I absolutely don't have time to write anything really coherent about this right now (although this is essentially a continuation of my thoughts on what's going on in the TOS Kirk + power issue) but there's one thing I've been thinking about lately, and that's how exactly Shatner plays these three (unrelated) scenes:
a) Janice Lester's frank flirtation in Kirk's body with Coleman in Turnabout Intruder, which is obviously both tactically forced, insincere, and coldly threatening (he is her henchman, for whom if she had any feelings, they've long been buried under a layer of her hatred/desire for revenge/resentment/internal misogyny, but whose feelings towards her she openly uses for her own purposes; she is also in despair and is trying to use all available resources to carry out her plan, which she perceives as the only possible form of survival for her)
b) one of the most revealing scenes of Kirk's tactical seduction in Catspaw, where he is frankly insincere/forced/coldly threatening, is in an absolutely desperate position under the pressure of a threat to the lives of his crew/his ship, and the object of his tactical seduction is an obvious dominant force (the lady monster of the week with rather questionable ethics) in complete control of the situation
c) his cold, menacing, quiet rage in Balance of Terror, when he politely warns Stiles that his racist intolerance is not welcome here (Stiles' behavior clearly goes against his personal ethics, but it's also directed against the person he holds dearest to him)
Objectively, these are quite different scenes, in which I can draw parallels for different reasons (only two of them have sexual overtones and work as flirting/seduction, only two are obviously justified for ethical reasons (both of them are Kirk scenes), and in one of them it's /not/ Kirk at all, which actually makes this scene even more interesting for comparing how similar Shatner actually plays Kirk's usual flirting vs. Janice's feminine flirting), but there is a certain regularity in how close to each other real rage/tactical seduction is in the range of his playing as a whole, making his performance of Kirk truly threatening not in moments of spontaneous raw emotional expression (which actually doesn't happen that often and indicates a certain level of psycho-emotional security), but rather in moments of pronounced hypercontrol, when he resorts to calculated acting/manipulation/wordplay (often giving the impression of moral ambiguity), remaining deceptively calm/relaxed on the outside but tense to the limit on the inside, detached from his feelings, not restraining but rather redirecting his own emotions into this quiet anger, attacking from a position of vulnerability/defense.
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