Been thinking about And The Children Shall Lead and how the kids play on everyone’s inner Beast, and trying to decipher what fears each crew member may have based on what the children made them do and see.
The asterisk means it’s either an approximation because their fear is too specific, or if they had this fear they’ve since developed means of coping
Autophobia: Fear of being alone
I feel like this one’s pretty obvious. People tend to make the argument that the Enterprise (the ship itself) is Kirk’s overpowering true love, but I don’t think that’s it. It’s more the friends and the life that he’s made within The Enterprise that he’s terrified of losing. Some of the places we see Jim at his most upset and afraid in the series are when he feels he’s been abandoned or is forcibly (and seemingly permanently) separated from the crew. How visibly upset he is on the empty Enterprise in This Side of Paradise and The Mark of Gideon, lashing out at Spock when the crew reluctantly relieves him of duty in The Deadly Years, and his deep resentment toward Deela when she kidnaps him in Wink of An Eye. This is also further reinforced by his actions in Star Trek: The Motion Picture & The Search for Spock. He’s also one of the two characters (the other being Sulu) where his fear counts as an actual phobia and not a hypothetical phobia, ingrained personality trait, or symptom of Neurodivergence.
S’chn T’gai Spock: *OCD (fear of losing control)
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: Obsessive thoughts that lead to repetitive actions.
If anything what we might perceive as OCD-like (or at least Neurodivergent) behavior may be typical of the Vulcan condition. I don’t think Spock has OCD, or at least I don’t know enough about it to say for sure, but what came up whenever I looked up “fear of hurting others/losing control” it came up without fail. While we don’t actually get to see whatever is making Spock’s hand tremble, momentarily defy orders and act as though everything is fine. I think we can surmise that his Beast convinced him that following the order would somehow hurt Jim or that he would be possessed/controlled to do so. Operation: Annihilate, Amok Time, Plato’s Stepchildren and essentially Spock’s whole character arc prove this to be true.
Bones: *Hyper-Empathy/Thanatophobia
Thanatophobia: Fear of death, dying, watching others die and/or others watching you die
There is a headcanon that Dr. McCoy is autistic with the hyper-empathy symptom, meaning he has a really hard time watching others suffer. This may have been the reason he became a doctor in the first place, or became worse/was triggered by his father’s death. While not technically a phobia and we don’t see Bones face his Beast in ATCSL. Evidence from other episodes supports this, Miri, Metamorphosis, Plato’s Stepchildren, The Empath, and For The World is Hollow & I Have Touched The Sky all heavily support this.
Astrophobia: Fear of getting lost or dying in space
Seems like kind of a ridiculous fear for someone who builds, maintains, and lives starships to have right? Maybe, but if that is something he’s deeply afraid of, it would make his surpassing ability to make certain the ship doesn’t explode despite impossible odds make plenty of sense. I don’t think it’s space itself that freaks Scotty out, it’s the idea of being stuck out there and/or suffering the cold and grizzly death that is getting sucked out into space does. So he does everything in his power to ensure that never happens. Out of all the supporting characters, the events of the episode that sparked this post aside, Scotty seems to have the best handle on his fear, the most condemning evidence that he’s got Astrophobia occurs later in season 3. He freezes up in the Jeffrey’s Tube during delicate work in That Which Survives. As well as telling his love interest that being bone deep afraid that you’re going to die in the cold vacuum of space is a perfectly normal thing to constantly think about in Lights of Zetar. Still, he is uncommonly steely-eyed and level headed whenever he has the con, even in the face of his fear. I used to theorize that maybe he was afraid of failure/imperfection, but Scotty’s Jerry-Rigs and Duct-tape way of doing things doesn’t lend itself to that idea. What stuck out to me was his comment “we’ll all be lost, forever lost!” in And The Children Shall Lead that made me think Astrophobia would be a good fit.
Nosophobia: Fear of contracting deadly disease
Uhura’s fear seems to be dying a slow and painful death by disease, one where she is irrevocably physically/mentally altered by her suffering. There’s evidence for this when she sees the appeal of immortality in I, Mudd, and that she’s scared she’ll end up like Chekov in The Tholian Web. Nosophobia is not hypochondria (convincing yourself that you have a disease/compulsively self-diagnosing) or germaphobia (extreme fear of germs and sickness). Nosophobia is more long term, an irrational fear of things like cancer and Alzheimer’s and other such conditions as well as potentially deadly viruses. It seems to me that if Uhura were to die she’d rather it be quick and painless rather than endure that sort of battle.
Hikaru Sulu-Cleithrophobia
Cleithrophobia: Fear of being trapped
Again, someone I thought maybe was afraid of failure (afraid of failing by destroying the ship with the swords in ATCSL) before I picked up on a very interesting pattern I noticed from The Corbomite Maneuver. Sulu gets really fatalistic and/or agitated when it seems like he’s trapped with no way out. He hyper fixates on the countdown when their trapped and condemned to destruction by Balok in The Corbomite Maneuver, he makes dark jokes while trapped and freezing to death on the planet from The Enemy Within. He seizes up instead of fleeing or fighting the Law Givers in Return if The Archons, and even panics a little when they’re trapped by the giant hand in Who Mourns For Adonais (and usually Sulu is insanely chill under pressure). Cleithrophobia gets confused with Claustrophobia often, but Celthrophobia has much more emphasis on the trapped and no way out elements than just enclosed spaces. So him being terrified by being unable to move because it’s surrounded by swords actually makes a lot of sense! Honestly, I find it uniquely fitting that a flyboy with an enthusiasm for growing things would be agitated by places that do not allow growth or flight.
Pavel Chekov-Proditophobia (in reverse)
Proditophobia: Fear of betrayal
Proditophobia is the fear of being betrayed, but there is more evidence to suggest that Pavel is waaaaay more terrified of betraying or being disloyal rather than being the victim of that action. There’s certainly evidence for it in both The Trouble with Tribbles and Day of The Dove, where he is driven to act out violently on the behalf of those he feels deep loyalty towards, in his head, allowing someone else’s reputation to be trashed counts as disloyalty. And The Children Shall Lead also shows us, at least at this point in Chekov’s character development, he feels more loyalty to Starfleet than the Enterprise crew (something that certainly changes/evolves by the time the movies roll around). The case might even have been that he was all bark and no bite and really wasn’t actually going to kill his Captain or mentor, he was just hoping they’d believe him so that they’d go peacefully and he wouldn’t have to worry about betraying Starfleet at all. I used to think maybe he feared punishment or retribution, but he’d never break any rules if that were the case, and if I know anything about this feral gremlin of an Ensign, he’ll do that in a split second if someone questions his loyalty.
