so Jim doesnt do romance with his crew. Do you reckon that if he had encountered Spock earlier in his Starfleet career, he would have made a move, realized how compatible they are? How long do you think Jim and Spock need to... latch onto each other?
Sadly I think he probably wouldn't have, but for nerd reasons instead of ethical reasons. As for the second question: not long at all, it's getting them to communicate that's the difficulty!
There's this whole fanon about him having this ladykiller reputation at the Academy and after, but there is nothing to support it and I actually think TOS-the-show suggests young Kirk wasn't only ... not that but back then, was someone who could easily just fail to notice when someone was into him. Arguably this obliviousness extends even to early S1, when Spock and Bones sometimes are the ones to clue him in until "Dagger of the Mind"—which, unfortunately, is quite easy to believe could be a turning point in him deciding to at least take control of his own sexual objectification.
One of the first things we find out about Kirk is that a lab technician had fallen in love with Kirk in the past, and a young Gary Mitchell orchestrated an entire campaign in order for her crush to catch stack-of-books-with-legs Academy teacher Lt. Kirk's attention at all. Even though she was enough Kirk's type that he not only dated her as a result of Gary's machinations, but nearly married her. Kirk had been teaching long enough to have built up a reputation among upperclassmen as a notoriously difficult instructor by the time Gary showed up as a first-year cadet (Gary helped her out in hopes that it would get Kirk to lighten up in class), so we don't know how long she was pining after the oblivious 20-something Jim Kirk. We know Kirk had likely been teaching for at least a year or two by the time Gary helped her, so this could easily have gone on quite awhile without Kirk noticing.
And in TOS, we're only given reason to think he had a few relationships (all serious, romantic, and long-term) between Ruth leaving when he was 18 and him gaining command of the Enterprise at age 32. Those known relationships are invariably with a very specific type of person: sophisticated, cerebral, professional women, most of them in Starfleet, all near his age and attractive in a cute glossy way, and all very driven and decisive people who pursued him as much as the other way around.
Janice Rand is doing this in her own way; he admires and loves Areel all the more because his guile and silver tongue have never slightly worked on her, and she takes the initiative yet is respectful of his boundaries, allowing him to be soft-eyed and affectionately romantic with her (he does things like kissing her hands); Edith is blatantly if decorously courting him as much as the reverse if not more so; and there was clearly a mutual give and take between him and Jan Wallace, even in their break-up (my personal headcanon is that Jan was the blonde lab technician but even if not, this holds).
Even Janice Lester probably seemed like this type to begin with: certainly physically, and she was driven, focused, and ambitious (and in a warped way still is). She's in the sciences like most people he's into; and pretty clearly was the dominant force in their relationship even before it turned into an abusive situation (the relationship lasted a year, so the timeline allows for it). She idealizes a domineering, aggressive masculinity that he evidently fell short of, and she's contemptuous of him for not fitting that ideal, even though in terms of physical strength, he could have easily overpowered and attacked her. She's half-convinced herself he wanted to but never had the spirit to do it ("you were afraid. you were always afraid") but is also outraged that he managed to get away from her control—she's basically the worst-case scenario of his type, not a completely different one.
Contextually I think the year they were together likely occurred during his 2-3 years as an Academy student, before he got immediately transferred to space service without the usual teaching gap that people like Finney had to go through (probably only reinforcing her projection of resentment onto Kirk). So they would have been no more than 19 or 20 when they got together, very young.
Aside from these, Kirk has no unforced romantic encounters in S2, only femme fatale situations, and in S3, the amnesiac Kirk readily goes along with marriage to a woman he barely knows because she seems nice and people tell him he should. Odona deliberately pursues him, and once it seems they're going to be stranded alone together, he's receptive; even in the weak "Requiem for Methuselah," Rayna does the classic gentlemanly flirtation of guiding his movements at pool and defiantly broadcasting her interest.
Basically, I think Kirk could easily fall like a ton of bricks for Spock at any time, and would fall quickly. He uses sex appeal a lot, especially in S2; he is more straightforward and emphatic about his desires and lack of them in S3 and the "femme fatale" scenarios shift towards much more overtly violating territory in S3 as a result, but, when he's not using his desirability as a tool to navigate some desperate crisis, he doesn't fall in love often, just quickly and in a very swept-off-his-feet way that markedly contrasts with the other scenarios. That's definitely what would happen with Spock IMO.
However, I don't think younger Spock would be at all clear about his feelings, and I think he's very unlikely to pursue Kirk in anything like the way that Kirk's canonical old flames and those he uncomplicatedly falls for in TOS do. I feel like Spock's emotional baggage, if anything, would only be worse at the time.
—FWIW, I am not remotely convinced by the SNW apologetics about how he would be expressive and emotional in his younger years because he's trying out his human side and we don't bear in mind that it's earlier and he hasn't evolved into his final form of TOS Spock!! And so on. IMO S1 TOS Spock is very obviously taking his first baby steps towards the rootedness and sense of belonging and commitment he shows in S3, and every indication is that he had been profoundly isolated and deeply unhappy prior to that, and never really experienced anything like Kirk's icily outraged defense of him in "Balance of Terror" before that moment. The way he's treated in "The Galileo Seven" is a much more typical Day in the Life of Spock; there's a reason that Amanda is so pleased to discover Spock has a friend when Kirk indignantly sticks up for him wrt Sarek.
Anyway, the point is, young (basically married and deeply repressed) Spock is absolutely not in a place where he would take any kind of initiative in any kind of ... anything with Kirk (I do not get where the "he's not yet gay slutty Spock of TOS" is coming from, early TOS Spock would rather die than reveal a desire). Even befriending Spock would be a challenge in their younger days, I suspect.
And moreover, while I think Spock would also fall hard and fast, even if he were constitutionally capable of being receptive at that point and was letting on à la S3 Spock, young Kirk is himself not really in a place where he'd likely even notice. Especially if he knows Spock is married/betrothed (which he might very well not know, Spock being Spock—but if he did, I think the ethical issues would come screaming back into relevance).
However. All of this isn't to say there is no scenario where I could believe that a romance could happen between early career Kirk and slightly older Spock, just that I think there'd need to be more to the AU than their paths crossing early.
Maybe Spock is involved in the initial investigation into the tragedy of the Farragut, and the XO canonically on record as saying don't listen to what Lt. Kirk tells you, he did nothing wrong and nothing he might have done would have changed a thing draws Spock's attention to 23-year-old James Kirk, traumatized by mass slaughter again.
Or maybe Spock is the lab technician, rather than the unknown blonde, when Gary Mitchell plays matchmaker vs Kirk as the terror of PHIL101 (I don't think I've yet seen teacher!Kirk K/S scenarios where Kirk's subject isn't some hyper military thing or STEM, but I can more easily imagine super intense sharp-edged Lt. Cmdr. Spock who is almost entirely withdrawn into his turtle shell and super intense sharp-edged hyper-scholarly humanities guy Lt. Kirk hitting it off).
Maybe it's an even more off-the-beaten-path-of-TOS-canon AU scenario as a result of some other change that involves T'Pring eloping with Stonn (or whomever) when Spock ran off to Starfleet, and a year later, 20-year-old Spock is stepping in on behalf of bullied 17-year-old brand new cadet Jim Kirk (then a mere four years out from surviving starvation and genocide). That would shift to a primarily epistolary romance after Spock ships out and maybe it's easier for Spock to be a bit clearer and Jim a bit less oblivious in writing (I fully believe Spock would find Ensign Kirk's conduct wrt Finney's mistake 110% correct and his support might well slow Kirk's tendency towards isolating himself while projecting composure and charm, while Kirk would intentionally and unintentionally drag young Spock out of being mired in his own head for so long).
There are any number of other possibilities, too. Maybe Spock has a transitional period between missions when he's ~27 and decides he might as well get Academy credits for his PhD while on leave. Given that TOS only ever indicates that Kirk was a teacher (and a straitlaced, demanding one, not the "I'm the Cool Mom" type of prof), not Spock, and it's just one of the many Kirk qualities grafted onto Spock in the various ST movies, it could be fun to have a scenario where Spock is the genius student who thinks he's too advanced for the required philosophy course, and Kirk is the strict regulation-loving nerd at 24, teaching his class for only the second time, still processing [insert horrors] and in extra think-or-sink mode. What happens after the course? Did Kirk destroy Spock's perfect GPA? Lots of fun ways that could go, too, where they're more mutually challenging than the usual.
But basically, all of this is to say that I can't see it happening given where they were at emotionally and circumstantially at earlier ages (according to TOS) with no change other than their paths happening to cross. There needs to be a bigger change baked into the premise to make it plausible for me that Spock is going to be proactive enough and reveal enough of his own feelings, and the two of them thrown together enough, for young Kirk to "make a move."
(For me, as someone who feels the original movies are pretty transparently a reboot in all but name and many of the characters irreconcilably different as written from the versions in TOS, I think what's most probable in terms of what we see in TOS is Kirk and Spock quietly getting together after the five-year mission when, at least for awhile, Kirk is no longer his CO. Kirk is visibly getting ground down in S3 and Spock is if anything only more insane about him and indifferent to higher considerations than Kirk's welfare as S3 goes on. Kirk said Spock was closer to him than anyone in the universe in the series finale, Spock mind-melded with him without a single word or moment of difficulty, and they immediately tried to run away together hand-in-hand, and the court martial as well is just ... they seem closer and more devoted than ever, this doesn't feel like an impending estrangement, it feels like the second to last chapter of a will-they-won't-they romance. I can see Spock having a bunch of Very Logical reasons that Kirk —known T'Pau stan who thinks Vulcan is "lovely"—should rest on Vulcan after the mission wraps up and see the silver birds and put his off-duty phone on starship mode and have proper coffee for reasons other than staying conscious etc. And knowing the clock is ticking until the chain of command snaps back on, it's Spock who sets out to (very logically) court Kirk rather than Kirk having to do all the emotional heavy lifting.)
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So, I am generally an epithet hater when it comes to narration. The notorious sorts of examples are "the blond," "the Brazilian," "the green-eyed girl" and so on instead of names or pronouns, but it definitely sets my teeth on edge. Professions are mostly fine by me, while race/species/nationality tends to be the most obnoxious and jarring, even when entirely fictitious.
Now, in fairness, this is just a really common awkward writing misstep, especially when there are enough characters of the same gender that pronouns lack clarity and the writer isn't used to seeing names used over and over. (It's not that different from changing the dialogue tag every sentence to avoid over-using "said," not realizing how much more jarring it often is to read replied/shouted/whispered/gasped/declared/etc one after the other than said.) It's not that big a deal most of the time.
I did notice early on that ST fic seems to use these a lot more than in other fandoms I'd been in. There's especially a lot of "the Vulcan," " the human," and so forth. I find "the Vulcan" especially jarring for Spock and most of all in a Spock POV, given that it's a lot more fraught and complex for him specifically, and it seems improbably useless for him to think of another crew member as "the human" given that 430+ of them are humans. But I mostly shrugged it off.
But I feel moved to point out that, in addition to the many other issues with Roddenberry's novelization of The Motion Picture (a script he didn't write and doesn't appear to understand especially well), he does this allllllllll the time and way more obnoxiously than the most amateurish fan writer. He describes Uhura as "the fine-featured Bantu," for instance, thus far I'm pretty sure he refers to Ilia more often as "the Deltan" than by name, and there's so much "the Vulcan" for Spock that it's painful. It doesn't make me like the device itself or Roddenberry's absolutely dire prose any better, but you know, let's put things into perspective.
And in the interests of full disclosure, I did laugh outright at an instance of this in an article written by a pro journalist rather than a fic writer or Hollywood guy prone to godawful prose. It was a ST-related thing from just a few years ago, but I don't remember the exact subject, only the fact that the journalist simply referred to William Shatner as "the Canadian."
Not "the Canadian actor" either. It was just Known Canadian Bill Shatner. And at that point, I was like ... okay, fine, the epithets win.
J and I, having suffered through the TMP novelization, felt the need to ritually cleanse ourselves by watching Star Trek: the Motion Picture itself. Whatever its flaws, it is not that.
However, it's still... like, half a film of material stretched like Bilbo Baggins' lifespan. Therefore, we are contemplating a TMP drinking game that will make the time pass a little more easily, but J's hard cider is 19% and we don't want to, you know, die. So, does anyone have suggestions for a non-fatal TMP drinking game?
It's petty, but I can't really get over the fact that one of the many TOS episodes in which Kirk grimly faces down the very real possibility of a no-win scenario in which he loses and everyone dies is ... "Space Seed." The episode that introduced Khan. The only time he appeared prior to The Wrath of Khan.
Kirk even goes out of his way to take responsibility and to record posthumous commendations for especially praiseworthy crew members while he can still breathe, something he only does twice in TOS. The other time is "The Immunity Syndrome," when he isn't sure whether they're all going to die or not, but accepts it's a possibility and hopes the commendations will survive in that case (there are only two people who appear on both sets of commendations, btw: Spock and Uhura). But back in "Space Seed," he was pretty damn sure they were all going to die, and wasn't disengaged or evasive or immature about it at all.
It's not even the most jarringly irreconcilable TOS episode with the characterization of Kirk (and Spock, for that matter) in The Wrath of Khan. I'd argue that "Obsession," "The Conscience of the King," "The City on the Edge of Forever," "The Tholian Web," and "The Mark of Gideon" among others are all more so. But watching "Space Seed" and TWOK back to back is, let's say, not something I find especially rewarding on a character level.
Of course, to be fair: you couldn't just sit down at your home TV and watch them back to back when The Wrath of Khan came out. TMP and TWOK in particular are soft reboots meant to introduce audiences who might well have zero familiarity with TOS to Star Trek in general, and a sense of the characters and their vibe as they'd passed into pop culture by then, and some kind of big theme.
They were made to be sci-fi blockbusters for audiences between Star Wars movies who had seen A New Hope and, for TWOK, The Empire Strikes Back more recently than "Space Seed" or "Obsession," not TV watchers straight off "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits." I know. For me, watching "Space Seed" and then being asked to believe that Khan would be this driven by Marla McGivers, and Kirk has never truly engaged with failure and death he couldn't personally outmaneuver feels like my brain matter is being forced through a pretzel machine, but in 1982 how many audience members would know who Marla McGivers or Captain Garrovick were?
But still. Every projection of TWOK Kirk onto TOS feels like the Star Trek version of one of my oldest DW icons (care of @duncatra):
So, the entire household went out to dinner at an Applebee's, because Ashe hadn't been there in years and had a sudden craving and we've wanted to spend more time together as an entire friend group. So there's J (my platonic best friend of 26 years, a very obvious cishet guy), Kh (his girlfriend/my other closest friend from grad school), Ashe (a tall and ultra-fashionable woman, J's closest friend from grad school and a good friend of mine), and me.
I mention all of this because J has been side-eyed as a potential corruptor of good girls' virtue since middle school, usually for at least borderline antisemitic reasons, but sometimes just for reactionary gender nonsense reasons. So he held the door for an older man after Kh, Ashe, and I had all filed out and this guy looked at J in amazement and said "you have three ladies, wow."
(It's not the first time someone has presumed that four 30-something friends living in a house in the PNW for financial reasons could only be a complicated polycule when one of the four is a man. It's especially not the first time he and I in particular have been assumed to be a couple, to the point that he's sometimes dryly referred to our house as "the fuck palace" to go by popular opinion.)
So that happened!
On a funnier note, we got through several more chapters of the TMP novelization. More on that later, but he took up the dramatic reading at the point at which Scotty takes Kirk to see the Enterprise. It basically reads like Roddenberry is desperately trying to make it sound pornographic anyway, so J went for the obvious option of reading it in hushed melodramatic tones, and I was laughing hard enough that I nearly cried and was like, "Do you think the Enterprise is wearing sexy lingerie?"
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Speaking of J, he got me a Christmas present labeled "enjoy the footnote" and, since I've been creeping back to research after a year of exhaustion, I was thinking it would be something to do with early modern studies or literary theory or adaptation or something—and instead it was the novelization of Star Trek: the Motion Picture complete with all the unhinged Roddenberryisms :D
I will say, given how often details that are absolutely not in the film or show but instead from the novelization get presented as uncomplicated canon facts that must be integrated into the experience of watching TOS or the movies or TNG etc, I was immediately surprised by several things:
Spock yearningly thinking of Kirk as his t'hy'la prior to kolinahr (what could go wrong?) happens on the first page. Like, before the title page and the copyright information. And it's before the preface ostensibly written by Kirk (though it sounds nothing whatsoever like Kirk). And it's before the second preface from the in-universe author, with quibbling footnotes. Roddenberry is to introductory material as hobbits are to breakfast.
The thing about Kirk sounding nothing like TOS Kirk, and the fundamentally implausible gaps in characterization between the TOS characterizations (esp but not only of Kirk) and the movie and/or novelization characterizations is explained in the prefaces (whether there should be a distinction between the film/the novelization isn't clear at this point; I'm still early in the book, but TMP the film explains nothing whatsoever about how the characters we knew in TOS could end up where they're at in TMP because TMP is a barely-veiled reboot).
The explanation is what I can only describe as canonception: in the continuity of the novelization, Star Trek the show exists in-story as some fictionalized documentary thing that's more or less the same as TOS, and which TMP!novelization!Kirk considers fairly inaccurate (the in-universe editor has some mildly skeptical commentary on this but doesn't seriously question it). As a result, he demanded the in-universe author of the novelization (who was significantly involved in the in-universe quasi-documentary that is actually called STAR TREK, his caps, but may or may not be exactly a TV show) submit his manuscript account of the events of TMP to the oversight of all the people involved including Kirk himself, Uhura, Spock, Nogura, etc. (Roddenberry does not seem to remotely understand that this would be highly sketchy nor how creepy, reactionary, and paranoid the universe of the novelization is in general.) IIRC there was also at some point an idea that the novelizations and some other "beta canon" type stuff exists in-story for at least some of the Star Trek shows, but are fictionalized works or other intrinsically limited and possibly inaccurate in-universe documents within their continuities.
So TOS itself does not actually share the simple flat continuity beloved of modern franchises with the TMP novelization. As far as the novelization is concerned, TOS is a vaguely approximate fictionalized account of the actual five-year mission that exists in the continuity of the novelization (and maybe TMP itself). The novelizations etc are, similarly, somewhat questionable documents within the continuity of any Star Trek show insofar as they exist at all in the continuities of any show. Neither the show nor novelization are uncomplicatedly canon for the other, although they exist in-story in some capacity. It feels a bit like Roddenberry went on a bender with some really dubious drugs and The Silmarillion and this was the result. (I actually find it kind of charming and this approach certainly easier to believe than contemporary Grand Unified Theories of Lore without regard to what the significance of any of that lore was. )
The universe is kind of awful, though! It's wild that this is just a few years before Roddenberry started mandating a tediously bland, unchallenging concept of utopia that hobbled early TNG—because Kirk is outfitted with an implant in his head and Starfleet is keeping the fact that senior officers are outfitted with, well, tech implants a secret from the public because of a previous multi-year series of wars (not the Eugenics Wars, later ones) involving some similar devices that went horribly wrong, and we're assured that Starfleet only uses these implants to send crucial emergency information and it's actually super rare to beam information into officers' brains like that (and also comically unclear and slow to arrive). But still, The Public Cannot Know.
Also there's a whole (transparently conservative fever dream) tangent about how the earlier, more intellectual generation in Starfleet were academics and philosophers who were so open to new ideas and adaptable and evolved as humans that they got seduced by alien philosophies and couldn't be depended on. Starfleet had to rely on less evolved, less progressive, but more disciplined people the prefaces keep calling "primitives" to hold their mission together at all. Kirk claims his year was the first that "primitives" such as himself were recruited instead of the more evolved and intellectual humans (the in-universe editor thinks Kirk is somewhat misrepresenting his own place in all this because he's just so modest, which itself is... lmao as a character beat).
There's one uncomplicatedly solid note: Roddenberry halts the acid trip long enough to remark that merely tolerating others' differences is not adequate, you have to go beyond that, then breezes on. Interesting take from a raging misogynist and antisemite, but not wrong.
I have a post I'll get to at some point about it, but J and I have progressed further through the TMP novelization by Roddenberry, and while I can't begin to describe everything in it, I'll just mention a few phrases that have entered our collective vocabulary as a result:
the mutant farming of prehistoric civilizations
the forthcoming mind control riots
the fuck deck
canonception
does the Enterprise wear lingerie?
the intrinsic eroticism of a woman's bald head
like a sexy fawn
for his girlfriend/my other closest friend Kh: as an all-too-scrutable Asian, myself,
an-artsy-girl000 replied to this post (but presumably actually this one):
Decker was asbolutely in the right. The good thing about this movie is that it never tries to make Decker into the obnoxious villain you paint him out to be. He's hurt, yes. But he's always making rational decisions and never panicking. Kirk is also partly right- he is definitely more experienced than Decker. But he doesn't know the ship anymore. He's driven by his ego, more than Decker is, but even then, he knows when to admit someone else was right.
All that to say, Decker and Kirk are super well written. Neither is perfect, and that's why their characterization is so fucking good
I nowhere said nor meant that Decker is a villain, though yes, I do think his behavior is deeply obnoxious and short-sighted long past the point when it's justifiable. Villainy would be trying to get Earth's population wiped out on purpose. Decker merely recommends an approach to the V'ger crisis (over and over and over, even after Spock's arrival) that would unintentionally have that result, which is less competent than doing it on purpose but definitely not villainous.
His conduct as first officer is additionally unprofessional and petty, but as I also said, I think that is a much smaller issue than his relative weakness as a tactician. I firmly believe that Decker is unqualified for full command of this particular mission, all the more given the number of lives at stake and his own tactical recommendations throughout the mission. That doesn't mean he's unqualified to command any mission, or that he's secretly malevolent, he's just not the guy for this job.
And the thing is, given the stakes set up by the plot of TMP, this is not really a situation where you can split the baby. After the early refits learning curve (which Decker is not uniquely qualified to assist with), his ongoing recommendations would have been disastrous for billions of people had Kirk followed them. Like, either—
a) these recommendations are not what Decker actually thinks should be done. Had he retained command, he would have made the kinds of decisions Kirk does in TMP that allow for even the possibility of success, in which case his contrary advice as first officer is wildly unprofessional at the worst conceivable time, or
b) he's actually being honest about thinking slow and cautious tactics are the way to deal with the V'ger crisis, in which case he's a deeply inferior commander for this specific mission, and it was for the best that Starfleet placed the survival of Earth's population in the hands of someone more experienced, gifted, and decisive (clearly indicated by Uhura's chiding remark about how Kirk receiving command had doubled their chances of success).
Either way, Decker's wrong in the circumstances. Yeah, it sucked for him personally, and yes, he was right about a few specific orders early on, but I think he's absolutely wrong in the big-picture sense that matters a lot more. There are just far more important things going on during all this than him being mildly screwed over, and he doesn't seem to recognize the urgency or priority of those in the way that Kirk, Uhura, and eventually Spock do.
Also, we have even deeper disagreements if you think Decker is that well-written. The writing of him isn't godawful, but I don't think it's anything like good, much less super good. If anything, I think the script is probably more unkind to Decker and Ilia than any other major characters, to a degree that feels unfair. IMO pretty much all the best dialogue in TMP goes to Spock or Kirk, and even with them, there's a lot that's carried by Nimoy's and Shatner's performances far more than the writing, as well as by the audience already more or less knowing them.
I think Decker's and Ilia's dialogue in TMP is mediocre, not helped by so much of their characterization and motives getting lost in the shuffle from Phase II to TMP (even the conflict between Kirk and Decker is mainly an artifact of late reshuffling; Decker had been envisioned as a personable first officer who idolizes Kirk almost as a father while Kirk is deliberately grooming him for command). And Decker's actor in particular does not have the screen presence to elevate the dubious writing the way that Nimoy and Shatner do in TMP, or Frakes and Sirtis in TNG for that matter. Riker and Troi are obviously much-improved second drafts of Decker and Ilia but still suffer from plenty of bad writing, yet the actors bring a ton of warmth and charm to the characters in a way that I don't think succeeds in TMP.
