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anghraineIf you follow me on Tumblr, you've seen me trip into an unexpected (for me) Kirk/Spock spiral. I knew, of course, that the ship is the granddaddy of modern western slash fandom—and fandom as many of us know it wouldn't exist without the ship's passionate early fandom—but given that a) ships can be wildly popular without me personally finding them compelling and b) I don't tend to be into m/m in general, I really didn't expect I would fall head over heels for it.
I think partly it's because sometimes I was watching with people who strain to ignore all hints of homoerotic subtext between anyone when it's not explicitly spelled out, and I was annoyed at the refusal to even consider any other possibility than The Holy Bond of Totally Platonic Heterosexual Dude Friendship despite the truly copious amount of material in this case. But even apart from that, I went from being a bit surprised the foundational slash fandom juggernaut wasn't "more or less typical bromance filtered through fandom goggles" but actually the real super homoerotic deal to "losing my mind about this" due to some particular, uh, incidents in TOS. The final straw for me was actually the season 3 episode "Requiem for Methuselah" (in which Kirk has a decidedly mediocre het romance Spock visibly dislikes, leading to a final scene in which McCoy claims Spock can't understand love triangles or the victories or agonies of love that Kirk has experienced, and without so much as a scene break Spock just waits for McCoy to leave and then wipes his rival from Kirk's memory. unhinged gay shit is what I needed to truly succumb, I guess!). But there were also three major S1 episodes that heavily contributed to my eventual "AHHHHHH MY SHIPPP" downfall. These weren't the only wildly shippy moments in the season (hahahahahaha), just the ones that were the emotional equivalent of being punched in the stomach:
1) "The Naked Time": I love this episode for many reasons, not only K/S ones (in fact, more for Spock feelings in general). However. This is the episode where everyone gets space drunk and loses all their inhibitions, so they just start doing whatever their repressed instincts and fantasies and emotions drive them towards (the fantastic "I'll rescue you, fair maiden!" -> "Sorry, neither" Sulu-Uhura scene happens in that context). Most people are just kind of silly. However, there's a point where Nurse Chapel passionately declares her feelings for Spock, and he gently rejects her but is deeply upset about it. The next time we see inhibition-free Spock, he's jumped from feeling terrible about Chapel to feeling terrible about his mother's emotional isolation on Vulcan, and his own participation in it. Kirk tries to shake him out of it, and an increasingly anxious Spock confesses, "Jim, when I feel friendship for you, I'm ashamed." Kirk keeps trying to shake him back to his senses and he just says in agony, "Understand, Jim. I've spent a whole lifetime learning to hide my feelings..."
I will say that normally, I am not one of the lesbians who finds much catharsis in m/m or mediates my own feelings about my own marginalized sexuality through it (my main exception to this was Faramir/Aragorn as a teenager). But Spock's "in vino veritas" being not daring escapades or wish-fulfillment fantasies, but misery and shame over both his feelings and his detachment (in the fourth-aired episode of the nearly 80 episodes of the series), and also shame over his lifelong attempts to conceal what, and how much, he truly feels just hit so hard. The fact that we later discover that his cultural norms led to him getting railroaded into a het marriage as a literal child and that he clearly loathes the necessity of sex with his wife only intensifies the sense of déja vu I started getting. Who knew that watching subtextual pining from a science-fiction show aired in 1966 could tear off the scabs on my "lesbian raised Mormon" damage? Not me until this episode!
[ETA: I know some of you are SNW fans, so note that I'm pretty harsh about it under the cut.]
(ngl there were times during the TOS watch where afterwards, I just had to lie down and contemplate my own experiences of repression and homophobia and gradually realized, "oh, so I am still really fucked up about that." Thanks, Spock!)
Also: I went in assuming that both Kirk and Spock would have bi energy throughout the show based on hearing them both casually described as canon bi or implicitly bi, but despite a few rare but obligatory female love interests for Spock, I started to feel very strongly that Spock could only be gay or grey-ace/gay. The obligatory het subplots are never truly consensual on his side and this is generally explicit, with Leila remarking that "There is no choice" about Spock joining her because she's going to sex pollen him, or his obvious visceral revulsion at pon farr while he's still able to think clearly. Or there's the overriding ancestral consciousness of 5000 years earlier that influences him towards things he normally doesn't even slightly want, like enjoying the taste of meat (he's a vegetarian repulsed by meat when he's fully himself, it turns out) and having a het romance with a woman he's barely met who is lying to him. The only obligatory Spock romance partner I found remotely appealing was a very cool character who was, unfortunately, being used by Spock-as-honeypot for Kirk's and Starfleet's benefit. So again, it doesn't seem like he has any realistic choice in the matter; the actors have great chemistry, but Spock's feelings about being used and using her this way are profoundly ambiguous, and there's no indication that he would have pursued her otherwise.
I do really like TOS T'Pring, I will say, but don't count her as an obligatory romance for obvious reasons—the episode is clear that neither of them desires the other under normal conditions.
Kirk has powerful bi vibes, but there are so many occasions when Spock is ??????????? about the appeal of hot women to other men that I gradually became more and more viscerally repelled by the idea that TOS Spock is into women at all, much less that he's "canon bi" or whatever the fuck. He ends up reading as so intensely "repressed gay" to me, so much of the time, that my kneejerk feeling about the obligatory Spock dub-con het per season is just /eyeroll (not helped by later ST generally being pretty slow to the game and mediocre about gay representation in general, and refusing to do anything slightly queer with Spock despite the extreme and very, very famous homoeroticism surrounding the original character). And all this only makes this drunken confession to Kirk about his lifetime of repressing his emotions and shame over his feelings for Kirk himself hit all the harder.
Also, "The Naked Time" also has Kirk explicitly say that it would be fine for Spock to have a romantic relationship with a lower-ranking crew member like Janice Rand, but not Kirk as captain, so Spock's rejection of Chapel doesn't even have that justification. It seems to me that Chapel mostly reminds uninhibited!Spock of his mother, but she certainly never gets what she wants from him. Later, early in the throes of pon farr in "Amok Time," he is absolutely livid that she's continuing to make overtures to him at such a time when he's "a man who is not hers" (his angry description of himself with regard to her). It's really only in "Plato's Stepchildren" that she seems to fully understand that what she's wanted from him requires some form of violation (as occurs in that episode; she's rightly horrified).
(For the record, one of my major grievances wrt SNW is the choice to interpret TOS Spock's revulsion from T'Pring and Chapel as "well actually deep down he must have been attracted at some point, right?" And after re-watching TOS all the way through, I was way more uncomfortable with this. For one, TOS Chapel has very obviously never gotten what she wanted from him ever. In "Plato's Stepchildren," when they're forced into an embrace, she confesses that it's what she always longed for from him, but not like this, and (as above) this is really the first time she seems to truly accept his rejection as final. For another, T'Pring and Spock's relationship is driven entirely by a forced betrothal at age 7 that neither of them has the least enthusiasm about when not in pon farr—I actually love that TOS T'Pring is aggressively disinterested in Spock as a sexual/romantic partner and truly feels nothing more than icy respect for him, and Spock is explicit that his interest in her is entirely confined to pon farr. In "Amok Time," I wasn't sure they'd ever even met as adults. There is so much "this dude couldn't possibly really mean no when he says no" fuckery that is actually framed as distasteful in TOS—one of the better and most chilling moments in the very flawed series finale is Janice Lester's vicious response to Kirk's claim that she overpowered him and took control of his body. She mocks him because, specifically, he's a man and obviously a woman could never do such a thing to him (the subtext is. uh. unsubtle, especially as he's already been sexually assaulted by women multiple times that season). And you'd think that over 50 years later, ST could engage with this very persistent thread in a more nuanced way than assuming Spock a) must desire women and b) must desire these specific women he rebuffs in TOS, given how rough and obvious and reflective of the production's many gender issues this thread tends to be in TOS. But no, the transgressions of boundaries and autonomy in TOS as a major thematic concern seems largely ignored in every modern take on both Kirk and Spock, who were the main vehicles for TOS's considerations of autonomy and especially sexual autonomy. Ugh. It reminds me of the transmutation of the Gorn as victims of colonization in TOS into... whatever the fuck.)
2) "Shore Leave": This is a silly and rather slight episode that contains the notorious opening scene in which Kirk mistakenly thinks he's getting a backrub from Spock ("That's it. A little higher, please. Push. Push hard. Dig it in there, Mr.—") rather than the pretty female yeoman who is actually doing it. When he sees Spock step forward and realizes someone else is massaging his back, Kirk hastily says, "Thank you, yeoman, that's sufficient." This is midway through the season, btw, not a late episode. Why Kirk would expect a massage on the bridge from Spock goes entirely unexplained.
Anyway, at the end of "Shore Leave," the male crew members are obviously planning to sleep with some hot lady androids—expect Spock. He immediately detaches the sexy android clinging to his arm and coolly remarks, "With all due respect to the young lady, I've already had as much shore leave as I care for" and retreats to the Enterprise while everyone else obviously stays and is strongly implied to have a bunch of hetero sex on the planet before returning to the ship. For some, they spend shore leave with the chorus girl sexbots; for others, they romance each other; for Kirk, the android is a replica of his girlfriend as a teenager. When everyone returns the next morning, Spock seems both rather baffled and a bit disapproving of the whole thing, but by and large indifferent.
(This episode was originally conceived and drafted into a teleplay by Theodore Sturgeon of "Amok Time" fame, btw, though it was subject to a lot of executive meddling and is much less substantial as a story.)
3) "The City on the Edge of Forever": this is the very famous penultimate episode of S1, and is a lot shippier on the K/S front than I expected, given that it centers on a grand het romance for Kirk (indeed the het romance, I would say) and I'd mostly heard of it in that context. Up to this point, as I recall, Spock's responses to Kirk's interest in women have seemed generally tolerant, even if (as in "Shore Leave") the appeal is lost on him, rather than usually resentful on a personal level. That changes in this episode, where Kirk isn't just attracted but genuinely falls hard for a pacifist who dreams of space travel.
For the first time that I noticed, Spock seems persistently and intensely jealous of this relationship (to the viewer, if not the other characters). Kirk/Edith does feel a lot more real and sweet than is typical for Kirk (who is usually seducing his way out of trouble and not pursuing a real relationship), and more of a threat to Spock's primacy in Kirk's emotional landscape. Since Kirk and Spock are at first stranded together without McCoy or other crew members around, there's also just a lot of attention to their dynamic with each other as distinct from the interconnections of all the senior crew. Kirk going on a gentle date with Edith, then coming home to a tense Spock, is kind of the vibe of the whole episode, and it makes it all the more powerful that Spock comes to view Edith and Kirk with compassion by the end. McCoy exclaims, "Do you know what you just did?" when Kirk and Spock prevent him from saving Edith, and it's Spock who gently replies, "He knows, doctor. He knows."
I like Edith a lot, too—she's one of the most distinctive and intriguing of the single-episode guest star love interests or quasi-LIs (of which there are many). Collins is predictably great in a role that could have been a lot more dubious than it ended up being. (And no, Edith isn't a Nazi sympathizer, as is sometimes claimed; she's a hardline pacifist who, in the alternate timeline, is so extremely effective as an activist that her pacifism indirectly leads to a Nazi victory, because her sentiments are entirely in line with the Federation's, but she happens to live in the wrong time for them.)
The episode also has some of my favorite small moments for both Kirk and Spock. They have a lot throughout the series—the mixture of obvious fondness and poking fun at each other in very different ways (sometimes with very little personal space, lol) is generally adorable. One of these instances is quite early in this episode, when Spock is like "I can't do this technical thing you want me to do, I just don't have the equipment in this era of history and it can't be done" (not his wording). Kirk understands him well enough to encourage him via some truly funny manipulation: "Yes, well, it would pose an extremely complex problem in logic, Mr. Spock. Excuse me, I sometimes expect too much of you." Shatner's and Nimoy's performances of it are a blast: Shatner's Kirk comes across as not only truly getting Spock but affectionate and charming about it, and Nimoy's Spock immediately being intrigued and affronted at the very idea is a delight.
The episode notably includes an incredible description of Spock's role in Kirk's life from Edith herself. She's a highly perceptive woman in general (almost but not quite ludicrously so, at times), and while she's alone with Kirk and Spock, she tells them that she's sure they don't belong here. Spock replies, "Interesting. Where would you estimate we belong, Miss Keeler?" And Edith just looks at him and says, "You? At his side, as if you've always been there and always will."
Thanks, Edith! But yeah, the episode is one of the most beloved of all TOS, though it had a wildly troubled production history (partly care of Harlan Ellison, partly care of just about everyone). One fascinating change is that Ellison's version had Kirk try to help McCoy save Edith, only for Spock to physically hold him back, which is ... damn. I can see why others on the team found that profoundly OOC for Kirk (it is), but it's an interesting idea nevertheless.
Anyway, another development in my own reactions came from this episode as well. Earlier on, even once I was like, "okay, this is definitely THE ship of TOS," I still had a lot of uncertainty about how I saw the finer details, and wasn't exactly passionate (there's a reason I was pretty quiet about it until recently!). It was more the kind of ship that settles as an immovable foundation into your sense of the characters, without necessarily attracting the fannish energy and drive that gets a ship buzzing in your brain. It's an unfortunate comparison, but Anidala is like this for me: it's not that I overwhelmingly love it as written, but it feels like an immutable law of nature to me and I absolutely cannot see Anakin with anyone else. I was originally considering a headcanon of "they are secretly in a relationship behind the scenes some way into S1, and that relationship is obviously open. Spock is also free to sleep with/seduce other people, but it's more repugnant for him to do personally, though he's okay with Kirk doing it" vs slow burn UST ft. reciprocal unspoken pining. Either seemed possible!
But Spock's intense shame over his feelings for Kirk as one of his most fundamental emotions in "The Naked Time" (whereas other people's dropping of inhibitions resulted in ... like, drunken singing) combined with his thinly veiled jealousy here gave me much more of a sense of repression and longing for something he feels he'll never have and shouldn't even want. And that's part of what makes it hit so hard tbh. It feels deeply similar to classic internalized homophobia gay angst—including the necessary iron composure that leaves this only visible to others as intense, unwavering devotion and service to a close, same-gender friend who values their friendship, but does not recognize the full depth of their gay friend's feelings.Not that I know about this or anything.
So by this point, I got to feeling like "secret, if open, relationship hidden for Starfleet protocol reasons" was less probable from what I'd seen thus far and "desperate pining and UST with no hope of return that each handles in wildly different ways" was more likely. In this ... headcanon iteration, I guess, I feel like Spock is trying to keep this to himself for both friendship and cultural reasons, and is conscientiously burying his envy of Kirk's partners when he feels it, even though it sometimes breaks through despite his best efforts. Meanwhile, Kirk tries to be satisfied with Spock's inflexible loyalty and faithful friendship since at least he's the central figure in Spock's unfamiliar emotional world, and I'm guessing he doesn't know if Spock is even capable of romantic or sexual love without being mindfucked into it, but he’s a lot more obvious about feeling threatened or insecure wrt Spock when he is.
Anyway, I'm definitely both in the "AHHHH MY SHIP THIS IS THE GREATEST, LOOK AT THEIR FACES" phase of shipping, but also "mkay, I'm going to go lie down and think about my life."
(And I'm writing a femslash AU, obviously.)
I think partly it's because sometimes I was watching with people who strain to ignore all hints of homoerotic subtext between anyone when it's not explicitly spelled out, and I was annoyed at the refusal to even consider any other possibility than The Holy Bond of Totally Platonic Heterosexual Dude Friendship despite the truly copious amount of material in this case. But even apart from that, I went from being a bit surprised the foundational slash fandom juggernaut wasn't "more or less typical bromance filtered through fandom goggles" but actually the real super homoerotic deal to "losing my mind about this" due to some particular, uh, incidents in TOS. The final straw for me was actually the season 3 episode "Requiem for Methuselah" (in which Kirk has a decidedly mediocre het romance Spock visibly dislikes, leading to a final scene in which McCoy claims Spock can't understand love triangles or the victories or agonies of love that Kirk has experienced, and without so much as a scene break Spock just waits for McCoy to leave and then wipes his rival from Kirk's memory. unhinged gay shit is what I needed to truly succumb, I guess!). But there were also three major S1 episodes that heavily contributed to my eventual "AHHHHHH MY SHIPPP" downfall. These weren't the only wildly shippy moments in the season (hahahahahaha), just the ones that were the emotional equivalent of being punched in the stomach:
1) "The Naked Time": I love this episode for many reasons, not only K/S ones (in fact, more for Spock feelings in general). However. This is the episode where everyone gets space drunk and loses all their inhibitions, so they just start doing whatever their repressed instincts and fantasies and emotions drive them towards (the fantastic "I'll rescue you, fair maiden!" -> "Sorry, neither" Sulu-Uhura scene happens in that context). Most people are just kind of silly. However, there's a point where Nurse Chapel passionately declares her feelings for Spock, and he gently rejects her but is deeply upset about it. The next time we see inhibition-free Spock, he's jumped from feeling terrible about Chapel to feeling terrible about his mother's emotional isolation on Vulcan, and his own participation in it. Kirk tries to shake him out of it, and an increasingly anxious Spock confesses, "Jim, when I feel friendship for you, I'm ashamed." Kirk keeps trying to shake him back to his senses and he just says in agony, "Understand, Jim. I've spent a whole lifetime learning to hide my feelings..."
I will say that normally, I am not one of the lesbians who finds much catharsis in m/m or mediates my own feelings about my own marginalized sexuality through it (my main exception to this was Faramir/Aragorn as a teenager). But Spock's "in vino veritas" being not daring escapades or wish-fulfillment fantasies, but misery and shame over both his feelings and his detachment (in the fourth-aired episode of the nearly 80 episodes of the series), and also shame over his lifelong attempts to conceal what, and how much, he truly feels just hit so hard. The fact that we later discover that his cultural norms led to him getting railroaded into a het marriage as a literal child and that he clearly loathes the necessity of sex with his wife only intensifies the sense of déja vu I started getting. Who knew that watching subtextual pining from a science-fiction show aired in 1966 could tear off the scabs on my "lesbian raised Mormon" damage? Not me until this episode!
[ETA: I know some of you are SNW fans, so note that I'm pretty harsh about it under the cut.]
(ngl there were times during the TOS watch where afterwards, I just had to lie down and contemplate my own experiences of repression and homophobia and gradually realized, "oh, so I am still really fucked up about that." Thanks, Spock!)
Also: I went in assuming that both Kirk and Spock would have bi energy throughout the show based on hearing them both casually described as canon bi or implicitly bi, but despite a few rare but obligatory female love interests for Spock, I started to feel very strongly that Spock could only be gay or grey-ace/gay. The obligatory het subplots are never truly consensual on his side and this is generally explicit, with Leila remarking that "There is no choice" about Spock joining her because she's going to sex pollen him, or his obvious visceral revulsion at pon farr while he's still able to think clearly. Or there's the overriding ancestral consciousness of 5000 years earlier that influences him towards things he normally doesn't even slightly want, like enjoying the taste of meat (he's a vegetarian repulsed by meat when he's fully himself, it turns out) and having a het romance with a woman he's barely met who is lying to him. The only obligatory Spock romance partner I found remotely appealing was a very cool character who was, unfortunately, being used by Spock-as-honeypot for Kirk's and Starfleet's benefit. So again, it doesn't seem like he has any realistic choice in the matter; the actors have great chemistry, but Spock's feelings about being used and using her this way are profoundly ambiguous, and there's no indication that he would have pursued her otherwise.
I do really like TOS T'Pring, I will say, but don't count her as an obligatory romance for obvious reasons—the episode is clear that neither of them desires the other under normal conditions.
Kirk has powerful bi vibes, but there are so many occasions when Spock is ??????????? about the appeal of hot women to other men that I gradually became more and more viscerally repelled by the idea that TOS Spock is into women at all, much less that he's "canon bi" or whatever the fuck. He ends up reading as so intensely "repressed gay" to me, so much of the time, that my kneejerk feeling about the obligatory Spock dub-con het per season is just /eyeroll (not helped by later ST generally being pretty slow to the game and mediocre about gay representation in general, and refusing to do anything slightly queer with Spock despite the extreme and very, very famous homoeroticism surrounding the original character). And all this only makes this drunken confession to Kirk about his lifetime of repressing his emotions and shame over his feelings for Kirk himself hit all the harder.
Also, "The Naked Time" also has Kirk explicitly say that it would be fine for Spock to have a romantic relationship with a lower-ranking crew member like Janice Rand, but not Kirk as captain, so Spock's rejection of Chapel doesn't even have that justification. It seems to me that Chapel mostly reminds uninhibited!Spock of his mother, but she certainly never gets what she wants from him. Later, early in the throes of pon farr in "Amok Time," he is absolutely livid that she's continuing to make overtures to him at such a time when he's "a man who is not hers" (his angry description of himself with regard to her). It's really only in "Plato's Stepchildren" that she seems to fully understand that what she's wanted from him requires some form of violation (as occurs in that episode; she's rightly horrified).
(For the record, one of my major grievances wrt SNW is the choice to interpret TOS Spock's revulsion from T'Pring and Chapel as "well actually deep down he must have been attracted at some point, right?" And after re-watching TOS all the way through, I was way more uncomfortable with this. For one, TOS Chapel has very obviously never gotten what she wanted from him ever. In "Plato's Stepchildren," when they're forced into an embrace, she confesses that it's what she always longed for from him, but not like this, and (as above) this is really the first time she seems to truly accept his rejection as final. For another, T'Pring and Spock's relationship is driven entirely by a forced betrothal at age 7 that neither of them has the least enthusiasm about when not in pon farr—I actually love that TOS T'Pring is aggressively disinterested in Spock as a sexual/romantic partner and truly feels nothing more than icy respect for him, and Spock is explicit that his interest in her is entirely confined to pon farr. In "Amok Time," I wasn't sure they'd ever even met as adults. There is so much "this dude couldn't possibly really mean no when he says no" fuckery that is actually framed as distasteful in TOS—one of the better and most chilling moments in the very flawed series finale is Janice Lester's vicious response to Kirk's claim that she overpowered him and took control of his body. She mocks him because, specifically, he's a man and obviously a woman could never do such a thing to him (the subtext is. uh. unsubtle, especially as he's already been sexually assaulted by women multiple times that season). And you'd think that over 50 years later, ST could engage with this very persistent thread in a more nuanced way than assuming Spock a) must desire women and b) must desire these specific women he rebuffs in TOS, given how rough and obvious and reflective of the production's many gender issues this thread tends to be in TOS. But no, the transgressions of boundaries and autonomy in TOS as a major thematic concern seems largely ignored in every modern take on both Kirk and Spock, who were the main vehicles for TOS's considerations of autonomy and especially sexual autonomy. Ugh. It reminds me of the transmutation of the Gorn as victims of colonization in TOS into... whatever the fuck.)
2) "Shore Leave": This is a silly and rather slight episode that contains the notorious opening scene in which Kirk mistakenly thinks he's getting a backrub from Spock ("That's it. A little higher, please. Push. Push hard. Dig it in there, Mr.—") rather than the pretty female yeoman who is actually doing it. When he sees Spock step forward and realizes someone else is massaging his back, Kirk hastily says, "Thank you, yeoman, that's sufficient." This is midway through the season, btw, not a late episode. Why Kirk would expect a massage on the bridge from Spock goes entirely unexplained.
Anyway, at the end of "Shore Leave," the male crew members are obviously planning to sleep with some hot lady androids—expect Spock. He immediately detaches the sexy android clinging to his arm and coolly remarks, "With all due respect to the young lady, I've already had as much shore leave as I care for" and retreats to the Enterprise while everyone else obviously stays and is strongly implied to have a bunch of hetero sex on the planet before returning to the ship. For some, they spend shore leave with the chorus girl sexbots; for others, they romance each other; for Kirk, the android is a replica of his girlfriend as a teenager. When everyone returns the next morning, Spock seems both rather baffled and a bit disapproving of the whole thing, but by and large indifferent.
(This episode was originally conceived and drafted into a teleplay by Theodore Sturgeon of "Amok Time" fame, btw, though it was subject to a lot of executive meddling and is much less substantial as a story.)
3) "The City on the Edge of Forever": this is the very famous penultimate episode of S1, and is a lot shippier on the K/S front than I expected, given that it centers on a grand het romance for Kirk (indeed the het romance, I would say) and I'd mostly heard of it in that context. Up to this point, as I recall, Spock's responses to Kirk's interest in women have seemed generally tolerant, even if (as in "Shore Leave") the appeal is lost on him, rather than usually resentful on a personal level. That changes in this episode, where Kirk isn't just attracted but genuinely falls hard for a pacifist who dreams of space travel.
For the first time that I noticed, Spock seems persistently and intensely jealous of this relationship (to the viewer, if not the other characters). Kirk/Edith does feel a lot more real and sweet than is typical for Kirk (who is usually seducing his way out of trouble and not pursuing a real relationship), and more of a threat to Spock's primacy in Kirk's emotional landscape. Since Kirk and Spock are at first stranded together without McCoy or other crew members around, there's also just a lot of attention to their dynamic with each other as distinct from the interconnections of all the senior crew. Kirk going on a gentle date with Edith, then coming home to a tense Spock, is kind of the vibe of the whole episode, and it makes it all the more powerful that Spock comes to view Edith and Kirk with compassion by the end. McCoy exclaims, "Do you know what you just did?" when Kirk and Spock prevent him from saving Edith, and it's Spock who gently replies, "He knows, doctor. He knows."
I like Edith a lot, too—she's one of the most distinctive and intriguing of the single-episode guest star love interests or quasi-LIs (of which there are many). Collins is predictably great in a role that could have been a lot more dubious than it ended up being. (And no, Edith isn't a Nazi sympathizer, as is sometimes claimed; she's a hardline pacifist who, in the alternate timeline, is so extremely effective as an activist that her pacifism indirectly leads to a Nazi victory, because her sentiments are entirely in line with the Federation's, but she happens to live in the wrong time for them.)
The episode also has some of my favorite small moments for both Kirk and Spock. They have a lot throughout the series—the mixture of obvious fondness and poking fun at each other in very different ways (sometimes with very little personal space, lol) is generally adorable. One of these instances is quite early in this episode, when Spock is like "I can't do this technical thing you want me to do, I just don't have the equipment in this era of history and it can't be done" (not his wording). Kirk understands him well enough to encourage him via some truly funny manipulation: "Yes, well, it would pose an extremely complex problem in logic, Mr. Spock. Excuse me, I sometimes expect too much of you." Shatner's and Nimoy's performances of it are a blast: Shatner's Kirk comes across as not only truly getting Spock but affectionate and charming about it, and Nimoy's Spock immediately being intrigued and affronted at the very idea is a delight.
The episode notably includes an incredible description of Spock's role in Kirk's life from Edith herself. She's a highly perceptive woman in general (almost but not quite ludicrously so, at times), and while she's alone with Kirk and Spock, she tells them that she's sure they don't belong here. Spock replies, "Interesting. Where would you estimate we belong, Miss Keeler?" And Edith just looks at him and says, "You? At his side, as if you've always been there and always will."
Thanks, Edith! But yeah, the episode is one of the most beloved of all TOS, though it had a wildly troubled production history (partly care of Harlan Ellison, partly care of just about everyone). One fascinating change is that Ellison's version had Kirk try to help McCoy save Edith, only for Spock to physically hold him back, which is ... damn. I can see why others on the team found that profoundly OOC for Kirk (it is), but it's an interesting idea nevertheless.
Anyway, another development in my own reactions came from this episode as well. Earlier on, even once I was like, "okay, this is definitely THE ship of TOS," I still had a lot of uncertainty about how I saw the finer details, and wasn't exactly passionate (there's a reason I was pretty quiet about it until recently!). It was more the kind of ship that settles as an immovable foundation into your sense of the characters, without necessarily attracting the fannish energy and drive that gets a ship buzzing in your brain. It's an unfortunate comparison, but Anidala is like this for me: it's not that I overwhelmingly love it as written, but it feels like an immutable law of nature to me and I absolutely cannot see Anakin with anyone else. I was originally considering a headcanon of "they are secretly in a relationship behind the scenes some way into S1, and that relationship is obviously open. Spock is also free to sleep with/seduce other people, but it's more repugnant for him to do personally, though he's okay with Kirk doing it" vs slow burn UST ft. reciprocal unspoken pining. Either seemed possible!
But Spock's intense shame over his feelings for Kirk as one of his most fundamental emotions in "The Naked Time" (whereas other people's dropping of inhibitions resulted in ... like, drunken singing) combined with his thinly veiled jealousy here gave me much more of a sense of repression and longing for something he feels he'll never have and shouldn't even want. And that's part of what makes it hit so hard tbh. It feels deeply similar to classic internalized homophobia gay angst—including the necessary iron composure that leaves this only visible to others as intense, unwavering devotion and service to a close, same-gender friend who values their friendship, but does not recognize the full depth of their gay friend's feelings.
So by this point, I got to feeling like "secret, if open, relationship hidden for Starfleet protocol reasons" was less probable from what I'd seen thus far and "desperate pining and UST with no hope of return that each handles in wildly different ways" was more likely. In this ... headcanon iteration, I guess, I feel like Spock is trying to keep this to himself for both friendship and cultural reasons, and is conscientiously burying his envy of Kirk's partners when he feels it, even though it sometimes breaks through despite his best efforts. Meanwhile, Kirk tries to be satisfied with Spock's inflexible loyalty and faithful friendship since at least he's the central figure in Spock's unfamiliar emotional world, and I'm guessing he doesn't know if Spock is even capable of romantic or sexual love without being mindfucked into it, but he’s a lot more obvious about feeling threatened or insecure wrt Spock when he is.
Anyway, I'm definitely both in the "AHHHH MY SHIP THIS IS THE GREATEST, LOOK AT THEIR FACES" phase of shipping, but also "mkay, I'm going to go lie down and think about my life."
(And I'm writing a femslash AU, obviously.)
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on 2025-03-04 01:40 am (UTC)(I guess I can forgive Andor since evading it was the reason I offered to watch all of ST, haha.)
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on 2025-03-07 01:17 pm (UTC)Nah it's great, I have always had a soft spot for the pairing but what TOS I watched was scattered and years ago so it's fun seeing you go through it in depth, there's lots of stuff I either forgot or didn't notice.
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on 2025-03-10 04:31 pm (UTC)