#lieutenant bailey

Previous: Dagger of The Mind

Next: The Menagerie Parts I & II

A meta anthology where I re-examine TOS, especially Spock, in light of the new information Discovery & Strange New Worlds has revealed about him to us.

Onto the Analysis!

Emotional Security

I have been examining this exchange back to back with conversations Spock and Chapel have had where you can visibly trace the affection they have for each other growing. The banter pacing and facial expressions are almost exactly the same.

“Because you are very charming and I am completely missing it?”

If I may be so bold, Spock has A Type: Spunky, professional, blonde, short, and possessing a charming, disarming unwillingness to take Spock too seriously.

I don’t think Spock is quite missing it this time around 😏

Poor Bailey: How Spock & Jim Take Out Their Issues On This Poor Recently Promoted Kid

Spock’s biggest command flaw, especially early on in his relationship to being in command is and always has been this:

Spock treats his subordinates like his father treated him. Spock treats Bailey, this noticeably distressed, too-soon-promoted young lieutenant, like Sarek treats his children when they display emotion.

Instead of logically, reasonably assessing what actions should be taken based off human emotional needs. Instead of using the compassion and empathy we know he has both as a Vulcan and as a Human, he is instead harsh and needlessly condescending.

He is as unforgiving, dismissive, and unaccomadating of Bailey’s anxiety, thus allowing it to worsen. Like Sarek, whom he later compares the Balok, who is just as unforgiving. Leaving it to be Kirk’s problem, which he handles with an equal lack of grace for very different reasons.

Like McCoy accurately observes, Kirk promoted Bailey (too soon) because he reminds Jim of himself. Jim, who was also probably promoted too soon considering the nervous breakdown he has about the weight of captaincy in The Naked Time. Specifically Jim circa 2256, which as we now know, was the beginning of the Klingon War. Before the events that lead to Obsession, where Kirk’s propensity for self-blame was codified into flaw.

Jim is very, very hard on himself but tends to treat everyone else with a certain level of understanding and compassion. Everyone else but Kirk gets to be Human, or really, everyone but Kirk and the people that remind Kirk of himself get to be Human. So he too, lacks extremely necessary compassion for Bailey.

No room for err or patience or forgiveness for an otherwise bright young officer. Caught between Spock’s daddy issues and Kirk’s self-reproach. No wonder this poor kid explodes in the final act and gets away from the Enterprise the moment the opportunity arises.

I honestly think the best indicator of character growth and healing in this regard for both Spock and Jim is how they treat Chekov almost a year later.

Checkmate.

TOS season one Spock is much, much more prone to despair than he is later on. A little less tenacious than how we see him closer to the end of the run. He is bleak in the prospect of a crewman’s death in The Man Trap, his default response is “never been done” in The Naked Time. Spock is unaccustomed to command, and unaccustomed to self-confidence.

Spock, as if this moment is a microcosm of his flawed way of thinking, looks at strategy only one way, chess. A game, I might add, he’s not nearly as good at as he pretends to be (he’s only canonically beaten a teenager who didn’t know how to play, and computers). He knows how to play in theory, but refuses to take into account the unexpected, the illogical.

He thinks strategically as if there could only be one game they’re playing, and only one way to play it. Severely limiting the scope of what is possible to what he is already familiar with, what he thinks will work. Yet again, going out of his way to reaffirm the most miserable and limiting of his beliefs. This at least, he grows out of tactically, if not emotionally.

When he can’t give Jim an answer, he nearly gives into the human instinct to apologize. As we learn, by the time TOS rolls around, Spock hardly ever apologizes to anyone for anything. Anyone except Jim, Christine, and on the very, very rare occasion, Bones.

He’s not ready to be so vulnerable as to apologize to Kirk, not yet. So instead he tries to put it in the most Vulcan way he can “I regret that I can find no other logical alternative”. Even then, he at the very least admits to regret, which is, undoubtedly, an emotion he’s all too familiar with.

“Not Chess Mr. Spock, Poker.”

Spock learns a valuable lesson from Jim about command in this mission! He’s sooooo ready for it not to work, and his interest is piqued when it does actually pay off! You‘d think Vulcans would love Poker considering it relies on statistics and betraying no emotion. Seriously Spock, you’ve heard of Yahtzee but not Poker?

I do find it intriguing (and a mark of Bones & Spock’s burgeoning friendship) that it isn’t Jim who volunteers to teach Poker to Spock, but McCoy! Mr. Pathos himself! Now that’s an off duty encounter I would LOVE to have seen.

Requesting Permission

Pinpointing yet another first in Spock and Jim’s relationship. Reflexively asking to accompany Kirk into a dangerous and unknown situation. We know that within this season that that question will transform into an absolute insistence upon going with Jim.