Star Trek: Start to Finish

Kirk’s Empathy

Kirk will and does go to great lengths for those he cares about, and that empathy is what makes Kirk an interesting character.

He is at his best when he’s fighting against long odds to help those he feels responsible for, because it’s when he stops being an action hero and starts being a guy you root for. His empathy is what connects you into the story, because you want him to succeed in his efforts to protect the other characters.

The flip side is Kirk’s empathy for those he’s just met. There are countless episodes where the crew discovers some enslaved group or oppressed minority or hoodwinked populace and Kirk just wants them to be free. His desire for everyone everywhere to have control of their own destiny is the motive force that drives the series, and it reflects the core ideals behind the show: that sixties-America binge of freedom as unadulterated good, as the axis around which everything turns.

That Kirk is a starship captain is the most fitting piece of the puzzle; he is freedom incarnate, zooming around the galaxy doing things that he wants to do because he thinks that doing them is awesome. That his adventures so often find him freeing people from bondage or escaping bondage himself is part and parcel of the enterprise.

Computers in Star Trek

I, Mudd is yet another episode where the bad guy is a big, scary computer.

Computers in this series are, without fail, staid machines that have a mission they don’t understand, that attempt to fulfill that mission based on a false premise, and end up undermining their premise.

We see this in The Return of the Archons and in The Apple, where a computer tasked with protecting the populace has enslaved them.

We see this in The Changeling, where a computer probe has confused its programming and is now out to annihilate the life it’s supposed to discover and report on.

We see this to a lesser extent in What Are Little Girls Made Of?, where a computer thinks that it’s a man, and doesn’t understand that its plan is hideously flawed.

And to stretch a little further, we see it in A Taste of Armegeddon, where the computer is merely the means through which the people have lost their way; it is the buffer that keeps them from realizing the magnitude of their folly.

Almost all of this is attributable to computers being new, unknown quantities. If the only thing you knew about computers was that they were machines that made logical decisions, it stands to reason that you would, much like the Romantic poets, rally against them and for emotion, for feeling, and for humanity. And we see this pattern again and again in Star Trek.

But what we also see again and again is Mr. Spock, cooly logical and yet heroic. He shows flashes of emotion, and that connects us to him, but he strives to suppress it, to hold that rational part of himself forward.

But what really distinguishes Spock is that he simply has more insight. The computers of Trek are defeated by pointing out their flaws; by making them aware of their shortcomings and leading them to admit their contradictions and, in so doing, to destroy the illusion of their perfectly logical actions.

Spock, though, is a walking contradiction and knows it. He is half human, and so cannot deny that he has emotions. And the Vulcans as a race do not deny their emotions; they merely seek to control and suppress them. But most of all, Spock understands that the world itself is not entirely logical, and the inhabitants of that world are far from it. When he encounters a failing of logic, it is “fascinating” and not earth-shattering. Spock has a healthy skepticism but is willing to admit that there are more things in heaven and on Earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy.

End Season One

After completing all of season one, I’ve gotta say that I can totally see both why people got obsessed with this show, and why other people think it’s the lamest thing ever.

It can be genuinely great. When it’s good, Star Trek shows you something about the human condition, and does so in a really smart way: McCoy makes you laugh, Kirk makes you feel, and Spock makes you realize what you’ve got. It can be just out and out silly and still make you think.

But it is just dripping with cheese. If you can’t get past the multicolored shirts or the reused sets or the lame props or the same stock shot of the Enterprise circling the same freaking planet, then you’re going to have trouble watching this show.

And I don’t think that that’s just “not giving it a chance.” These things genuinely bring you out of the action, cause you to take pause, and interrupt the flow of the story. They make it actively harder to watch. They are a detriment to the power of the scripts.

And, sometimes, so are the actors. Nimoy can pull of Spock pretty well, unless Spock has to play along the borders of having emotions, and then he tends to overplay his lines. Shatner overplays his lines all the time, except for the ones where he can be the boyishly charming guy, when both Kirk and Shatner really seem like guys you’d like to meet. Kelley is very rarely given a chance to actually act in any register but “concerned doctor” or “comic relief,” which makes his performance stronger (he pulls those two roles off well) and weaker (you get a little tired of those two roles, and wonder why he can’t ever be a normal guy).

But when they pull it off, there’s fireworks. And in unexpected places.

I like the character of Kirk a lot better than I thought I would. He’s supposed to be smart, which isn’t what I remember. He really is a guy who you’d follow down to the surface where the natives are gunning for you. You’d trust him to get you out of any situation, because he has done this before.

I also don’t remember it being as funny as it is. I remembered Star Trek being stuffier, more earnest. I’m glad that it’s not.

I’m glad that it’s just what it is.

Whither Star Trek Remastered?

CBS used to provide the entire first season of Star Trek Remastered, but now when I go there it’s just five episodes. All the old links to individual episodes from my previous posts still work; the episodes just don’t show up on the index page. Weird.

Kirk versus Spock on Retaliation

Arena sees another in the long-running dialogs between Kirk, who jumps immediately to a “Kill ‘em all” stance, and Spock, who wants to show all sentient creatures compassion. This is an undercurrent with particular implications on this episode, but it’s been present in a lot of episodes and it’s something I don’t remember from my occasional viewings before this.

Which is a shame, really. This is a smart argument for these two characters to make because of who they are. Kirk, the thinking but emotional human, is driven by revenge and impetuous desires. Spock, the logical and sometimes cold half-Vulcan, is instead weighing reactions and repercussions.

But what’s really interesting is that when McCoy makes an appearance in this back-and-forth, it’s usually as a stand-in, but he switches between the sides. He frames his argument for compassion in terms of our ability to aid suffering, and his argument for vengeance in the shared burden that suffering inflicts upon us.

It’s this sort of discussion that makes Trek interesting, and I’m kind of surprised that I don’t remember this particular thread. Does it fade out as time goes on?

TOS Plotting

One of the things that all the episodes have done really, really well so far is tie the characters that span episodes into the action of the current episode. McCoy is visiting an old flame, Nurse Chapel is, too. One of Kirk’s oldest friends has something terribly wrong with him and Spock loses his inhibitions and cannot stay logical.

It’s truly one of the strengths of the show, and it reminds me of nothing more than the scenario-creation rules in my brother Josh’s Sons of Liberty, where it works similarly well.