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lotesseLike others - *waves at princessofgeeks* - I've been getting back into Classic Trek. I've been sort of vibrating back and forth between Voyager and TOS, happy as a pig in clover to be back in this fandom. I love being in this fandom. There's Voyager talk coming up, but right now I seem to be writing kind of a lot about TOS episodes? I blabbed about 'Where No Man' in PoG's comments, and I seem to have produced a very long analysis of 'Requiem for Methuselah.' idek.
Admittedly, this isn't a very good episode. Shatner's more than usually hammy, the guest actors aren't good either, and Spock and McCoy spend weird amounts of time standing around like bumps on logs doing nothing as the plot unfolds around them. The set decoration is appalling, and causes the Da Vinci reveal to come way more out of nowhere than it needs to – reimagine the episode's mise en scene as more authentically developing out of the renaissance, the art on the walls more obviously in that tradition or with that lineage, the costuming as a believable development of Italian renaissance fashion – even the names, which are terrible (although it's a very cute touch that Rayna gives her surname as Capek, presumably referencing science fiction writer Karel Capek, who coined the word “robot”); if the pair were Romola and Fiorentino instead of Rayna and Flint I think that twist would feel more comfortable. There's also a thematic issue, in that they need to be telling a story about a man with such a boundless curiosity that he wanted to live forever so that he would never have to stop learning, who eventually began to find himself wearing down and growing tired – but through their direction and acting choices failing to make either Flint or Rayna come across as remotely curious. Their ennui goes up to eleven. So I have a hard time believing that Rayna actually has all those degrees, because she just doesn't seem to give a shit about doing much – she isn't constantly reading, or rushing off to check up on all of her active experiments, or even particularly curious about the alien life forms that turn up in her home. I have a hard time believing that Flint built Rayna, because he seems so indifferent to her, and to robotics, and to building things. Spock and McCoy's unresponsive passivity throughout the ep, while uncharacteristic for them, is very much characteristic of the episode's take on intellectual activity and personal engagement. There's no a whole lot of boldly going here.
Except, that is, for the final scene back on the Enterprise, which is one of the most graceful, elegant, arresting bits in all of Trek.
Buried under all its poor execution, there's actually a really good story driving this episode. They don't make it easy to see, but it all falls into place if you take Rayna as a Spock-analogue. There's a move toward setting them up as mirrors early on, through Rayna's initial interest in Spock as a Vulcan, and through her request to talk physics with him. TNG later works the parallels between robots and Vulcans; here, Rayna is tremendously smart but emotionally unengaged and unexperienced. And, as the ep demonstrates, Kirk has a type. He's powerfully, instantly attracted to Rayna, because at this point he's very accustomed to loving emotionally remote genius scientist types; they're the ones he knows how to love best. He's been loving on Spock for years by this point. And Rayna is an unblemished, undamaged version of Spock, without his bitterness or emotional scars – an innocent Spock, unspoiled and pure and open-hearted. Of course he falls for her; she's total JT catnip. (Rayna herself is, I think, a victim of sexism in casting, costuming, direction, and filming. They went for Princess Space Barbie when they should have been thinking Christine De Pisan or the young Elizabeth Tudor or Hypatia. I find that the whole thing works better if I mentally sub in Drew Barrymore and her Da Vinci fairy godfather from Ever After, and then make Drew Barrymore a robot who dies because she learns to love.)
The show overall tends to occupy Kirk's point of view more than Spock's; Kirk is us and Spock is always kind of going to be them. We see a lot of Kirk's gentle (and sometimes not-so-gentle) attempts to win Spock's affections, and in the push-pull of their relationship we tend to be pulling alongside Kirk: come on, Spock, open up, come closer. We want love for Spock. But of course love can also genuinely be difficult to deal with. Spock's explanation of Rayna's dilemma (“The joys of love made her human, but the agonies of love destroyed her”) outlines the horns of his own, here: we're coming down to the end of the show, and Spock seems to be feeling the press of the timeline. Kirk's friendship and support and acceptance have encouraged him to start to reconcile himself to his capacity for humanity and desire and need, but as Spock's panicky extremism in ST:TMP will later show, he's not completely square with himself yet. He's still fundamentally afraid that the agonies of love are going to destroy him – and that's not, I think, an entirely boundless fear, or one that it's not possible to sympathize with. In this episode we see Rayna killed by love, and later Kirk crushed by it – and if Kirk can't survive love, what the fuck chance does poor Spock have?
It's one of the things that makes K/S such an intoxicating ship: the way that Kirk loves at Spock, challenging him to resist being engulfed by the tide of absolute acceptance, trust, and affection that Kirk directs at him. In one way, I think that I would do anything to be loved like that, to receive that kind of active validation from another human being, to be the focus of that much care. But in another way it's kind of a scary thought: I would do anything. It would be terrifying, because it would feel so good. You could risk losing yourself in that kind of love, I think. You could give up everything. But one of the other cool things this ep in particular does is to open up the idea that Spock also loves his Vulcan heritage, that he doesn't cleave to Vulcan just because he was brutalized as a child into hating his own humanity, although that's certainly part of it. But Spock also really does love Vulcan: the place, the desert, the nonviolence and ethics that characterize its philosophy, the tranquility and awareness that characterize its art and spirituality. Rayna dies because she loves both her (admittedly incestuous, and tangentially can I say that I really like the semi-Tempest vibe they've got going here with the hidden sorcerer and his beautiful daughter thing?) father-figure Flint and the excitement, passion, and activity represented by her attraction to JTK; Spock is likewise torn between the joys of his life at Kirk's side and the home life that Kirk really does kind of threaten through no fault of his own. Rayna allows us to see the impact of being on the receiving end of Jim Kirk's loving, especially for emotionally remote genius scientist types. Watching Rayna's passion for Kirk first liberate and then destroy her, Spock is seeing his own nightmare scenario play out.
The final scene, back on the Enterprise, is gloriously fucked-up and ambivalent and inchoate, and it's the one moment when this episode really pulls it together and gets its Trek on. McCoy speaks very deliberately the whole time, consciously manipulating Spock; we're at the end of this show, and McCoy knows that the word love is written in Spock's book, because he's seen him go through a hell of a lot for it. Instead of confronting Spock, McCoy prods him into processing what's happened by indirectly reminding Spock of the heights of love's highs, encouraging him to believe that love can be worth the pain, prodding him to stay open to love even though he's afraid. I don't see how you could possibly read this scene as anything but McCoy playing slash yenta, daring Spock to keep letting Kirk love him, and to love Kirk back – although I'm not entirely sure what to do with McCoy's exit line (“I wish he could forget her”). His delivery becomes less careful, more impulsive – I don't think he's manipulating Spock anymore, he's slipped into speaking his mind straight up, without ulterior motive. I can think of three things McCoy could have been wishing for: first, simply, for the episode to not have happened, for Kirk in particular to not have been forced to face up to the harsher realities of love; second, for Spock to make Kirk forget his sadness over Rayna's loss by returning his love and care; or third, for Spock to do exactly what he does, which is to remove the memory from Kirk's mind. That is, I can't decide if Spock's fulfillment of McCoy's wish is irony, or obedience.
What is undeniably heartbreaking and fucked up, though, is that I think that Spock would have done the same thing in either the second or the third above cases; the best way Spock can think of here to act on his love for Kirk is to nonconsensually wipe his mind blank of the entire experience. Clearly, Spock doesn't think that it's better to have loved and lost than better loved at all. It's obvious when he initiates the meld that he's acting out of an impulse of extreme tenderness, trying to give Kirk the best of what he has to offer in comfort and in solace. Which either means that Spock doesn't see his love as something that he can give Kirk, or that he doesn't see it as something Kirk would value. Spock thinks, in this moment, that he is most valuable to his Captain and his friend as a sin-eater, shouldering the burden of unethical, merciful, action so that Kirk can find peaceful oblivion. My pet Emily Dickinson line, “The heart asks pleasure first, and then, excuse from pain, and then, those little anodynes which deaden suffering,” seems very applicable here; Spock's heart isn't asking, or giving, pleasure first anymore. And so, ultimately, McCoy's prodding at Spock's emotional reserve only serves to further isolate him, by giving Spock a rationale to wipe out any of the insights into his own fears and hopes that Kirk might have gained through their meeting with Rayna.
princessofgeeks* - I've been getting back into Classic Trek. I've been sort of vibrating back and forth between Voyager and TOS, happy as a pig in clover to be back in this fandom. I love being in this fandom. There's Voyager talk coming up, but right now I seem to be writing kind of a lot about TOS episodes? I blabbed about 'Where No Man' in PoG's comments, and I seem to have produced a very long analysis of 'Requiem for Methuselah.' idek.Admittedly, this isn't a very good episode. Shatner's more than usually hammy, the guest actors aren't good either, and Spock and McCoy spend weird amounts of time standing around like bumps on logs doing nothing as the plot unfolds around them. The set decoration is appalling, and causes the Da Vinci reveal to come way more out of nowhere than it needs to – reimagine the episode's mise en scene as more authentically developing out of the renaissance, the art on the walls more obviously in that tradition or with that lineage, the costuming as a believable development of Italian renaissance fashion – even the names, which are terrible (although it's a very cute touch that Rayna gives her surname as Capek, presumably referencing science fiction writer Karel Capek, who coined the word “robot”); if the pair were Romola and Fiorentino instead of Rayna and Flint I think that twist would feel more comfortable. There's also a thematic issue, in that they need to be telling a story about a man with such a boundless curiosity that he wanted to live forever so that he would never have to stop learning, who eventually began to find himself wearing down and growing tired – but through their direction and acting choices failing to make either Flint or Rayna come across as remotely curious. Their ennui goes up to eleven. So I have a hard time believing that Rayna actually has all those degrees, because she just doesn't seem to give a shit about doing much – she isn't constantly reading, or rushing off to check up on all of her active experiments, or even particularly curious about the alien life forms that turn up in her home. I have a hard time believing that Flint built Rayna, because he seems so indifferent to her, and to robotics, and to building things. Spock and McCoy's unresponsive passivity throughout the ep, while uncharacteristic for them, is very much characteristic of the episode's take on intellectual activity and personal engagement. There's no a whole lot of boldly going here.
Except, that is, for the final scene back on the Enterprise, which is one of the most graceful, elegant, arresting bits in all of Trek.
Buried under all its poor execution, there's actually a really good story driving this episode. They don't make it easy to see, but it all falls into place if you take Rayna as a Spock-analogue. There's a move toward setting them up as mirrors early on, through Rayna's initial interest in Spock as a Vulcan, and through her request to talk physics with him. TNG later works the parallels between robots and Vulcans; here, Rayna is tremendously smart but emotionally unengaged and unexperienced. And, as the ep demonstrates, Kirk has a type. He's powerfully, instantly attracted to Rayna, because at this point he's very accustomed to loving emotionally remote genius scientist types; they're the ones he knows how to love best. He's been loving on Spock for years by this point. And Rayna is an unblemished, undamaged version of Spock, without his bitterness or emotional scars – an innocent Spock, unspoiled and pure and open-hearted. Of course he falls for her; she's total JT catnip. (Rayna herself is, I think, a victim of sexism in casting, costuming, direction, and filming. They went for Princess Space Barbie when they should have been thinking Christine De Pisan or the young Elizabeth Tudor or Hypatia. I find that the whole thing works better if I mentally sub in Drew Barrymore and her Da Vinci fairy godfather from Ever After, and then make Drew Barrymore a robot who dies because she learns to love.)
The show overall tends to occupy Kirk's point of view more than Spock's; Kirk is us and Spock is always kind of going to be them. We see a lot of Kirk's gentle (and sometimes not-so-gentle) attempts to win Spock's affections, and in the push-pull of their relationship we tend to be pulling alongside Kirk: come on, Spock, open up, come closer. We want love for Spock. But of course love can also genuinely be difficult to deal with. Spock's explanation of Rayna's dilemma (“The joys of love made her human, but the agonies of love destroyed her”) outlines the horns of his own, here: we're coming down to the end of the show, and Spock seems to be feeling the press of the timeline. Kirk's friendship and support and acceptance have encouraged him to start to reconcile himself to his capacity for humanity and desire and need, but as Spock's panicky extremism in ST:TMP will later show, he's not completely square with himself yet. He's still fundamentally afraid that the agonies of love are going to destroy him – and that's not, I think, an entirely boundless fear, or one that it's not possible to sympathize with. In this episode we see Rayna killed by love, and later Kirk crushed by it – and if Kirk can't survive love, what the fuck chance does poor Spock have?
It's one of the things that makes K/S such an intoxicating ship: the way that Kirk loves at Spock, challenging him to resist being engulfed by the tide of absolute acceptance, trust, and affection that Kirk directs at him. In one way, I think that I would do anything to be loved like that, to receive that kind of active validation from another human being, to be the focus of that much care. But in another way it's kind of a scary thought: I would do anything. It would be terrifying, because it would feel so good. You could risk losing yourself in that kind of love, I think. You could give up everything. But one of the other cool things this ep in particular does is to open up the idea that Spock also loves his Vulcan heritage, that he doesn't cleave to Vulcan just because he was brutalized as a child into hating his own humanity, although that's certainly part of it. But Spock also really does love Vulcan: the place, the desert, the nonviolence and ethics that characterize its philosophy, the tranquility and awareness that characterize its art and spirituality. Rayna dies because she loves both her (admittedly incestuous, and tangentially can I say that I really like the semi-Tempest vibe they've got going here with the hidden sorcerer and his beautiful daughter thing?) father-figure Flint and the excitement, passion, and activity represented by her attraction to JTK; Spock is likewise torn between the joys of his life at Kirk's side and the home life that Kirk really does kind of threaten through no fault of his own. Rayna allows us to see the impact of being on the receiving end of Jim Kirk's loving, especially for emotionally remote genius scientist types. Watching Rayna's passion for Kirk first liberate and then destroy her, Spock is seeing his own nightmare scenario play out.
The final scene, back on the Enterprise, is gloriously fucked-up and ambivalent and inchoate, and it's the one moment when this episode really pulls it together and gets its Trek on. McCoy speaks very deliberately the whole time, consciously manipulating Spock; we're at the end of this show, and McCoy knows that the word love is written in Spock's book, because he's seen him go through a hell of a lot for it. Instead of confronting Spock, McCoy prods him into processing what's happened by indirectly reminding Spock of the heights of love's highs, encouraging him to believe that love can be worth the pain, prodding him to stay open to love even though he's afraid. I don't see how you could possibly read this scene as anything but McCoy playing slash yenta, daring Spock to keep letting Kirk love him, and to love Kirk back – although I'm not entirely sure what to do with McCoy's exit line (“I wish he could forget her”). His delivery becomes less careful, more impulsive – I don't think he's manipulating Spock anymore, he's slipped into speaking his mind straight up, without ulterior motive. I can think of three things McCoy could have been wishing for: first, simply, for the episode to not have happened, for Kirk in particular to not have been forced to face up to the harsher realities of love; second, for Spock to make Kirk forget his sadness over Rayna's loss by returning his love and care; or third, for Spock to do exactly what he does, which is to remove the memory from Kirk's mind. That is, I can't decide if Spock's fulfillment of McCoy's wish is irony, or obedience.
What is undeniably heartbreaking and fucked up, though, is that I think that Spock would have done the same thing in either the second or the third above cases; the best way Spock can think of here to act on his love for Kirk is to nonconsensually wipe his mind blank of the entire experience. Clearly, Spock doesn't think that it's better to have loved and lost than better loved at all. It's obvious when he initiates the meld that he's acting out of an impulse of extreme tenderness, trying to give Kirk the best of what he has to offer in comfort and in solace. Which either means that Spock doesn't see his love as something that he can give Kirk, or that he doesn't see it as something Kirk would value. Spock thinks, in this moment, that he is most valuable to his Captain and his friend as a sin-eater, shouldering the burden of unethical, merciful, action so that Kirk can find peaceful oblivion. My pet Emily Dickinson line, “The heart asks pleasure first, and then, excuse from pain, and then, those little anodynes which deaden suffering,” seems very applicable here; Spock's heart isn't asking, or giving, pleasure first anymore. And so, ultimately, McCoy's prodding at Spock's emotional reserve only serves to further isolate him, by giving Spock a rationale to wipe out any of the insights into his own fears and hopes that Kirk might have gained through their meeting with Rayna.