kingstoken

1.28 ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ is a pretty intricate plot for this season, with a lot of threads still packed into the 50-minute format. My favorite things include:

+ Edith Wheeler and her dreams of starships; she’s just like us

+ Edith’s (probably very famous line) about Spock belonging next to Kirk, and Kirk belonging somewhere else. This season - the very first! - is going very hard on Spock and Kirk as a matched set.

+ All the respect for Kirk shutting down the male heckler at the food kitchen and saying he wanted to hear what Edith has to say <333

Interestingly, Spock, Kirk, and McCoy all are returned to their future as soon as Edith dies again - so the guy who took McCoy’s phaser and seemingly phased himself out of existence must ~always have done so~. One can’t help but wonder how he might have played a role in history if those three hadn’t gone back, either.

Also: It’s the second time travel episode and we’re still in the first season!

original tags: #pour one out for a real one

( You see the same things that I do. We speak the same language. )

I haven't talked about some of the racism in casting issues much yet, mostly because they seem very well acknowledged and then later addressed or corrected by later star trek. Khan is supposed to be an Indian man and is played by Ricardo Montalban, who does a good job in the role but is Mexican and well - reasonable people seem to recognize the problem with this.

But I was simply not prepared for the Klingons, oh my gosh. I knew there were casting issues but uh: This guy in 1x26 'Errand of Mercy' is in straight-up blackface D:

( cut for images )

Watching 1.24 ‘This Side of Paradise’ and seeing Spock get sprayed with flower spores and suddenly kiss a woman: Oh, it’s a metaphor for hetcomp.

anghraine replied to the Tumblr post with: Yes! She even says he won’t have a choice about it, which… blech. (Some people think Sudden Heterosexual Spore Cult Spock reveals his true self without inhibitions, and I’m like, no, Spock’s true self without inhibitions is crying about his mom, come on.
elperian replied: some of these people didn’t take ‘the naked time’ to heart and it shows! also, spock talking about his duty to the ship and to 'that man’…oof. I get why spock seems melancholy about how he had felt 'happy’ for the first time in his life, because the idea of like…just letting go of having to think through everything all the time and just relax could be *incredibly* freeing, but that’s not to say that it was his true self or who he wants to be. even the colony leader was melancholy about the time they lost not being able to do what they had hoped to do.
anghraine replied: Yup, a drugged spore haze that creates an artificial sense of belonging in the spore cult undoubtedly IS as close to happiness as he’s experienced, but that’s because his life sucks (which IS entirely consistent with “Spock without inhibitions is miserable and crying about continually hurting people who care about him, esp Amanda and Kirk” from “The Naked Time”) not because he secretly wants to be drugged and heterosexual. And yeahhhh tying “I am what I am”/“if there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them” to “that man on the bridge” is UHHHHH. Okay. thisisfine.jpeg (1/2) And yeah, strikingly unlike “The Naked Time,” pretty much everyone here reacts to the spore haze in the same blandly contented, “yay belonging” way regardless of their original personalities or hang-ups (it’s not a great Kirk episode IMO, though I find his seething resentment of Leila and “of course the one I’ve got to break out is Spock, this is going to be painful on multiple levels” very funny, but his realization that he’s up against the same “paradise” with literally everyone is correct!), and individuality is primarily revealed in how they react afterwards: some are /shrug, some like Elias are regretful, some like Spock are shaken, some are angry. (And of course, there’s Leila wanting to go back to the spores with Spock because she knows he’d never actually consent for real…) (2/2)
elperian replied: the purgatories line! being with kirk but not actually being able to be with kirk as his captain? there’s a lot to unpack there. and yes, good note on how everyone acts roughly the same when drugged, except for mccoy’s georgia accent getting ramped up to 200% for some reason. it is interesting that kirk didn’t really need spock to initiate the irritating signal that broke everyone else out - but in the event it didn’t work, he’d already made sure spock was free and by his side. INTERESTING. (1/2) oh! oh! and saying this is the “true” spock seems to overlook the way he just…refuses to give her his whole name. “you couldn’t pronounce it” is a polite way of saying no, but when he’s not spored-up, he doesn’t share himself with her. (2/2)

1x21 ‘The Return of the Archons’ introduces the prime directive only for Kirk to be like “doesn’t apply here, according to me”.

Also, shout-out to that one Starfleet officer who wanted justice for Tula and tried to get it for her :/

[May 18, 2025 Update: This episode is actually quite hard to look back upon, because of all the unbridled violence and the story treatment of Tula.]

anghraine replied to the Tumblr post: I love how little it matters in TOS, tbh! And especially here; almost every reference to it is actually to the “evil” Prime Directive programmed into Landru but disastrous because he can’t think critically about why it exists or how to implement it beyond a kind of rigid and literal enactment, which seems rather significant! Kirk and Spock’s redefinition of the Prime Directive as the true common good of people / destroying oppressors and the parallel to their understanding of the Starfleet Prime Directive seems to have been totally forgotten by later ST, unfortunately.
elperian replied: agreed about spock and especially kirk’s understanding of the Prime Directive, and the repeated usage of “Prime Directive” with respect to landru’s directive emphasizes the way that such a directive can be narrowly interpreted and used for ill instead of good. kirk even says “that [the Prime Directive] refers to a living, growing culture.” by some definitions, and some later versions of ST, they *shouldn’t* have interfered, because any version of culture is their own, but TOS seems to understand that the Prime Directive isn’t as hard and fast as it’s later made out to be. it reminds me of early stargate: sg1 when daniel tries not to interfere with an attempted rape on flimsy Prime Directive grounds (even though there is no such PD in SGU and it’s just lifted from wholesale) while the others want to stop it. as the episode opens up, it turns out the others were right, and non-interference isn’t this gold standard. (1/3) it is also perhaps significant that ‘return of the archons’ is the first even borderline “alien” culture the enterprise encounters - the people in 'miri’ were just earth people somehow duplicated on the other side of the galaxy, and most of the other interactions have been with united earth colonies - except for the gorn, and the romulans (2/3) * also the culture in ‘galileo seven’, whom we don’t really see, but whom spock demonstrates respect for. (3/3)

I finished 1x19 ‘Tomorrow is Yesterday’, Star Trek’s first time travel episode :) It was solid, although I find the conceit of reversing time for everyone else to be a strange choice (in terms of space-time dynamics). How does everyone else on the Enterprise remember everything that happened if people transported back to earth forget what happened in their own timeline?

It is a classic (perhaps setting the standard) use of U.S. military bases in time travel episodes, and I’m glad that Sulu is getting more regular screentime between this and 'arena’. It’s interesting to watch the core cohesive cast come together, especially as the yeoman filter in and out of episodes.

Also, all of these people are clocking Spock as an alien super fast. His ears aren’t even that noticeable unless you know to look for them! Is it the bowl cut? Is the bowl cut giving away that he’s a Vulcan? he does have the great response to the pilot’s line of “I never believed in little green men” with “neither did I’ - A+ delivery, Spock, you never fail me.

Watching 1x15 ‘Shore Leave’: I’m no fool, I’ve seen a lot of Star Trek - that’s not the original McCoy that we got back! It’s a new one! Fabricated by this planet! You can’t fool me, I’ve seen Voyager!

[May 18, 2025 Update: This episode also features bonus implied BTS Spock/Kirk massages, Spock tricking Kirk into taking a break after the back-to-back intensity of 'The Conscience of the King' and 'Balance of Terror', and more backstory of Kirk as a "grim" cadet at age 18 (5 years after Tarsus IV). It has some weird stuff, but this is ST, after all. I am a little >_< over the yeoman who was so eager to switch into princess gear, but I guess it is shore leave, after all.]

'The Conscience of the King' is easily my first fave episode of ST: TOS and I made five separate posts about it over on Tumblr. I also really love this fanvid of it, but I am still thinking about it nearly 3 weeks later. What a great episode, on almost all fronts, and I look forward to rewatching it with a friend soon.

***

( make it a love song. just something to reassure me I'm not the only living thing left in the universe, huh?  )

+ Bonus notes: Uhura singing! All the themes about memory and intuition and [chewing glass] Lenore playing Kirk as he plays her and [picking up the thousand photos of Kirk now falling out of my fangirl book] and Kirk choosing to connect with Spock and Riley instead of isolating himself and that being what saves them all.

Favorite Lines:

LENORE: Who are you to say what harm was done?
KIRK: Who do I have to be?

*

MCCOY: Mr. Spock, the man on top walks a lonely street. The chain of command is often a noose.
SPOCK: Spare me your philosophical metaphors, doctor.

*

MCCOY: What if you decide that he is Kodos? What then? Do you play God, carry his head through the corridors in triumph? That won’t bring back the dead, Jim.
KIRK: No. But they may rest easier.

*

KIRK: You're an actor now. What were you twenty years ago?
KARIDIAN: Younger, Captain. Much younger.
KIRK: So was I. But I remember.