- Spock, ‘I, Mudd’
Logic Thinking And Its Discontents
It’s time to boldly go into a multi-part look at the original ’Star Trek’. The crux of which is of course the Kirk/Spock/McCoy triangle. Formally this is yet another of its inheritances from the film 'Forbidden Planet', with the Commander, Lieutenant and Doctor. But if both are interested in psychology the film's paradox is to be unconcerned with characterisation. As a one-shot of course it has less running time to build characters, but even so it seems content to paint in broad types. They're cast in the film in pretty much the way they carry out their duties, according to rank, and certainly don't spend much time debating philosophy.
Whereas, a show of limited sets gives a conference room over entirely to the three's debating. (Though for a Doctor, McCoy sure seems to hang around on the Bridge a whole lot.) 'Star Trek' has a reputation as a pedagogical message-of-the-week show, a mouthpiece for Kennedy-era interventionism – showing up somewhere and doing the right thing in the allocated fifty minutes. But Spock and McCoy will squabble about that right thing on almost a weekly basis. There’s a sense that they can't just serve up instant answers, that they need to be teased out.
Yet Kirk is at the apex of this triangle. He's able to draw on both of them, knowing when to listen to logic or draw from intuition. As a leader needs advisors, Kirk needs Spock and McCoy, but also needs to make the final decision himself. They're brain, heart and head. It's a model which professes to achieve diversity of thought and unity at the same time.
And okay, drama dramatises things, which often involves personifying them.But this model seems fixed on the notion that heart and head can’t exist in the same body, and can only be combined via the workings of an external force. Perhaps relatedly, our society has a tendency to associate intellectual brilliance with emotional coldness, a ‘rule’ proven through being regularly applied to fictional characters. Such as Sherlock Holmes, or… oh, you guessed.
The third season episode ’The Tholian Web’ gives us a Kirkless situation, where Spock and McCoy have to manage without him. It rather shamelessly supposes this to be something new whereas by this point we’ve lost count of the times. But it plays the concept for all it’s worth, by focusing solely on Spock and McCoy, with no counter Kirk subplot. In fact even the ghost images of him don’t appear until late on.
Instead it has the tape he leaves them. Spock is advised “temper your judgment with intuitive insight. I believe you have those qualities, but if you can't find them in yourself, seek out McCoy. Ask his advice”, and McCoy told to follow the new Captain. In other words, even when Kirk is missing presumed dead the necessary interlocutor between their opposite poles is still Kirk.
For the first Kirkless situation we need to jump back to the early 'Galileo Seven’. Its designed around demonstrates the limits of logical thinking. Abandoned on a hostile planet against primitive locals (essentially id-creatures, impervious to if not the opposite of his logic, never properly seen on-screen) Spock makes mistakes and lives are lost. And yet he never falls prey to panic, keeps his head when all about him are losing theirs - and gets the majority of the crew home. As it's an unusually hard science story for 'Star Trek', quite deficient in omnipotent alien beings, we can more-or-less follow the rationalism of his decisions.
Yet instead of McCoy having to admit that Spock’s decisions proved right in the end, them being alive and all, it turns out Spock was in the wrong. He's gleefully told by McCoy and Kirk he acted illogically, an accusation which is... well, quite illogical, Captain. He jettisons their remaining fuel, causing a signal flare the Enterprise sees and responds to. Its a gamble. But had he not taken this chance their lives would have been prolonged by only a few hours. Calculation was his thought process. They then go through exactly the whole debate again, in the later episode 'Gamesters of Triskellion', and still McCoy hasn't learnt to have any confidence in him.
While in 'Corbomite Manouvere', Kirk corrects Spock's chess analogy to poker – which allows him to go save the day. And poker is more McCoy's game. Why load the deck so? Because at some point, logical thinking and ideology are going to clash. Intuition and ideology aren’t the same thing but they can seem the same, the things we’ve always assumed will “feel right” to us. But in the modern world a degree of logical thinking is necessary. So it needs to be invoked, but in such a way its forever subordinate to feeling. The brain can’t be done without, but must be constantly mistrusted. Thinking is like a powerful but potent drug, only to be messed with when the antidote of feeling is close to hand.
Though, like any rule, exceptions apply. 'Devil in the Dark', unusually is a horror story. Which makes it much closer to 'Doctor Who',even to the point where the horror is inverted and the 'monster' found not to be a monster at all. And it's Spock who plays the Doctor role, not only guessing the truth but managing to communicate with the monster. McCoy scoffs and Kirk plays the skeptical role of the Brigadier, but they come round.
‘Spectre of The Gun’ has a plot resolution which literally relies on Spock making the others see the world as he does. Cross aliens transport them into a Wild West set to re-fight the battle of the OK Corral as the losing side. And it is demonstrably a Wild West set, the Hollywood tradition of building streets out of theatre flats is given a Brechtian foregrounding. Their adversaries, the Earps, are about as robotically remorseless as Yul Brunner in ‘Westworld’. Though slightly absurdly, no-one among the crew seems to notice this and they carry on insisting they’re in the 1880s.
Then, at the very end, Spock realises the solution is to transcend. Ostensibly he persuades the others via the Vulcan mind meld. But it works like no other occasion. It’s more like a Zen master preparing his novices for a ritual involving treating the ‘real world’ as samsara. (“Unreal. Appearances only. They are shadows. Illusions. Nothing but ghosts of reality.” Strictly the bullets are unreal whereas samara is more akin to ‘merely real’. But the comparison is there.) After which the Earp’s bullets can no longer harm them. In contrasts to Kirk, whose lineage we’re told stems from the Wild West. As Spock points out, they’re enveloped in “the violence of your own heritage”, the very thing they need to rise above. After which they are permitted to meet the bodiless aliens, the Melkotians.
But there's not really any corresponding points where McCoy's heart fails him. In ‘Man Trap’ Kirk snaps at him: “You could learn something from Mr. Spock, Doctor. Stop thinking with your glands.” But it’s incidental to the story. In 'City on the Edge of Forever' he causes all the trouble by getting so hyper-emotional, but only via going mad. There was no particular reason why it should be him. (And in fact in Harlan Ellison's original script it wasn't.) And it's noticeable that when Spock turns out to be right it’s often when he’s not pitted against McCoy, for example in 'Arena' where he questions Kirk's aggressiveness towards hostile aliens.
In short, in the ceaseless tug-of-war between Spock and McCoy the game is rigged, the deck loaded. It's simply assumed that his logical approach is deficient (even as we rely on it). Then, with the plot conceit of his being half-human, it’s equally assume he's kidding himself about being non-emotional anyway. Hence the dodge that, if he does something that worked out, it couldn’t have been logical in the first place.
There isn't a single other Vulcan character in the whole first season, and when we do finally see them, in 'Amok Time', it's a traditionalist, ritualised society, not a logic-based technocracy at all. His father shows up now and then. But a full-on Vulcan, a completely logical being, is not something the show takes any interest in.
At times, the show uses the motif of the computer talking metallically. But at others ‘readings’ are relayed by Spock, as he peers into what I can only think to call a peeroscope. Spock may be the tech guy on the team who spends the Xmas party telling you the merits of various operating system. The interlocutor with the computer is something of a computer himself.
Certainly computerised systems are treated with mistrust, in episodes such as ’The Ultimate Computer’ where the running of he Enterprise is mechanised. As we literally see the lights go out across the ship, we realise this will leave the Federation like all those dead worlds its crew has encountered, with only programmes pointlessly left running. It’s a different threat to the commonly encountered mad computer, the menace doesn’t come from machine hubris but logic pursued to its limit. We should also remember Spock’s effective replacement in ’Next Generation’ was “synthetic life form” Data.
But if Spock was intended to prove on a weekly basis the limits of all that thinking business, there was a twist to the tale…
Spockmania Strikes
The Captain’s Log conceit is mostly there to allow for a post-advert catch-up. But it does at times stray into Kirk’s ‘thought voice’, the pared-down equivalent of a theatrical monologue. Whereas Spock just holds his impassive poker face.
Analysing Frank Millers’ comics in ’The Importance of Being Frank’ (in 'The Daredevils' 1) Alan Moore noted “Miller’s creation Elektra has never utilised thought balloons to expand upon her motivations. Thus, much of her characterisation is in the reader’s mind.” Spock does have one moment, in ‘Cloud Minders’, where we get to hear his thoughts. And it’s strangely jarring.
Much like a sitcom, ‘Star Trek’ comes alive in the casting. Shatner's idiosyncratic, histrionic, scene-stealing performance is infamously over-the-top. But in many ways it has to be for the thing to work. Kirk has to push himself into the foreground, by sheer act of will, or he'd merely be the referee between Spock and McCoy. Had they stuck with Jeffrey Hunter as Pike, as in the pilot, it's unlikely we'd be talking about 'Star Trek' now. The fun to be had with Shatner and Kelly comes through performance. There’s never a moment where they lose themselves in their character, but that doesn’t matter when you can enjoy them being themselves.
So its their overplaying which enables and highlights Nimoy's underplaying, achieving considerable expressiveness just by raising an eyebrow. He’s not just the best but in the precise sense the only actor. So when he comes to do the heavy emoting which is so commonly associated with acting, it has greater effect. He’s like the best player in the band who knows it, so deliberately rations his solos. It becomes something you wait for.
And those ‘solos’… initially at least they came from Nimoy himself. Worried about the part’s effect on his reputation, he was insistent Spock couldn’t just be “a walking computer who gives scientific data” and required repeated assurances from Roddenberry.
But there was something further which cemented Spock’s popularity. Hilariously, even as the scripts stipulated Kirk getting the girl on a weekly basis, it was Spock who proved to have the girl appeal. And that’s not a small thing in the history of this show.
As the M0vieblog has pointed out: ”Although the importance of female fandom has been somewhat downplayed in favour of stereotypes about male nerds, female fans were hugely active and important from the very beginning of Star Trek.” These female fans weren’t necessarily tuning in for their Spock fix alone. But Nimoy’s fan mail soon surpassed Shatner’s and the term ‘Spockmania’ was coined, leading the production to play into this.
But what was the basis of this appeal? Particularly when it was Shatner getting his shirt off on a near-weekly basis. Gene Roddenberry “believed that female viewers would find a slightly dangerous and taboo character more attractive. This was supported by female visitors to the set who seemed to be immediately drawn to Nimoy.”
Not uncharacteristically, he may well be claiming lucky break as masterplan. But there is insight in his comments. There’s a strange accord between Spock and both Peter Cook’s stand-offish pop star Drimble Wedge in ‘Bedazzled’ (1967) and Gary Numan’s career-launching ‘Top of the Pops’ debut in 1979. The two aren’t identical. Numan, seemingly separated even from his own band, plays someone convinced he’s emotionless while you can see he’s actually vulnerable. (“And just for a second I thought I remembered you.”) Whereas Cook just plays the facade, culminating in the pay-off line “I’m not available”. But it’s the same equation, unavailability creates appeal.
We should remember that in this era it was still uncommon for women to have careers. Domesticity was presumed to be your realm. And if your life reduced to your husband, then a steady, loving, reliable husband becomes the equivalent of a McJob – rote and dull. Aged nineteen, Sylvia Plath, wrote in her journal “I must pour my energies through the direction of my mate. My only free act is choosing or refusing that mate”. In which case, why not use that one free act to at least give yourself something of a challenge? A confident alpha male with good prospects, Kirk might have been what women were expected to look for in a man. But the female audience voted with their pens, and they went for Spock.
We can take a stab at plotting the development of Spock past the walking computer with the logic chip. He’s not at all like himself in the pilot, where the remorselessly efficient second-in-command role went to Number One. You can see fore-tremors even here, even if they’re pegged to another character. The mindreading aliens state to Pike: “Although she seems to lack emotion, this is largely a pretence. She has often has fantasies involving you.” Though her on-screen behaviour never openly confirms this, she does manage a logically-deduced but waspish put-down to Vina. (Who those aliens are grooming as her rival for Pike.)
It may start with Uhura’s song about him in ‘Charlie X’. (Which not only relies on the explanatory song trope, but comes in the second episode broadcast - where we might expect character elements to be described diegeticially. The original script had her mimicking others.) Bizarrely, this both references an old, abandoned idea that he would have a full-on Devil look (“devil ears and devil eyes”) and looks forward to his babe magnet future. Here his allure’s presented as intentional (“at first his look could hypnotise… his alien love could victimise/ And rip your heart from you”), a warning to space-faring gals. And Spock smiles as he (literally) plays along. It’s hard to work this out from here. Is it that the cold exterior character is not yet developed? Or is it already being melted down?
Then, in the fourth episode ‘Naked Time’, a space virus causes everyone to lose their inhibitions. But here Nurse Chapel confesses her love to him while he’s unable to respond. He breaks down, but precisely because he couldn’t tell his mother he loved her. (Nimoy has since said little was scripted for this scene, and most of his dialogue was extemporised.)
It was ‘This Side of Paradise’ that first had Spock fall in love. A role originally been slated for Sulu, but switched to him. And if we were to guess when those fan letters first took effect…
As time went on Spock’s breakdowns became about as much a ‘Star Trek’ cliché as Kirk getting the space girl, with predictably diminishing returns. (“Spock, your feelings are showing again.”) Seeing him throw teenage tantrums on ’Amok Time’ was risible stuff. (Nimoy himself grew disappointed by the treatment of the character, leading to strained relations with Roddenberry.) But there were other ideas too, which better grasped the concept…
The Vulcan Mind Meld, introduced in ’Devil in the Dark’, parallels telepathy – often used to portray a deeper form of contact than mere speech, underlining the notion of Spock possessing uncharted depths. While in ‘Return to Tomorrow’ they meet a benevolent alien race who have over time lost their bodies. So, as a temporary solution, they ask to borrow the crew’s. Kirk hosts their benevolent leader Sargon, like going to like. But Spock is assigned Henoch, who proves to be a scheming Loki figure. Watching Nimoy dressed as Spock but playing the malevolently smirking, insouciant Henoch is easily the most memorable element of the story. If this wasn’t the original motivation tfor the script it should have been.
As so often, it may be a unique combination of chance circumstances that gave us the Spock we have. The imposed post-pilot rethink. Nimoy’s insistence on a more substantial role. Letters from the female fanbase. And without the Spock we have, there’d be no ’Star Trek’ as we have it. That’s only logical, Captain.
Coming soon! More boldy going...
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