Operation Annihilate hurts more if you've seen Discovery because Spock does understand what it's like to lose a sibling.
I haven't seen Discovery yet, but I'll admit that my personal experience of TOS and interpretations of what it was doing with its characters and themes in the 60s are very deliberately not informed by the decades of much-later retcons of the original show. Spock in particular*, I think, has been targeted hard by retcons ever since they reset his entire character arc in 1979, and I feel like the later generations of Obligatory Spock Appearances that I have seen (in AOS and SNW) keep ever-more-drastically losing sight of what made him compelling in the first place, across a lot of different axes (including his flawless eyeshadow and narratively central homoeroticism :\).
I don't want to sound hostile or aggressive about the ask at all, though! I didn't mind receiving it, and I don't have any grievance with Discovery fans or people who do feel the need to try to reconcile all the different major Star Trek projects with each other, as long as they don't show up in TOS fans' notes to lecture us on how we've got to engage with ST their way.
I do get "well actually, in [other ST thing] it turns out" on a pretty regular basis, though, so—well, I'm only rambling further about this because I have quite a few new ST followers and want to be clear about what to expect. I'm not trying to attack anyone outside the corporate media hellscape.
I like other Treks than TOS, but I am fundamentally very opposed to the X Cinematic Universe media franchise world where every story in a setting must be perceived as part of a single consistent narrative all the other stories are hammered into, and you've got to keep up with all these different, largely independent projects to truly understand The Whole Story. I'm like, nope, Paramount/Disney/whomever isn't the boss of me, and for me, the TOS movies are kind of the Aeneid of Star Trek to TOS's Iliad, and Prodigy is, like ... uh, Troilus and Criseyde in this analogy, and otherwise, /shrug. It's like, all three texts are fantastic, and I'm intrigued by how the latter two texts talk to each other and to Homer, but they are all very, very different and I have no interest in forging a grand unified narrative of the Trojan War in my head. So it is with Star Trek for me!
I'm not only like this with Star Trek btw—I'm the same with Star Wars (and Lucasfilm is even more aggressive than Paramount about pushing every single thing as integral to The Whole Story). In general, this is just how I as a person respond to fundamentally separate storytelling projects that engage with an ostensible shared setting or shared characters or whatnot.
(I'm not really fannish about any other part of ST, so I didn't bother finding Matter of Troy analogues for TNG/etc, though I enjoy them enough in a non-fannish way.)
So anyway, all of that is to say: for my personal experience and interpretation of how TOS characterizes Spock, it's actually important to me that he really was every bit as isolated his entire life as TOS indicates, until he joined Starfleet and especially until the five-year mission.
For me, Spock's guilt over Amanda in TOS and the stakes of the fraught dynamic between them are deeply bound up in him being her only child (and not only by blood). For me, the "no bigotry on the bridge" scene in "Balance of Terror" really is the first time Spock has had a relationship with anyone who would advocate for him in that way. I see TOS Spock as the child of two parents who care about him but have always been far more preoccupied with each other and themselves, and as someone who was wholly ostracized by all his peers on Vulcan, and who even among the somewhat more welcoming humans, has been continually disrespected in very, very racialized ways.
And for me, part of the heartbreak of that Spock moment in "Operation: Annihilate!" is that TOS Spock and Kirk do have wildly different histories apart from both being bullied, and Spock has never experienced anything like this grief. Spock never had a Sam in his life, nor an Aurelan (who Kirk seems to have been close to as well), nor a Peter and the other two boys who implicitly didn't make it. Spock has spent his life fundamentally alone. But he also has never experienced the kind of horrific losses Kirk has, either—family members, immediate communities, and entire swaths of planetary populations lost, just hundreds or thousands of people ripped away over and over and over while Kirk watches or finds them afterwards.
Something important about Kirk and Spock's relationship to me, though, is that they don't have to personally experience the other's life to profoundly understand and connect to each other in the way they both desperately need. This is one of the reasons they're closer to each other than to any of their other friends or colleagues (something explicitly stated in TOS multiple times). And in S1, I think we really see that evolution with Spock in particular, where in early episodes like "The Enemy Within," he might unbend enough to say, "If I seem insensitive to what you're going through, captain, understand it's the way I am," but by the season finale, he reciprocates Kirk's accommodation of his cultural norms when it really matters.
I think TOS Spock tries to express his compassion in an emotional, human-normative way, down to the phrasing, because at this point, he prioritizes Kirk's suffering at such a time above his own values and preferences. It's more important to reach out to Kirk in Kirk's terms than to Be Vulcan About It, until Kirk needs him to be Vulcan about it. The instant that Kirk makes it clear that he can't deal with human sympathy and needs something productive to focus on, Spock instantly shifts gears to Being Useful because that's what Kirk needs from him, even when it is excruciatingly painful or risks blindness or ... really, anything.
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*Kirk, notoriously, is also hit super hard by pop culture-filtered characterization retcons from The Wrath of Khan onwards and especially in AOS, well beyond the AU premise. But I think the subtler discomfort seen in modern ST re: TOS Spock as a masculine figure is nearly as egregious.
Thanks! I did want to explore the McCoy-S'paak relationship in addition to all the other moving parts, of course :D
That scene is actually set later than the AU version of "The Tholian Web," but thinking about the episode is one of the main things that made me want a Stranded For Reasons scene between them. Thankfully Star Trek provides lots of justifications for Stranded For Reasons, so I don't have to feel terribly indulgent about it :P
When I was thinking about the verse, I was definitely intrigued by the idea of this middle-aged Emotions Guy medical principles doctor answering to S'paak, a 30-something woman with incredible knowledge and ability to process data, and deliberately little emotional affect, and how something like Kirk's posthumous message would register when it's S'paak being told to consider McCoy's insights even though they may seem illogical, while McCoy is told that he better damn well remember that S'paak is the one in charge. So I wanted to get a clear handle on how exactly I wanted to navigate that especially fraught relationship as a cross-gender one, even if the fundamental issue of McCoy's self-appointed emotional coaching via microaggressions would obviously remain intact.
(I do think gender would impact his dynamics with both Jessica and S'paak, of course.)
Elizabeth...i am so torn on the mobsters this could be your opportunity to dress them like flappers but Jessica and s'paak in those suits is so lush..
Oh, damn, I didn't even think of the flapper option! I do like it and I love the idea of hiding S'paak's ears in a sort of Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) get-up, though Jessica would be more likely to actually take the option. I could also see S'paak going for the suit and Jessica for the flapper gear as a sort of extension of S'paak wearing the more androgynous version of the science uniform by then and Jessica swaggering around in the TOS miniskirt, but I think I want them to more or less match.
Given the context of the episode—wanting to be taken seriously by a bunch of hypermasculine mobsters—I suspect the suits are the best option. And I do love the idea of them in the dashing hats and outfits :D
Elizabeth your gender flip spirk is living rentfree in my brain so on my lunchbreak I'm wondering how you'd see one of my favourite non spirk moments in the episode Tomorrow is Yesterday when John Christopher sees a crewmember and asks "A woman?" to which Kirk replies "A crewman." This episode is I think one of the ones most changed by the flip, not in terms of plot but character interactions.
Aww, I'm super flattered that I've got other people thinking about it!! That is one of my favorite non-shippy moments for Kirk, actually (along with his lecture to Charlie about consent and anger at pro-life bullshit in "The Mark of Gideon"), and I've been contemplating which S1 episode plots would generally be most affected by the gender change (the others are likely "Charlie X," "Mudd's Women," "The Squire of Gothos," and "The City on the Edge of Forever").
I think the fundamental concept around Captain Christopher is that he's very much a man from the 60s with fairly standard perspectives of the era rather than those driving the aspirations of ST itself—iirc he's visibly taken aback by Uhura's presence on the bridge, not only as a woman but pretty obviously a Black woman—but he's not beyond learning. So that's what I'd want at play in how things go with him specifically.
In the original episode, he of course doesn't recognize Kirk's uniform, but recognizes him as a fellow more-or-less-military man, and they are able to communicate in those terms despite Christopher's reluctance to go along with anything for most of the episode. I think that vague rapport would not look at all the same with Jessica, to go by his responses to other women in the crew in the original episode. He doesn't make a huge deal out of it in the later episode and I don't think he'd be OTT shitty, but I do think he'd be much more resistant to accept decisions about his life coming from a woman, and he's already resistant as a man (I'd keep both Jessica and S'paak kicking his ass in his various escape attempts, for sure).
There's also the question of whether the team that infiltrates the naval base would have the sense to send a team that can "blend", which is not going to happen with Jessica. On the one hand, Kirk's interactions with his 60s US military captors are incredible and it would pain me to lose them ("This little thing? Just something I slipped on" adfhjnkk;dj), and I think the Starfleet cast often just forgets to account for prejudices of eras they time-travel (or functionally time-travel) to. So I think it's credible enough that Jessica would want to handle things herself in a matter this important and wouldn't think through the full ramifications of her presence there. But it does make a lot more sense to send a dude squad on an "infiltrate a naval base in the 60s" mission, so I'm still deciding! I'm leaning towards it being her, though.
When i first watched the episode i thought spock was weirded out because lenore is so much younger, and while kirk isn't above turning on the charm on younger women his own purposes (mirri), the women he's genuinely attracted to tend to be his equal intellectually (edith keller, carol marcus)+ unlike mccoy youth on its own doesn't really count for him (the man trap)
On the one hand, you're right about Kirk's preferences. Even only looking at TOS, when he actually gets to have a voluntary romance (past or present) rather than one forced by the circumstances, he's very frequently drawn to elegant scientists and science geeks. The woman he nearly married in his 20s was a lab technician, Janet Wallace is an endocrinologist, Janice Lester is a scientist, Edith Keeler is obsessed with space travel and the potential of atomic power, Rayna functionally has 17 degrees in arts and sciences (even in Kirk's brief, abortive flirtation with Helen Noel—a psychologist—he "talked about the stars" with her rather than pursuing the sexual relationship she wanted). Now and then, he's into highly competent professional women like Areel Shaw (a lawyer) or Janice Rand (whose role as a mature woman and not a super young, fresh-out-of-the-Academy one is repeatedly emphasized in "Charlie X", by Kirk and others). He very clearly has a specific type that Lenore doesn't fit.
(And even in the tactical circumstance of "Miri," it doesn't enter his head that her interest is sexual/romantic until Spock and McCoy tactfully let him know.)
On the other hand, Spock's alarm is very definitely not driven by a belief that Lenore is Kirk's real motive. McCoy is the one who can only really see Kirk's behavior through the filter of Kirk's pursuit of Lenore, and who doesn't want to see the cold calculation behind it right up to the final moments of the episode. It's McCoy who tries to convince Spock that Kirk's attraction to Lenore is all that's going on, and it's Spock who correctly insists that's not the real explanation and something deeply concerning is going on that's connected to Kirk's questions about Thomas Leighton + Lenore and the Karidian players + Kevin Riley. When Spock leaves and starts researching potential connections between the various things he's concerned about, he doesn't even run a search for Lenore but for her father's history in combination with Leighton, Kirk, and Riley that turns up the Tarsus IV backstory.
But yeah, the specific conversation I was referring to in my post is this:
SPOCK: Spare me your philosophical metaphors, doctor. The captain is acting strangely. I'm asking if you've noticed.
MCCOY: Negative. [...] What are you so worried about, anyway? I find Jim generally knows what he's doing.
SPOCK: It was illogical for him to bring those players aboard.
MCCOY: Illogical? Did you get a look at that Juliet? That's a pretty exciting creature. Of course your personal chemistry would prevent you from seeing that. Did it ever occur to you that he simply might like the girl?
SPOCK: It occurred. I dismissed it.
MCCOY: You would.
SPOCK: Did you know that he suddenly transferred Lieutenant Riley to engineering?
MCCOY: Lots of things go on around here that I don't know, Mr. Spock. Now, he's the captain. He can transfer whoever he pleases. You can look that up in a hundred volumes of space regulations somewhere. All right? Come on, have a drink.
SPOCK: No, thank you.
How I feel about this character - Depends on the season, actually. S1 Silver? Scary little man. Amoral but not actually like - the devil incarnate yet. Like watching a young Tom Riddle knowing I can’t keep him from becoming Voldemort. S2 Silver? Oh, oh, wait - he might not be entirely horrible oh wait that’s how the whole Death Eater thing started isn’t it. S3 - Put. The beard. Back where it came from. You lost your leg, not your hand, you can still shave, and for the love of the gods, will you please eat something and stop rambling deliriously about how James is a sea god. You’re scaring Billy. Also, step away from James. S4 - keep me away from this version of him at all costs. Throw him in the bin with the rest of the garbage before I decide to Fight Him.
All the people I ship romantically with this character - None. No really, seriously, none. (ok I do in fact have some complicated headcanons about Hands but it’s strictly a one-sided unrequited weird ship ask me about it sometime if you’re brave and Silver and Muldoon as a couple might have been ok and would even have made S4 resonate more)
My non-romantic OTP for this character - idk, Silver and the ghosts of what he threw away?
My unpopular opinion about this character - pretty sure anyone who’s been following me for more than a month knows this. I think Silver was wrong, I think what he did to James and Madi both was as wrong as wrong can be, and that if they never wanted to see him again and never forgave him for his betrayal, it would be exactly what he’d earned with his duplicity regardless of what he thinks his intentions were..
One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon. I wish… honestly I don’t know what I wish had happened. Like - on the one hand, way to build a character that I think is deeply, deeply flawed and very, very wrong with some very deeply seated underlying control/abandonment issues. A++ on the character building, nope don’t change who he is. On the other…. dear gods I wish he’d just never come into contact with James at all?
