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kinetic-elaboration · 3 years

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December 30: The Search for Spock

Today, the Search for Spock. Third TOS film in 3 days; I’m living my best life.

I feel like I won’t have much to say about this one, but I always say that and then ramble.

Definitely the best of the first three. I’d rank them: TSFS, TMP, TWOK, personally.

The pacing was the best of the three; the overarching human narrative, of a man’s quest to save his most important person, was way better than TWOK (just two old guys who can’t get over 15 year old beef lmao); the sci fi aspect was literally just Genesis part two but this time I was proven correct in thinking it’s dumb; Kirk was consistently both awesome and in character; the found family feels were on point; the humor was on point; the eerie moments were on point; it had a lot of Dramatic Moments; and a beautiful ending. A+

Some particular favorite scenes: Kirk finding McCoy hanging out in Spock’s quarters; Sarek talking to Kirk about Spock (NO ONE is allowed to talk to me about Shatner’s acting ever again and Mark Lenard is a treasure); the entire stealing-the-Enterprise sequence; the fight scene with the Big Klingon because the only proper fight scenes are Kirk fight scenes; Kirk holding Spock up for their dramatic exit from Genesis; the Ending. Kirk and Spock legit could have kissed at the end and it would have read perfectly fine.

A few complaints: first of all there was 0 reason to have little Spock go through Pon Farr. It was creepy and wrong. He has nothing going on in that brain of his, so he definitely can’t consent to sex, and Saavik’s a daughter figure to him, so you know she didn’t want to do that. Also, he looks like he’s still a child. And she tries to explain it to him, but he doesn’t know language, not even Vulcan--how would he? He’s existed for a day. Finally, real Spock didn’t experience Pon Farr until his late 30s, so it’s completely unnecessary to include that in this film.

Also, I thought Saavik and David were pretty boring in this film. They had a very narrow purpose, as my mom put it, and imo not much character. That David was Kirk’s son was almost completely irrelevant. They obviously have some kind of (romantic?) relationship but no real chemistry. The recasting of Saavik didn’t help her at all. Overall, they were just kinda blah to me. Especially compared to the badass crew of the Enterprise lbr.

I remembered David’s death very differently. I remembered it as Kirk’s fault somehow--but it really isn’t his fault at all. David’s on the exploration mission because, I assume, he wants to be, and then he sacrifices himself on his own, for Saavik. In the context of the protomatter revelation, it looks like a redemptive act. It’s terrible for Kirk but like...even Sarek puts it in the same breath as losing the Enterprise.

I hated seeing the Enterprise brutally torn apart in B*yond, but her death here is completely different: it’s sad, and oddly beautiful, to see the ship flaming out against the sky, but it’s not played as a big action / torture porn sequence. And it’s warranted: she was already going to be decommissioned, Kirk stole her for a last hurrah, and he gives her up as part of a desperate plan, when he has almost nothing else left. Losing the Enterprise is necessary to complete his arc. She’s always been the most important. He’s sacrificed so much of his life for this ship and this job. But now he’s pissed off Starfleet, he’s lost his son (the first person he gave up for the Fleet, when he was still in the Academy), and he’s got just a bare thread of chance to save Spock, the other half of his soul. So if he doesn’t succeed, who cares if he’s lost the ship? He’ll have nothing left anyway. And if he succeeds, as he does, it’s a fair price.

I also feel like this is really the end of the Kirk / TOS story, even though there are 3 more films with him. He’s finally chosen: Spock over all else. He ends the movie on a different planet, with literally only Spock and the rest of the core bridge crew with him, but it’s a happy ending. Because all the excess has been cut away, and the core of what’s important to him has been found. Beautiful.

Then the epilogue is like “but if whales? wouldn’t that be fun?” and it is.

I loved Sulu’s outfit in this and also Uhura’s in Kirk’s apartment. But Kirk and that tracksuit? Is that what he thinks appropriate retirement clothing is?

I loved Scotty hating on the Excelsior and also how Sulu was into it, especially given that Sulu becomes captain of that ship later. I bet he and Scotty still argue about it.

It was interesting that the main alien enemy here was the Klingons. I’m not against it, it’s fine, they’re generic, but they had a cloaking device, and I’m fairly sure this is the first time we’ve seen the Klingons with that. Mom thinks they stole it from the Romulans, and I’d have to agree. It seems the same, right down to the weaknesses. Interesting that the Federation was the first to steal it, and yet the don’t seem to use it.

I’m back on David again. I cannot believe this bitch. He rants and raves about how awful the big mean military is in TWOK and yet WHO was using UNETHICAL SCIENCE to create his big, stupid pointless invention? Oh, that would be David, the civilian scientist. Maybe if he’d gone into Starfleet he’ have learned ethics. Or not a Starfleet officer did sell Genesis to the Klingons lol. (Actually...if they already had it, why are they still after Kirk for it?) He’s also super naive. “The Klingons won’t want this, it doesn’t even work?” My not-so-sweet summer child, it’s a weapon. It’s a much better weapon than it is a terraforming device.

...I think McCoy was turned on by Uhura putting Mr. Adventure into the closet. But then who wasn’t?

I can actually see Scotty and Uhura having romantically compatible personalities at this point in the series.

Definite mom erasure in this film; no Carol; no Amanda. You KNOW Amanda would have been at the weird Vulcan ceremony.

I will give the AOS films this: more than anything in TOS or the TOS films, they make Vulcan look like a real planet where people really live and do normal, every day stuff like sit on their balcony or (sort of) go to school. I mean I realize Spock was resurrected on a ceremonial mountain, which is probably...just for ceremonies, but still.

I loved that the first thing Spock said to Jim was “my dad told me about you” because first of all, love that he got to see his father first, and second, they talked about Jim. “Hey Spock, do you remember me? Good. Do you remember your husband? I hope so because he literally just sacrificed everything to save you.” Wish we had a deleted scene of that.

Anyway I love two (2) space husbands and that is all.

”

#the year 2020 #2020: fandom thoughts #2020: star trek #star trek tos

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autisticandroids · 7 years

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DS9 for the fandom ask

The first character I first fell in love with:

okay so storytime: i actually watched ds9 out of order, because when i’m at home i mostly watch trek with my parents. we were running out of good tng, and mum and dad were like “hey, everyone likes ds9 even though we hated it back when it aired, let’s watch it” and i was like “nooooooo, dataaaaaa” and they were like “we’re watching it.”

so we watched emissary and they were like “this sucks” and i was like “but i heard worf is there in later seasons let’s jump” and so i picked a random middle season and that’s how i started ds9 with season five.

anyway, the first character i really fell in love with was odo, oddly enough. or rather, not oddly at all because he is superficially smack dab in the middle of my Ideal Character Type, but i later got quite disillusioned with him because of the show’s uncritical attitude towards his Police-ness, the way he is set up as a Protagonist of the show instead of the lovable quirky side-boy, and his conspicuous lack of gender complexity (he is the most comfortably masculine of the spocks, and it’s a symptom of ds9′s uncritical valorization of masculinity, degradation of femininity, and specifically villification of male femininity)

The character I never expected to love as much as I do now:

okay so there are three answers to this that each deserve equal space.

first, ben. ben ben ben ben ben. my love, whom i adore, and care very much about. it took me so long to understand him.

i spent the first maybe..... two months? of watching ds9 ranting at my mother for three hours a day about how benjamin sisko had the possibility to be such a good character with so much potential if he wasn’t so INCONSISTENTLY WRITTEN. i really couldn’t understand him. i wanted to love him but i couldn’t get inside his head. i spent all of my time wishing that he’d been better written so i could have the character i wanted him to be

this has a lot to do with the fact that i need to understand a character’s ethical system, why they follow it, and what efects it has on them to really understand a character, especially in a series as driven by ethical dilemmas as star trek. most characters i get get a read on it fairly quickly. to use the other two characters i’m about to list here, julian bashir is an idealist, in a way that’s rooted in a combination of naivete and his raging god/hero complex. elim garak has no morality, just a system of loyalties that he will follow to the death, and a sense of propriety based on rather conservative cardassian ideals; this has a lot to do with his tendency to dehumanize other people, and to not see himself as a person with agency but rather as a tool, as well as his rather uncritical patriotism.

anyway, i just could not figure out captain sisko. i couldn’t do it. and then i read hollow men, and it all slid into place.

the funniest running gag/plot point in hollow men (which takes place directly after in the pale moonlight, an episode which i fumed about for WEEKS after watching it) is ben sisko going around to approximately every member of starfleet who outranks him and begging them to yell at and punish him. and none of them will do it, because he did, you know, actually do the right thing.

before this, i had assumed that his ethical beliefs had been carelessly and inconsistently written. after, i realized that he was actually a hypocrite, of a very particular type. specifically, three things are true about his worldview/psychology and they’re totally incompatible. first, he truly, genuinely believes that a Good Starfleet Officer is a Moral Paragon of Perfect Idealistic Purity. second, he is a pragmatist who will always, in the end, do what needs doing. but third, most importantly: he needs to believe that he is a Good Starfleet Officer. this is why he is always so surprised at himself when he must Do Something Bad, and yet always so willing to do it. why it always throws him into a crisis. he has to lie to himself about things in order to function. he’s also incapable of maintaining a healthy level of detachment from affairs at hand, even though in the end he will generally make the right decision. he gets very emotionally involved in things, in all sorts of way: he holds a personal grudge against eddington. he gets angry at garak at the end of in the pale moonlight. hell, he gets caught up by dukat’s friendly and charming demeanor and happily banters with him despite knowing he’s a monster. ben is very bad at taking a step back. and that was the piece i was missing.

next: julian. here’s the story on julian: whether i like a character depends very much on how they’re framed. and i fucking hated the framing he got from both the show and the fandom. i’m not interested in julian as the audience avatar the way he is framed in the show, nor am i interested in him as the naive baby/perfect caretaker/sidekick boyfriend/garak’s pet twink that he is in the fandom. i don’t care for it.

now, i thought i hated julian bashir in an uncomplicated way for a long time. but about four months into my watching of ds9, three things happened at once: first, i began bingeing season seven seven with my parents. you know, the season where julian goes off the rails to the point where the show can’t lie to itself anymore. second, i hit a string of julian/miles episodes on my own personal runthrough of the earlier seasons. and third, i realized that i talked more about julian bashir than almost any character except mr garak, and that....... normally doesn’t happen with characters i straight up hate.

julian is a perfect, beautiful nastyboy antihero who thinks he’s hot shit and the savior of the galaxy. and i love him for it. but i couldn’t love him for it when i thought that i was supposed to love him for being a different character. which he wasn’t.

third, and this is the one that’s gonna shock EVERYBODY: i didn’t like garak at first. and the thing is, garak is like odo: he’s my type, to a t. mr queercoded (ex-)villain, wildly gnc, utterly fucked up, no healthy coping mechanisms we die like men and yet still dangerous through all of it.

but see, i started with season five. and his first episode of season five involves him 1) being a racist asshole and 2) not doing anything else of note. so i was like ???????????? why don’t i love this guy like everyone says i should. sooooooo i went back and watched past prologue. and i didn’t care for it. past prologue is a VERY badly written episode, on a number of levels. first of all, garak doesn’t make any attempts to not be obviously suspicious. second of all, he CREEPS ON JULIAN IN THAT FIRST SCENE IN A WAY THAT MAKES MY SKIN ABSOLUTELY CRAWL JESUS CHRIST. third, it just isn’t a very good episode. imo.

AAAAANYWAY so instead of giving up like a sensible person i kept skipping through garak episodes one after the other. i enjoyed cardassians (although the resolution was, imo, Bad), and i absolutely LOVED profit and loss, (although that was as much for the quodo as for garak), and then i got to the wire. here’s the thing about the wire: it is a LOT of emotional turmoil for a character who we’ve only seen in three episodes. it helped me reconcile my biggest issue with garak (that he seems like a spy when he should be able to seem innocuous since he has spy training; he acts suspicious bc he was high and also as a form of self-sabotage) and it also made me more attached to both him and julian, but also...... after watching it, i felt like i should have been more invested going in. i felt like i didn’t Feel enough, because i didn’t know him (or julian, really) well enough.

so i kept going on my garakbinge. the first time i felt maybe a touch of the emotions i feel for him now was in second skin. it was when he vaporized that obsidian order agent after bantering with him and quipped “a shame, i rather liked him”. and then the other charcters turned and looked at him in absolute horror. deep in my gut i felt a little bell go off. a bell that said damn that is a good piece of writing. because like, action hero style quips right? actually kind of a brutal and terrifying concept. no one ever points that out. and like..... god damn is he quick with the quips.

and then.... then........

civil defense. civil defense helped me to truly understand what kind of monster garak is. what makes him tick. and it’s all in the scene where he insults dukat for hitting on kira. what he focuses on in his insults? the fact that dukat is married, and calling dukat unattractive. he focuses on dukat’s failings according to Propriety (that he’s slipping around on his wife) and as a man (that he’s an incompetent seducer/unnatractive). he doesn’t comment on the fantastic rapey-ness of the situation, doesn’t comment on the fact that what dukat wants is one last validation that his role in colonialism was justified/is forgiven. it showed me that garak dehumanizes everyone, yes, and thinks of himself as above everyone (except, as i was to learn later, the Objects of his Loyalty), but that he had two categories. non-cardassians couldn’t know any better. they were sub-cardassian by nature. they could never be held to the same standard. whereas cardassian should know better. they should be better. the fact that they’re not is their own personal failing. this racist principle controls garak’s entire way of relating to other people, and i didn’t understand him until i understood it.

and then........

improbable cause/the die is cast. never has a piece of television quite so effectively Totally Destroyed My Ass.

improbable cause is a smart little piece of comedy that brilliantly develops a relationship that has a ton of potential: garak&odo. they’re both brilliant on their own, but together they reach new levels, and the writing is glorious.

the die is cast is a harrowing walk through elim garak’s daddy issue riddled psyche and i don’t know if i could not-love any character after watching them go through that shit.

the mood whiplash between the two episodes is ingenious, the writing is tight, and the emotions? very real. i was so invested. i decided i was ready to die for elim garak at about exactly the moment odo punched him in the face.

The character everyone else loves that I don’t:

jadzia dax. she’s the only in the credits-main character who i truly cannot muster up some love for, somewhere. the only time i ever enjoyed an episode focused on her was rejoined (yeah, shocking, i know). jadzia dax is a sex object who is defended from accusations of being a sex object by doing two things: 1) giving her a superficial list of traits (sass, scientific knowhow, some fighting skills) associated with Strong Female Characters, and 2) making her a Mighty Whitey with the klingons.

but she isn’t actually a complex person. she responds to workplace sexual harassment and even stalking (lookin at u juli) by laughing and flirting back, and her sexual libertinism mostly serves to make her supremely available to all nearby men. if you are a young straight man in the audience, she is your wise mentor (but without any kind of power over you), your fuckbuddy (with no strings attached), your best friend and drinking (but without any of those nasty feminine interests and habits girls tend to have) and your girlfriend (but with no difficult Womanfeelings). ds9 has some really terrible gender bullshit and essentialism that we can blame for this. miles o’brien’s line about wishing keiko was more like a man in that one episode is a good example. it sounds gay, and it is, but it’s also underpinned by this terrible gender essentialist, heteronormative assumption that women are inherently alien to men and inherently difficult, (and also that men don’t have feelings/shouldn’t have feminine traits/yadda yadda). jadzia dax is the perfect woman for a man who follows this philosophy. she is a sexy woman who has none of the traits that make women difficult, won’t ever so no, and will always make things more fun without being a person in her own right.

the only time she ever gets to be a person on screen is when her gender is overridden by her performing the role of white audience avatar among the scary, barbaric, non-white-coded klingons. she is a textbook mighty whitey, an audience avatar who is instantly loved and respected by all klingons she meets, and can out-klingon most klingons as a party trick. it’s really absolutely disgusting and plays into ds9′s really bad racial politics and especially bad racial politics regarding klingons. like, she just waltzes into their culture and they shower her with adoration, and also she’s used to highlight the barbarism ds9 likes to portray klingons as having.

i’m gonna work myself up into a snit about ds9, klingons, and worf so i’m just gonna stop here, but, god DAMMIT,.

The character I love that everyone else hates:

there aren’t a ton of universally hated characters in the fandom? but ben sisko doesn’t get the three dimensional appreciation he deserves and i cringe every time i see him reduced to “baseball dad”

The character I used to love but don’t any longer:

odo and jadzia, but just so i can round this out with another character, i’ve gotta say quark sort of too. i still love him, and actually i still love odo too, but i no longer get excited when i see a quark episode because they’re so repetitive. as the series went on, quark got more and more shunted off into his own corner of the narrative and stopped being allowed to interact with others in meaningful ways, and that just made him less interesting to me? because without outside influence, quark is totally cyclical. he can’t develop. he’s trapped in his own trap and all his plots are the same. i love him but i need him to do something else for once. please.

The character I would totally smooch:

kira :3c

The character I’d want to be like:

i don’t normally take fictional characters as role models, because i tend to be more interested in them for their flaws than their virtues, but if i had to pick i would say ben.

The character I’d slap:

julian. deserves slapping but doesn’t deserve anything worse.

A pairing that I love:

:3c y’all know

A pairing that I despise:

all the het especially the canon het, garashir

#star trek #rape ment //#racism ment //#thanks for the ask!#bluespock

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