They Fight Crime!

To continue my periodic Tumblr TOS!K/S fandom pet peeves: I keep periodically running into comments on gifs or meta wrt Kirk and Spock's unhinged mutual jealousy of each other's love interests (or just. interests) that go something to the effect of: "well I like a Kirk and Spock who are a healthy, open-minded poly couple who don't get jealous at all." Every time, I can't help thinking, "Okay, so you don't actually like Kirk and Spock, then."

I mean, it's possible to like most of a character and headcanon away some specific detail that you think doesn't work or is OOC in the wider context of something that long and complicated (me with "Elaan of Troyius"; forcing Taming of the Shrew onto the TOS cast is a terrible and indeed OOC idea to begin with, but it simultaneously manages to be racist towards Elaan while shrugging off her drugging the previously repulsed Kirk into sex, and unsurprisingly shares a writer with the ragingly antisemitic "Patterns of Force"). But you have to ignore such a major component of their dynamic and characterizations to deny their jealousy wrt each other that this seems like ... not an offensive misreading, really, and there are others that bother me more on that level, but few strike me as so absolutely wrong. Every time I see it, I wonder if the person has even seen the show, at least at all recently, because it's just ... it's not even that it's baseless as an interpretation, it's actively contradicted so flagrantly, so often, that it seems completely disengaged from the show.

(Kirk's heartfelt, melancholy description of love is extremely and explicitly monogamous, well beyond the casual defaults of what you'd expect from the era, and he's ... I mean, Kirk spends almost the entire show fully aware that Spock is ashamed of his feelings for him, and after the first shock, is incredibly tolerant and unconcerned about Spock dealing with this angst via repression and blatant lies. But Kirk's easy, patient assurance around this dries up the instant he gets the slightest glimmer of a suspicion that someone or something else could conceivably dislodge his position at the center of Spock's world. He seethes with extremely visible jealousy and hostility whenever that happens and swings to the opposite extreme of getting unhappy and insecure. And Spock's jealousy is even more incredibly conspicuous and persistent throughout most of the series, especially in episodes like "The City on the Edge of Forever." By S3, Spock has hit such an intensity of envy that when Bones is like "you just couldn't understand love triangles, or love at all, all the desperate things it drives people to do, the ecstasies and agonies... anyway g'night" Spock immediately responds by mind-melding with the unconscious Kirk to remove his latest love interest from his memory after bleeding jealousy of her the whole episode. Kirk and Spock are many things, but healthily poly people free from jealousy and insecurity is certainly not among them!)

The household Star Trek movie watch just hit The Wrath of Khan! I’ve seen it multiple times before, but it was really different to watch it so shortly after watching TOS and TMP.

My feelings are … more complex now. Where Spock’s character growth was randomly rewound in TMP for unexplained reasons, Wrath of Khan!Spock feels more of a projection into the future. He’s older, steadier, and less repressed, while still retaining the composure and dignity that are so personally and culturally important to him. His sense of humor is still dry but less buried and harsh, he’s reserved and unflinching in a very Spock way, but it feels healthier and more integrated than he was capable of before. I don’t get the impression that he’s at all ashamed of what he feels for Kirk at this point, nor ashamed of much at all.

I feel like we see how far Spock has come from his early shame and denial, for instance, when Kirk, McCoy, and Saavik go to beam to the research base. There’s this less-repressed-than-formerly-but-still-powerful intensity in Kirk and Spock's farewell that, as ever, gives the distinct sense that everyone else just ceased to exist for them. Spock says outright, “Be careful, Jim” and it’s very adorable and relatively open by Spock standards. And then professional hater McCoy is like … oh, so am I chopped liver? while Saavik is just ????? and it’s hilarious and just feels very recognizable.

[ETA 7/4/25: this is still roughly my opinion after re-watching the other TOS movies, with one large caveat I struggled to fully articulate at first. Both TOS and TMP emphasize that an overwhelmingly Vulcan Spock is not true to the fuller reality of who Spock is and is not psychologically healthy for him. The lifelong pressure he's been under to compress himself into someone who could fit within an acceptably Vulcan identity is the source of his suffering and (gay-coded!) repression. His arc throughout TOS, which is then repeated and finalized in TMP, was all about him finding a path out of this repressed, ashamed existence, a path in which he doesn't need to renounce the ways he's Vulcan, but can accept himself in a healthier, more balanced way than Vulcan culture or his own hang-ups were ever going to allow. The essential tension of TMP pivots on this far more than on anything to do with Kirk, and culminates in Spock refusing to return to seek approval on Vulcan, and instead staying with Kirk and going to Earth—this is symbolic, not just a plot detail. Spock has struggled to prove himself a true Vulcan, even while choosing Earth/humanity at essentially every fork in the road: joining Starfleet instead of the VSA, serving on a human Starfleet vessel instead of the Vulcan ones that exist in TOS, refusing alternative, more Vulcan-typical opportunities like with Kollos because he insists his life is on the Enterprise, breaking his kolinahr when Kirk and V'ger unintentionally reach out, and finally confirming all these decisions in that refusal to go back to Vulcan.

But the two Meyer films, The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country, are more inclined towards idealizing Spock than the other films (and certainly more than TOS), and idealizing him specifically in Vulcan terms. Both lean into this largely idealized Spock who is essentially the face of Vulcan maturity, driven by Vulcan philosophies he never mentioned and rarely adhered to previously, and don't really engage with how deeply trying to be an ideal Vulcan has been a source of pain and real harm for him, nor with his arc largely involving movement away from overriding identification with Vulcan and towards identification with his relationships to other people, especially Kirk. In both, Spock's relationship with Kirk is more ambiguous than in the other films, despite still being very important. The major exception to this "Vulcanizing" of Spock without much sense of its costs is the death scene, where the glass between Spock and Kirk gives shape to the price of his emotional distance—and honestly, it was unsurprising to discover that the idea for that came from Shatner, not Meyer. As powerful as the death scene is, Spock's side of the dialogue is rather odd to me in characterization terms, especially after TMP; the idea that he'd address Kirk as Admiral at such a moment rather than Jim, the kind of generic "don't grieve" sentiment that has little to do with any particulars of their relationship. Much of the power of the scene comes from the cinematic language and the absolutely superb performances, IMO.

But then, my fandom heresy is that I actually think The Final Frontier does a much better job than The Wrath of Khan of credibly showing a Spock who has come to terms with his hang-ups around his culture and family and feelings and relationships, and can insist on the whole person he is now, while remaining very much recognizable with Spock's distinct quirks. He's still capable of fucking up in very Spock ways and being characteristically petty and defensive about doing so, but he's also grown beyond Sybok and Sarek and proving himself as a Vulcan on a very fundamental level, without cutting out any part of what makes him who he is. Godslayer Spock > perfect Vulcan ideal Spock! In any case, though, I do feel that Meyer's Spock is pretty deeply disengaged from the basic direction of his arc in TMP and TOS and, like with Kirk, much more influenced by the pop culture perception of him than the details of his original characterization. It's not terrible but it is noticeable, and that swerve has strongly influenced the perception of Spock as a character over time, including in his original incarnation. I like seeing Spock live his best life in TWOK, to be sure, but I do think the execution is conceptually flawed.]

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I was looking up a random S1 factoid in one of the okay but lesser TOS episodes and this bit from “What Are Little Girls Made Of” sure hits differently now:

KIRK: Well, there’s one difference between us. I’m hungry.
ANDROID KIRK: The difference is your weakness, captain, not mine.
KORBY: One at a time, gentlemen. Captain?
KIRK: Eating is a pleasure, sir. Unfortunately, one you will never know.
ANDROID KIRK: Perhaps, but I will never starve, sir.

me, drafting a post on “The Conscience of the King”: hey robot feel free to shut the fuck up forever

Tagged: #not quite up there with lenore being like 'who do you think you are to judge my father for orchestrating a genocide you survived' #or kodos himself defending himself by claiming kirk is basically subhuman which is. uhhh layers of horrifying #but. you know. good god. #(this was produced only a few weeks before 'conscience of the king' btw which almost immediately precedes 'shore leave'. despite the episodic quality the air order does make spock and mccoy's machinations #to get kirk to take some shore leave and decompress VERY understandable #also mccoy's remark in 'shore leave' #that kirk was a very serious young man in his early academy days and kirk's correction that he was not just serious but grim ...yeah)