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Jan. 5th, 2026 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineJ and I recently re-watched "The Return of the Archons" (after concluding it was the peak Christmas episode for various silly reasons), and there's this small and wonderfully in-character scene when the away party has found sanctuary with a local ally during the Red Hour. They're able to hide in this private room with some bunks, allowing for all but one of the entire party to sleep in the meanwhile. We don't actually see the decision get made. We just cut to the crew members all in the beds and Kirk having taken off his coat to wrap himself in a blanket, protectively keeping watch over his resting crew members. We just get a few quiet moments of this interspliced with the insanity of the Red Hour outside, which he observes with quiet disgust between pacing quietly around the little room, adding some folded clothes to cushion McCoy's head, making sure the young ones are sleeping in their bunks, and checking on Spock (who is lying on his back and either meditating or simply awake the whole time, not needing the sleep but—given how easy the nonverbal communication between them is in this episode—likely aware that trying to convince Kirk to take the bed is not, let's say, a logical use of his time).
It's very cute, honestly, and the episode is so beautifully made that it has an incredibly warm, pleasant quality on a purely visual level. It's the kind of thing that I think gets the kind of kneejerk "oh he's such a father to his men" despite TOS Kirk's very consistent aversion from anything smacking of fatherhood (very obviously for gender role reasons, not reactionary nuclear-family-meets-gender-essentialism retcons from 20 years later reasons). But I definitely ended up thinking "I can't believe I've seen multiple posts straining to frame Janeway as some kind of maternal figure as captain when she doesn't have a parental bone in her body—she's not Team Mom she's Team Captain—and meanwhile Kirk has 100x more fretful mama energy as captain to the point that his long-suffering maternal authority becomes the actual premise of an actual later episode."
In conclusion:
captain, are we there yettttttttt
It's very cute, honestly, and the episode is so beautifully made that it has an incredibly warm, pleasant quality on a purely visual level. It's the kind of thing that I think gets the kind of kneejerk "oh he's such a father to his men" despite TOS Kirk's very consistent aversion from anything smacking of fatherhood (very obviously for gender role reasons, not reactionary nuclear-family-meets-gender-essentialism retcons from 20 years later reasons). But I definitely ended up thinking "I can't believe I've seen multiple posts straining to frame Janeway as some kind of maternal figure as captain when she doesn't have a parental bone in her body—she's not Team Mom she's Team Captain—and meanwhile Kirk has 100x more fretful mama energy as captain to the point that his long-suffering maternal authority becomes the actual premise of an actual later episode."
In conclusion:
captain, are we there yettttttttt