Anghraine

Speaking of my coughing baby vs hydrogen bomb perspective on the various obligatory het romance plots in TOS, I’ve been really struck by how many seem dub-con at best. Maybe that’s partly because I’m finishing the third season and it’s especially pronounced there, and it’s also been particularly glaring with Spock in particular (the Kirk dubcon plots tend to be more viscerally horrifying, but he at least gets to consent sometimes).

Spock has a small fraction of the number of romantic (or "romantic") plots that Kirk does, and while I might be misremembering something in the many episodes I’ve seen—

1— “This Side of Paradise”

The premise of this "romance" is that Leila, the softly-lit blonde girl of the episode, was in love with Spock six years earlier, but his issues meant their love could never be, and he rejected any possibility of romance with her. It's not at all clear what past!Spock actually felt about the situation (Leila says "you couldn't give anything of yourself" and he wouldn't even put his arms around her), both because of his general manner when not under the effect of the sex/docility/spore cult pollen, and because her feelings are so much the main driver of both the backstory and the present events.

Early on, lead spore cultist Elias asks Leila if she’d like Spock to join their creepy community. She replies, “There is no choice, Elias. He will stay.” It doesn’t seem like she actually cares about what he’d choose in his right mind, just about using the sex pollen to railroad him into the life she wants with him. This doesn’t mean she was always like that (she herself has been exposed for a long time, though she doesn't change much when the spores lose their hold on her), but her disinterest in his consent to life with her makes this ostensibly sweet romance 100x creepier. Not helped by the sex pollen itself and her avoidance of explanations when Spock is still in his right mind and could decide for himself.

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Speaking of my TOS watch, I’ve noticed that the writing for Kirk in particular has gotten sharply worse overall in S3 (also for other characters, but less obtrusively), yet when it’s good, it’s really satisfying.

I loved both Kirk and Spock in “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky,” for instance. It’s a good episode in general (maybe one of the least awful about women in TOS) and a really nice McCoy episode as well, but I enjoy how Kirk and Spock are kind of confused about McCoy’s marriage but ultimately willing to support their friend. And it ends not only with McCoy’s cool wife surviving and becoming even more of a leader of her people than she was before (and this framed as unambiguously Good), but iirc Kirk and Spock prepared to make the occasional detour to her colony so McCoy can visit her without leaving his career behind. And while Spock was something of a flanderized dick in “That Which Survives” (if in a way that can easily be read in K/S terms), it’s got some very solid Kirk characterization:

MCCOY: Could it be the Enterprise hit the planet?
SULU: Once in Siberia, there was a meteor so great that it flattened whole forests and was felt as far away as—
KIRK: Mr. Sulu, if I'd wanted a Russian history lesson, I'd have brought along Mr. Chekov. This is a matter of survival, gentlemen. Without the Enterprise, we need food, and we need water, and we need them fast. I want a detailed analysis made of this planet, and I want it now.

Kirk [to Sulu]: Your report covers all vegetation?
Sulu: Yes, captain. All vegetation is inedible. Poison to us.
McCoy [to Kirk]: If the Enterprise has been destroyed, you know how long we can survive??
Kirk [grimly]: Yes. [pause] I don’t see any water, but there must be some to grow the vegetation. A source of water would stretch our survival. Did you see any evidence of rainfall?

Shatner doesn’t overplay the moment IMO, but there’s a quiet weight to Kirk being The Starvation Expert of the team given uhhhhh his personal history—and also the fact that this episode is one of few that (in a completely different scene) explicitly acknowledges other TOS episodes.

Tagged: #this single moment just feels so weighty and the way everyone defers to kirk not only as captain but as knowledgeable about survival #and how it's not overblown the way so much of s3 kirk is...whew. nice to see some good character choices here and there too #it /is/ wild to me that the jj abrams star trek gives kirk the most generic Troubled Youth backstory possible #when his canon backstory is infinitely worse. canon kirk survived starvation and the massacre of 4000 people in his colony at age 13 #and afterwards became a bullied nerd (established on multiple occasions!) until he found his true calling of commanding a starship #i get wanting to split into a different timeline etc etc but damn chris pine could have done something great with a more nuanced kirk #OH also. kirk seems to get more obligatory ''''romance'''' scenes than ever before in this season #but these relationships also seem much more often dubiously consensual at best on his side also #he's either a prisoner or an amnesiac or enthralled by a drug or whatever in them until literally episode 21. #in which he falls for rayna the robot #the relationship is terribly written but at least they're both allegedly choosing it (and even there flint is dangling kirk in front of her #like a sexy lure or something. batshit concept but they're definitely being manipulated - and still i think it's the most purely consensual #relationship that kirk has in the whole season thus far) #ngl him stranding deela to die without sharing the antidote and flying away was probably the most cathartic kirk dubcon plot conclusion #i'm predictably very tempted by femslash kirk/spock sometimes but it does feel that this would be more expected for f!kirk #anyway. weird trend in a weird season but it's nice when his backstory is remembered at all

[ETA from 4/6/2025 re: "tempted by femslash kirk/spock sometimes but" hahahahahahahahaha]

If 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.]

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