Spock

Captain’s log, supplemental.

I’ve now worked my way through the whole of Star Trek‘s first season, and have watched the first episode of the second season. The thing I like most about the show — the first time around and this — has to be Spock. He is, aside from the obvious technological trappings (the Enterprise, phasers, “warp factor eight”, “beam me up”) the most science-fictional aspect of the show, being its only regular alien. The alien as unemotional, wholly logical entity was surely a bit of cliché even by the mid-sixties, but the fact that Spock was a main character meant it was something that could be explored in a bit more depth, and so you quickly go beyond the cliché. (Thanks in great part, of course, to Leonard Nimoy’s acting, which lends Spock a great deal of dignity, even managing to withstand the increasingly regular habit of Kirk & co. to end each episode with a joke at Spock’s expense. If it’s not his relentless logic, it’s his pointy ears.)

But Spock gets some of the best jokes. His way of distracting a guard prior to giving him the Vulcan nerve-grip, for instance: “Sir, you have a multi-legged creature crawling on your shoulder.” I remembered that from the first time I saw the series, and it was a little joy to rediscover. Also, when McCoy breaks off an argument with Spock to ask, “Shouldn’t you be working on your calculations?” and Spock says, coolly, “I am.” (One more Spock joke for the road. “You never told me if you had another name, Mr Spock.” “You couldn’t pronounce it.”)

The interesting thing about Spock, as a character, is how he is basically characterised in relation to the people around him. You could imagine a show featuring only Kirk — in fact we get several episodes where Kirk is isolated and has to work on his own — but it’s impossible to imagine a show with only Spock in it. Spock, on his own, would be dull. It would be just him looking into his readout device, occasionally nodding to himself, occasionally raising an eyebrow. He only comes to life, as a character, when his unemotional, logical nature is brought into contrast with the emotional, irrational nature of humans. This is an extreme example of what story guru Robert McKee calls “cast design” — where aspects of a character are brought out only by having other (usually minor) characters act as contrasts to them.

Even Spock having one of his emotional episodes — this being the main surprise his character is capable of, and so is, as a result, something that happens quite regularly — only makes sense when he has something to feel about, which means other characters. The archetypal episode in this sense is “Amok Time”, the opener of the second season. This has to be my favourite episode so far (and a better one, in my opinion, than the episode usually slated as the best Star Trek ever, Harlan Ellison’s “City on the Edge of Forever“). Here, we get Spock as a teenager, moodily refusing to explain what’s making him so miserable, then retreating to his cabin to pluck disconsolately on his Vulcanian harp. “Amok Time” was written by Theodore Sturgeon, one of my favourite writers (it is, in fact, the second of two episodes he wrote for Star Trek, the first being “Shore Leave”, a much less characteristic episode). “Amok Time” is, it seems to me (unversed in Star Trek fandom as I am) something of an equivalent to Doctor Who‘s “Deadly Assassin“, where we finally get to see the Doctor’s home planet of Gallifrey, and as a result the mythology of the whole programme moves up a gear. In fact, I’d say “Amok Time” had an effect not only on the way subsequent Star Treks built their universe of alien races, but how other (mostly US) TV SF programmes define their alien cultures, too. “Amok Time” gives us not only Spock’s famous split-fingered salute (“Live long and prosper”), but hints at the existence of an entire, ancient culture through one of its key rites of passage. This is something you see time and time again in subsequent SF TV — the Taurons’ gangsterish tattooing and coming-of-age get-togethers in the recent Battlestar Galactica spin-off Caprica, for instance. I have to admit, this approach usually irritates me, as it seems a bit superficial. In Caprica, the Taurons’ invented rituals just seemed to have been lifted from other, existing cultures — Yakuza tattooing, Jewish bar mitzvahs — and modified a bit to make them alien, but in “Amok Time”, the ritual is linked to a specific aspect of Vulcan biology. It has a reason; it’s not merely striving for an effect. As a result, it works.

The most character-defining moment in “Amok Time”, though, is not the rite of passage, or Spock’s adolescent moodiness beforehand, it’s the moment he realises he hasn’t killed Kirk at all, and is, for a second, genuinely happy. He quickly collects himself, but from then on you know that, beneath all the illogicality and decorum, Spock is, really, just one of us. And no doubt part of his personality is down to the role he sees himself as playing as part of the Enterprise’s family — he consciously defines himself as “the one who’s not human”, and does his best to act that way. Cast design, then, is a two-way process.

But I bet he enjoys those jokes at the expense of his ears as much as the rest of the crew.

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