can bring to bear to save him (the parallel signifying nothing, I'm sure). And the way these collide is kind of heartbreaking, because "Journey to Babel" is entirely clear that her reason for staying with Sarek is not that she's vaguely loving but that she's every bit as insane about him as he is about her.
When she hits Spock for not risking his own life and that of hundreds of other people on board to donate a ton of blood to Sarek in an experimental procedure that may or may not even work and tells him she'll hate him forever if he doesn't do it, I was like... I mean, I get that it's a tough moment for her, yes. But also, what the fuck. This is your son, ma'am.
I don't hate her for this, to be clear. I was just surprised that Spock is such an obviously secondary priority to both of his parents rather than Amanda being The Normal One. Amanda has never been normal about Sarek a day in her life!
And ... I mean, Spock himself has repeatedly jeopardized the lives of everyone on the Enterprise for slim chances of somehow saving Kirk, well past the point when even McCoy was telling him to stop. Oh, and Spock led a different outside chance of saving Kirk that failed and left the Enterprise with only impulse power, and Spock's response was to keep going towards Kirk's location on impulse power and spend the 58 days it took him to get there barely eating or sleeping.
So, like, yes, I don't get the feeling that Sarek or Amanda are particularly good parents, though they love Spock in their very different ways. But I do kind of respect them for being the only TOS couple who I genuinely feel are absolutely unhinged about each other in the same way as Spock and Kirk. As far as TOS is concerned, I'd love to be a fly on the wall at their family gatherings.
On further consideration, I do stand by the Amanda-Spock parallels in how they relate to Sarek and Kirk respectively but probably the closest analogue to Amanda's wtf behavior to Spock in "Journey to Babel" is honestly a truly vicious speech from Kirk in "Is There In Truth No Beauty?"
There's this scene in which Spock's mind is on the point of being lost to the point of his vital signs dropping, and Dr. Miranda Jones, the resident Vulcan-trained human telepath, is failing to reach him. Miranda was envious of Spock previously, but is generally cool and doing her best in some tough and unfair situations, and when she's like "welp I did my best but I'm losing him," Kirk goes apeshit on this poor woman:
What are you doing about it? ... The other half [of Spock] is human. Far more human than you, apparently ... If you don't reach him soon, he'll die. But that's what you want, isn't it? ... You want him to die. What did you do to him on the Bridge? Did you make him forget to put the visor over his eyes? ... You know your rival, don't you? You couldn't keep him from making a mind-link with Kollos, something you couldn't do yourself! With my words, I'll make you hear such ugliness as Spock saw when he looked at Kollos with his naked eyes! The ugliness is within you! ... Spock saw Kollos, and for that he must die ... The smell of hatred, the stench of jealousy permeates you. Why don't you strangle him while he lies there?
amanda: there must be some part of me in you! [internally: sarek sarek sarek sarek sarek]#spock: mother please stop [internally: jim jim jim jim jim]#anghraine babbles#deep blogging#long post#star peace#c: i object to intellect without discipline#sarek x amanda#i guess. lol#star trek: the original series#anghraine’s meta#st fanwank#otp: the premise#amanda grayson (X)
anghraine babbles#the viciousness of the speech is partly calculated but afterwards he’s like#‘…um so. maybe i went too far in trying to jolt her into making more of an effort BUT IT WAS ALL TRUE ACTUALLY#oh god what if it only makes her fail harder and HE DIES and it’s ALL MY FAULT’#my dude. you need to stop inflicting yourself on other people and have a goddamn conversation with the love of your life#no silently gazing into each other’s eyes for a full 12 seconds in front of other people doesn’t count#sarek#amanda grayson#sarek x amanda#long post#star peace#c: i object to intellect without discipline#c: who do i have to be#miranda jones#anghraine’s meta#st fanwank#otp: the premise (X)
There's a level on which TOS Sam Kirk appearing solely as a corpse played by William Shatner in a fake mustache is really funny.
There's a different level on which I'm wildly over-invested in the handful of implications we have about Sam, Aurelan, their three sons, and of course how they relate to my ultimate TOS blorbo, Sam's much younger brother Jim Kirk.
Like, the main advantage to only allowing a brief glimpse at Sam for the obvious "William Shatner in a mustache" reason is that it forces the hints at (Jim) Kirk's relationship to his family to be mediated through Aurelan and Peter instead, so we get less of a sense of Jim and Sam + Sam's family, and more of Sam and Aurelan and their children as Jim's family. Basically the only thing apart from Sam's profession we knew about them before this episode was that not just Sam, but his wife and all three sons had come to celebrate (32-year-old) Kirk receiving command of the Enterprise.
It's never suggested to be the flagship in TOS nor does the idea make much sense for their mission in TOS, but it is one of only twelve ships of its kind, and its mission is a huge deal. So receiving the captaincy so young was definitely a major achievement, just not as monumental as it's treated later on. The implication of Sam and Aurelan showing up with all of their children to see Kirk honored this way not only speaks to the magnitude of his success but to their affection and support for him.
Later in "Operation: Annihilate!" we'll find out that Kirk has Aurelan's private number for emergencies and they're on clearly affectionate terms.
KIRK: Aurelan? Aurelan, it's Jim.
AURELAN: Jim? Sam, he's—
KIRK: He's dead. But your son's still alive. You've got to help us.
AURELAN: You are here. It is you, Jim!
TOS doesn't give the slightest implication about any other family member having any meaningful presence or significance in his life at all. We're given no reason in the show to think he has children or other family of his own (it's wildly unlikely for TOS Kirk tbh, for various reasons). We're given no reason to think their parents are in the picture or have been in a long time, certainly none to think either parent was at the ceremony—TOS Kirk is never associated with conventional parent-child nuclear family at all.
It was a friend of their family who helped Kirk apply to the Academy, not their parents. The people mentioned in TOS as guides or inspirations to him, or as people he looks up to, are all unrelated mentors in Starfleet like obvious father-figure Captain Garrovick or public figures like T'Pau. The only "traditional" family mentioned as there for him and whom he ever acknowledges is his older brother, sister-in-law, and nephews—all of whom he's clearly very fond of and has a close relationship with—not parents or children.
We don't know the ages or birth order of Sam and Aurelan's children, but for all three to be of appropriate ages for a significant Starfleet event, Sam is likely to be significantly older than Jim, with the extremely brief glimpse of Shatner!Sam + mustache obscuring how youthful he really looked (the writers had envisioned a 10-year age difference, though this is never mentioned onscreen; it does make the backstory from "The Conscience of the King" work more easily, though, since Sam's survival no longer needs to be explained—he would have already been an adult and off on his own life, if young, and frankly he and Aurelan seem to have done better by a troubled 13-year-old younger brother who had just survived starvation and genocide than Sarek and Amanda ever managed with Spock for... existing).
But the other thing about Sam as Bill Shatner With Mustache is the obvious implication that, while I don't think we're meant to think the brothers are diegetically identical, they do resemble each other very closely apart from age. Jim looks far more like Sam than Sam's one surviving child, Peter, ever will. And Sam is going to be 43 forever—to Jim, to Peter. But Jim lives. Every year his reflection looks a little more like Sam's.
ngl I think quite a bit about this in terms of Viola in Twelfth Night, a character who is already deeply fitting for comparison to James "What is gender, really?" Kirk:
I am all the daughters of my father’s house,
And all the brothers, too—and yet I know not.
I my brother know
Yet living in my glass. Even such and so
In favor was my brother, and he went
Still in this fashion, color, ornament,
For him I imitate.
Bonus feature:
She [Viola] pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
But there's more!
There is a cut scene from the end of "Operation: Annihilate!" where Kirk takes Peter (in a tiny Starfleet uniform!) to the bridge, and puts him in the captain's chair to ask which offered home he wants to live in: one is with Sam's research partner and his (the partner's) wife on Deneva (Peter's home, despite the horrors, which Sam had called the best place in the galaxy) and the other with his grandmother on Earth (I don't think it was stated whether this was Aurelan's or Sam's mother, though I'm inclined to think Aurelan's for various reasons, including the descriptions of Peter as the last survivor of Sam's family; Kirk describing her as "your grandmother" with no indication that he's talking about his own mother; and Kirk somberly responding "No one ever is" to Peter sadly saying that living with Sam's friends won't be the same as his own parents). Peter chooses to stay on Deneva.
Unsurprisingly, I adore the idea of Kirk not only asking Peter what he wants rather than unilaterally making the decision for him, btw, but sitting him in the captain's chair of the Enterprise—!!!—and lowering himself to nearly Peter's eye level to ask him what he wants. Uncle Jim understands symbolism, okay.
There's also this bit after Peter is beamed back down to Deneva where Scotty says that Peter seems a bright lad who might well end up in Starfleet, and Kirk grimly responds that he hopes not. He explains that he doesn't want Peter to ever have to weigh decisions like destroying a planet to stop the massacre of billions and will follow a different, happier path.
He's fine, they're fine, the remnants of this impossibly suffering family are totally fine.
Anyway I also wonder what it's like for Peter Kirk to have an increasingly famous uncle who looks just like his dead father.
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