Tumblr crosspost (29 January 2025)
Apr. 28th, 2025 02:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineI finished TOS today :’(
From J’s loathing of the series finale, I thought it would be worse tbh. It is not good, to be clear! Obviously the whole conceit of the episode is intensely misogynistic (and transphobic, though I think that was less intentional). And Janice is so completely identified with Gender Rage while also being so mediocre as a person that her characterization is somewhere between insulting and comically stupid, but with a bit of generosity there are some things I still find intriguing about it.
From J’s loathing of the series finale, I thought it would be worse tbh. It is not good, to be clear! Obviously the whole conceit of the episode is intensely misogynistic (and transphobic, though I think that was less intentional). And Janice is so completely identified with Gender Rage while also being so mediocre as a person that her characterization is somewhere between insulting and comically stupid, but with a bit of generosity there are some things I still find intriguing about it.
For instance, Janice’s rage over Kirk leaving her for his career only for Kirk to be like “actually I left you because your internalized misogyny was incredibly off-putting” is phrased in a deeply cringy 60s way. Yet, J and I have both found this to be basically true IRL and have known women like that. Self-hating misogynistic women do make for terrible romantic partners, and Janice is at Lady Macbeth levels of it. And there are vague but pretty suggestive references to her concentrating her general rage at Society onto Kirk as her partner within their romantic relationship until he left; she "punished" him in the year they were together, and her fury over him getting out has led her to obsessively follow his life since then and finally attempt to seize control over it again. He's on decent or friendly terms with his other exes; the situation with Janice is different and in the timeline of the episode, she's basically an abuse checklist given human form.
I also found it interesting that Janice (in the body of Kirk) is so sneeringly mocking of the idea that a woman could possibly have physically gotten the better of a man in a way I have absolutely heard from abusive people before, when the reality is that a) she knows perfectly well (as does the audience) that this is exactly what happened, and b) this has happened to Kirk numerous times before (I think on at least four unrelated occasions in this season alone).
On just an acting/directing level, I guiltily enjoyed Shatner’s performance of Janice apart from a few specific scenery chewing moments (that are terribly written as well; in fact, one of the revelations of this watch is that so much of TOS's worst dialogue is given to Shatner to carry, especially in S3, even accounting for how much of the overall dialogue he has, and his worst acting tends to be closely tied to bad writing—he delivers some fantastic performances with more understated, elegantly written scenes but is terrible at elevating awkward unsubtle writing). At first, there’s this blend of his usual Kirk demeanor with hints that something isn’t right, and then the hints get stronger and stronger until he’s such an obvious monster that all the crew except security are refusing to follow blatantly unethical orders and actively trying to use the pre-existing Starfleet protocols that allow senior staff to remove a superior officer, which I genuinely like as a setting detail. It’s a surprisingly good episode for Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov because of this, a bunch of background female characters are visibly weirded out, and Spock yet again earns his uncontested crown in Kirk's world, where McCoy is noticeably more reluctant to act.
But yeah, the earlier phases of Shatner-as-Janice-imitating-Shatner-as-Kirk have this kind of almost-but-not-quite-right uncanny quality that I thought was actually pretty well-done. It’s rather better than the guest actor’s performance of Kirk-stuck-in-Janice’s-body at first, until she really gets going and absolutely captures Kirk in the rest of her performance.
So, like, there’s this wild moment when Janice is sweet-talking the awful doctor into helping her commit murder, and it’s clearly coded as, you know, the evil tempting ways of women as Janice leans in both kind of seductively and kind of menacingly. But Janice is performed by Shatner throughout the entire scene, so it’s … uhh. Well. A lot.
Meanwhile, Kirk-trapped-in-a-lady-body is trying to prove that he is Kirk to Spock, who is basically willing to entertain the possibility, but not at all certain. As we watched the scene, I half-jokingly told J, “I feel like a mind meld could solve a lot of problems here” and I'd no sooner said it than Kirk did suggest a mind meld with Spock via the incredible line, “You are closer to the captain than anyone in the universe. You know his thoughts” which UHHHHHH and then Spock does mind-meld with Kirk, and is immediately convinced that this really is Kirk. But! Kirk is played by a woman the whole time, so this incredibly shippy scene has ... plausible deniability? Visually, it looks like a het scene (especially with Spock holding Kirk's hand for over two minutes of screen time as they try to escape together), but in-story, of course, it's much gayer (while the Janice/doctor scene is the actual het one).
I’m honestly reminded a little of my Shakespeare class’s discussion of how Twelfth Night would have registered to audiences at the time, when Viola would be played by a boy pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man. It’s complicated. Obviously this weak episode is no Twelfth Night, but … well. Lot of gender happening here.
I do also appreciate that the episode takes a very strong “just following orders is not an excuse” position, as does virtually everyone on the Enterprise except the security people (security always seems to be the weakest link, honestly). If the usual female cast members were more present, I think the gender stuff wouldn’t feel as bad, tbh—I don’t recall seeing Uhura at all (I think Nichelle Nichols had a scheduling conflict and she wasn't deliberately excluded, but still), Chapel is hesitant but goes along with basically everything, the random woman on the bridge is just kind of scared where the men simply refuse to comply…
The conclusion is also just ambiguous enough to read the way I’m choosing to read it, which I feel is absolutely not what was intended, lol.
For context, a lot of Actual Janice’s unhinged rage is driven by a mixture of what seems to be a very real glass ceiling in Starfleet + a distinctly authoritarian approach to power. J and I have long joked about half the cast of Mass Effect whining about “red tape” and we started going “RED TAPE!!!” as Janice transparently fumed about operating within an organization in which authority figures are actually answerable to other people and regulations exist around institutional power. But she's also dragged down by all these A Woman Scorn’d tropes, with comparatively subtler indications that she's not just an ex but an abusive ex, and the terribly written Woman Scorn'd stuff is so loudly broadcasted and unsubtle and badly written that it overwhelms the more convincingly chilling aspects of her character. (This chilling quality is far more successfully done with Deela in "Wink of an Eye," though she's coded much more as a rapist than a domestic abuser/stalker.)
After Kirk and Janice are restored to their respective bodies and Janice is led away by the doctors, Kirk says, “I didn’t want to destroy her.”
Spock’s last line in the show is his reply: “I’m sure we all understand that, captain.”
Kirk responds, “Her life could have been as rich as any woman’s, if only…”
And that’s the end of the episode! And the show! And I was like, “as any woman’s, yeah, but she didn’t want to only have the opportunities available to women, which is entirely fair even if she individually sucks.” But since Kirk just trails off and wanders sadly away, there’s no clarification of what “if only” refers to. I would guess that the writers intended something like, “if only she’d been happy with her place in the universe as a woman” or whatever, but I’m choosing to live in a world where it’s more like ... this was a perfect storm of about five different factors, and not specifying any of them lets him wave vaguely at everything rather than attributing her actions to any single cause.
Regardless, I’m sad to leave TOS behind. For all its warts—the godawful handling of so many female characters comes from barely ten years before Princess Leia blasted her way into cultural consciousness; the writing and direction is wildly erratic in quality; the characterization sometimes wobbles to serve the plots; etc—I’ve really loved it. I’m very fond of so many of the characters, and feel like I know them despite the wobbling. I love how the show uses color in such a vivid way (even accounting for technology that affects this, like the lighting making green command uniforms look gold), I love the willingness to try different cinematographic approaches with angles, effects, lights, stages, whatever. I love the worldbuilding-as-we-go that coalesces into something more recognizable as Star Trek than we'd see again for a long time. I love the way it’s episodic enough to watch in any order, but the airing order builds on itself nevertheless (it feels very right for “Amok Time” to long precede “Journey to Babel,” for instance).
I even enjoy the glaring-to-a-modern-eye staginess. I’m so tired of glossy de-saturated sci-fi aesthetics that TOS being like “fuck it, let’s try X” whether it succeeds or not is just very welcome. I’ve loved checking out the strange, precisely tailored, wildly campy costumes, the hairstyles, the various little details that make it feel real in a larger (and brighter) than life way. RIP to TOS from the future: nobody’s doing it like you.
Tagged: #janice lester critical #(i mean. obviously. but still) #obviously i'm thinking of the level of seething rage janice feels towards jess kirk in the femslash au too #because i don't believe for a moment that she wouldn't loathe jessica at least as much
I also found it interesting that Janice (in the body of Kirk) is so sneeringly mocking of the idea that a woman could possibly have physically gotten the better of a man in a way I have absolutely heard from abusive people before, when the reality is that a) she knows perfectly well (as does the audience) that this is exactly what happened, and b) this has happened to Kirk numerous times before (I think on at least four unrelated occasions in this season alone).
On just an acting/directing level, I guiltily enjoyed Shatner’s performance of Janice apart from a few specific scenery chewing moments (that are terribly written as well; in fact, one of the revelations of this watch is that so much of TOS's worst dialogue is given to Shatner to carry, especially in S3, even accounting for how much of the overall dialogue he has, and his worst acting tends to be closely tied to bad writing—he delivers some fantastic performances with more understated, elegantly written scenes but is terrible at elevating awkward unsubtle writing). At first, there’s this blend of his usual Kirk demeanor with hints that something isn’t right, and then the hints get stronger and stronger until he’s such an obvious monster that all the crew except security are refusing to follow blatantly unethical orders and actively trying to use the pre-existing Starfleet protocols that allow senior staff to remove a superior officer, which I genuinely like as a setting detail. It’s a surprisingly good episode for Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov because of this, a bunch of background female characters are visibly weirded out, and Spock yet again earns his uncontested crown in Kirk's world, where McCoy is noticeably more reluctant to act.
But yeah, the earlier phases of Shatner-as-Janice-imitating-Shatner-as-Kirk have this kind of almost-but-not-quite-right uncanny quality that I thought was actually pretty well-done. It’s rather better than the guest actor’s performance of Kirk-stuck-in-Janice’s-body at first, until she really gets going and absolutely captures Kirk in the rest of her performance.
So, like, there’s this wild moment when Janice is sweet-talking the awful doctor into helping her commit murder, and it’s clearly coded as, you know, the evil tempting ways of women as Janice leans in both kind of seductively and kind of menacingly. But Janice is performed by Shatner throughout the entire scene, so it’s … uhh. Well. A lot.
Meanwhile, Kirk-trapped-in-a-lady-body is trying to prove that he is Kirk to Spock, who is basically willing to entertain the possibility, but not at all certain. As we watched the scene, I half-jokingly told J, “I feel like a mind meld could solve a lot of problems here” and I'd no sooner said it than Kirk did suggest a mind meld with Spock via the incredible line, “You are closer to the captain than anyone in the universe. You know his thoughts” which UHHHHHH and then Spock does mind-meld with Kirk, and is immediately convinced that this really is Kirk. But! Kirk is played by a woman the whole time, so this incredibly shippy scene has ... plausible deniability? Visually, it looks like a het scene (especially with Spock holding Kirk's hand for over two minutes of screen time as they try to escape together), but in-story, of course, it's much gayer (while the Janice/doctor scene is the actual het one).
I’m honestly reminded a little of my Shakespeare class’s discussion of how Twelfth Night would have registered to audiences at the time, when Viola would be played by a boy pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man. It’s complicated. Obviously this weak episode is no Twelfth Night, but … well. Lot of gender happening here.
I do also appreciate that the episode takes a very strong “just following orders is not an excuse” position, as does virtually everyone on the Enterprise except the security people (security always seems to be the weakest link, honestly). If the usual female cast members were more present, I think the gender stuff wouldn’t feel as bad, tbh—I don’t recall seeing Uhura at all (I think Nichelle Nichols had a scheduling conflict and she wasn't deliberately excluded, but still), Chapel is hesitant but goes along with basically everything, the random woman on the bridge is just kind of scared where the men simply refuse to comply…
The conclusion is also just ambiguous enough to read the way I’m choosing to read it, which I feel is absolutely not what was intended, lol.
For context, a lot of Actual Janice’s unhinged rage is driven by a mixture of what seems to be a very real glass ceiling in Starfleet + a distinctly authoritarian approach to power. J and I have long joked about half the cast of Mass Effect whining about “red tape” and we started going “RED TAPE!!!” as Janice transparently fumed about operating within an organization in which authority figures are actually answerable to other people and regulations exist around institutional power. But she's also dragged down by all these A Woman Scorn’d tropes, with comparatively subtler indications that she's not just an ex but an abusive ex, and the terribly written Woman Scorn'd stuff is so loudly broadcasted and unsubtle and badly written that it overwhelms the more convincingly chilling aspects of her character. (This chilling quality is far more successfully done with Deela in "Wink of an Eye," though she's coded much more as a rapist than a domestic abuser/stalker.)
After Kirk and Janice are restored to their respective bodies and Janice is led away by the doctors, Kirk says, “I didn’t want to destroy her.”
Spock’s last line in the show is his reply: “I’m sure we all understand that, captain.”
Kirk responds, “Her life could have been as rich as any woman’s, if only…”
And that’s the end of the episode! And the show! And I was like, “as any woman’s, yeah, but she didn’t want to only have the opportunities available to women, which is entirely fair even if she individually sucks.” But since Kirk just trails off and wanders sadly away, there’s no clarification of what “if only” refers to. I would guess that the writers intended something like, “if only she’d been happy with her place in the universe as a woman” or whatever, but I’m choosing to live in a world where it’s more like ... this was a perfect storm of about five different factors, and not specifying any of them lets him wave vaguely at everything rather than attributing her actions to any single cause.
Regardless, I’m sad to leave TOS behind. For all its warts—the godawful handling of so many female characters comes from barely ten years before Princess Leia blasted her way into cultural consciousness; the writing and direction is wildly erratic in quality; the characterization sometimes wobbles to serve the plots; etc—I’ve really loved it. I’m very fond of so many of the characters, and feel like I know them despite the wobbling. I love how the show uses color in such a vivid way (even accounting for technology that affects this, like the lighting making green command uniforms look gold), I love the willingness to try different cinematographic approaches with angles, effects, lights, stages, whatever. I love the worldbuilding-as-we-go that coalesces into something more recognizable as Star Trek than we'd see again for a long time. I love the way it’s episodic enough to watch in any order, but the airing order builds on itself nevertheless (it feels very right for “Amok Time” to long precede “Journey to Babel,” for instance).
I even enjoy the glaring-to-a-modern-eye staginess. I’m so tired of glossy de-saturated sci-fi aesthetics that TOS being like “fuck it, let’s try X” whether it succeeds or not is just very welcome. I’ve loved checking out the strange, precisely tailored, wildly campy costumes, the hairstyles, the various little details that make it feel real in a larger (and brighter) than life way. RIP to TOS from the future: nobody’s doing it like you.
Tagged: #janice lester critical #(i mean. obviously. but still) #obviously i'm thinking of the level of seething rage janice feels towards jess kirk in the femslash au too #because i don't believe for a moment that she wouldn't loathe jessica at least as much
no subject
on 2025-04-29 02:38 am (UTC)no subject
on 2025-04-29 07:24 am (UTC)