In “Spock Amok,” the crew takes a much-needed shore leave while the Enterprise puts in for repairs at Starbase One. Hijinks ensue. Written by Henry Alonso Myers & Robin Wasserman, directed by Rachel Leiterman.
Mark Turetsky: Will, I’ve been feeling like lately we’ve been getting our signals crossed, so I thought it might be cool, just to be more effective co-reviewers, if we did a Freaky Friday-style body swap. Sound good?
Will Nevin: I have never not committed to a bit, Mark. How we gonna make this happen? Wish in a fountain? Ask one of the eight billion genies around?
Mark: They aren’t cheap, but I’ve hired a Vulcan medium. I took some money out of our expense fund. Anything for the good readers of ComicsXF.
Will: Ugh. Now I’m getting cold feet. I’ve seen Search for Spock — you don’t want to mess around with a fella’s katra. Who knows what might happen?!
Mark: Too late! It’s done. Now I’m Mark, but typing out of Will’s body. And you’re Will, but you’re typing out of Mark’s body. I hope our readers can keep up.
Will: Let’s wrap this up quick. I don’t trust you to get in my miles tomorrow.
Young Vulcans in Love
Mark: I’m going to be blunt upfront: this episode’s introductory scene is precisely attuned to what I want out of a Star Trek. I love, love, love “Amok Time,” I listen to Gerald Fried’s “The Ritual / Ancient Battle / 2nd Kroykah” as often as I can, my spouse even screens the episode in her university science fiction class in the unit on Orientalism. The bell-banners, the lirpas. It had it all. I’ve even used clips of it in my video Hannukah cards. So I was ready to love this episode.
Will: A lot going on here, isn’t it? The cold open foreshadows both Spock’s internal conflict and “Amok Time” — the latter in a way much more palatable than some of the other nods to Trek lore that we’ve seen in this Alex Kurtzman-era of the franchise. When I see “comedy of manners” in an official episode description, I’m primed to not like it because I’m a grumpy old man.
But they won me over, Mark. This was silly (at times) without insulting my intelligence, like, say, “Stardust City Rag.” And there was a point to all of it. SNW continues to do no (major) wrong.
Mark: I’m afraid I’m on the other side of this: I love when Trek does comedy. “The Trouble With Tribbles,” “Trials and Tribble-Ations,” “Qpid” (the Robin Hood episode), “The Magnificent Ferengi,” those are my touchstones for Trek comedy. And just as a quick digression, it’s worth noting that Roddenberry didn’t want broad comedy anywhere near Trek. It was only when he was off filming a Robin Hood TV pilot, Gene L. Coon set about making comedic episodes, including “The Trouble With Tribbles,” and when Roddenberry returned, they had a private meeting, after which Coon quit. To my mind, Coon is very much the unsung hero of the creation of Trek as we know it, as he was also (apparently) responsible for a lot of the social commentary of the Original Series era.
Will: I am not a merry man, Mark! But in seriousness, I’m truly not against Trek comedy — when it works. I think maybe I was just apprehensive because SNW has been so good. And, also, Roddenberry was so bad at his job. How terrible it must have been to humor him as a studio executive.
Mark: All that said, I didn’t end up loving this episode (TWIST!).
Will: It’s the least great episode to date, I agree. But there’s still a lot here to enjoy. When SNW misses, it doesn’t miss by much.
Mark: I think my major issue is that so many of the jokes didn’t land. Ethan Peck and Gia Sandhu do great work as Spock and T’Pring, but I’m not sure if they have the comedic chops to pull this off. Or, at very least, their Vulcan affectations just worked against making this really land for me. Maybe it’s because comedy requires such a commitment to one’s emotions? I don’t know. I could see it working better with zippy, His Girl Friday style screwball delivery.
Will: Playing a zany Vulcan sounds like an actor’s nightmare. The scene with Pike as they’re struggling to tell him/not tell him epitomizes your central problem — at its best, it’s cringe comedy, which is not my bag. But, god, Anson Mount would have turned in the performance of his lifetime if he had somehow gotten mixed into this.
Mark: I also think it’s that, as Vulcans, T’Pring and Spock are both drawing on Leonard Nimoy’s foundational portrayal, and so they’re just not distinct enough, performance-wise. I pointed out the huge range of energies of the different performers in the main cast in our review of the pilot episode, and there’s a version of this episode where everyone gets body-swapped that would have been amazing (Farscape did it to wonderful effect).
Okay, let’s move past our objections. I do love that T’Pring, in this portrayal, comes across as an absolutely formidable person. I keep feeling like she embodies this Thor Ragnarok meme:
Will: That’s good meme-ery there, my man. T’Pring doesn’t want to be married for the sake of being married; she doesn’t want Spock (or to be wanted by Spock) for that simple fact either. She wants a partner — an equal. The best parts of this admittedly goofy story spoke to those central truths and were relatable for people who’ve been in a relationship that is/was missing those core qualities.
Mark: One thing I have some questions about is T’Pring’s job as an El-Keshtanktil, a Vulcan cop. When they talk about her job, she talks about bringing Vulcan criminals back onto the path of logic. It sounds, at first, like it’s an enlightened form of law enforcement. But it implies that the law is the ultimate logic, and subsequently that crime is a rejection of logic. I am certain that as a lawyer you have some thoughts about this.
Will: What is the law if not logic applied to society as a whole? It is a little…sketchy…that most (all?) of the Vulcans we’ve seen who’ve rejected logic are framed as criminals, unbalanced or unbalanced criminals. (Looking at you, Sybok.) There has to be room in Vulcan society for people to say, “Nah, that’s not for me.”
Mark: Let’s not forget that the Romulans are basically Vulcans who rejected logic, went off and formed their own society and became, let’s just say, not the nicest civilization.
And there’s also the development that when logic fails, Spock (in T’Pring’s body), just punches Barjan T’Or unconscious and they arrest him. So, is he just going to Vulcan Jail? Are they going to try to force him to become logical as his rehabilitation?
Will: If you scratch enough of the shine off of Vulcan philosophy, you get to some flavor of totalitarianism…which is maybe why you don’t get a lot of answers for your questions.
Mark: They did a great job on Discovery of showing that problem with Michael Burnam’s childhood. At her school, when measuring how emotional she still was, they’d just show her flashes of her dead parents, and, like… that’s really bad. That’s child abuse bad.
How did you think Nurse Chapel figured into this part of the story? I love that they’re developing Chapel and Spock’s relationship as friends (as we saw her pining away for Spock back in TOS). This is a lot more nuanced than that characterization of her character.
Will: Chapel was an x-factor in this chapter of the Spock/T’Pring relationship but also played her part as a genuinely concerned friend and explainer of human emotions — you know, the thing Troi did for Data approximately a thousand times since Geordi was almost as aloof. And we also got some pretty strong signals that Chapel is queer, which opens her up to love (and heartbreak!) all over the ship.
Mark: I would say that was an outright confirmation that she’s queer. It’s also nice to see her outside of the context of being the nurse with the cutting-edge medical treatments. She gets to be a full person in this episode. She seems to have the biggest life outside of work of any of the crew. Unlike a certain pair who remain on the Enterprise…
Working Vacation
Mark: La’an and Una stick around to work outside of the hustle and bustle of active duty life aboard ship. They set out to prove that, as Seymour Skinner put it, it’s not that they’re out of touch, it’s the children who are wrong. And while they’re both workaholics, I thought that they worked well as a comedic team here.
Will: Mark, you want to know one of my favorite episodes of any flavor of Trek?
Mark: Tell me!
Will: “Starship Mine” is nothing but prim and proper Jean-Luc Picard tearing ass across an empty Enterprise and taking out a whole mess of space terrorists. It’s stupid in all the right ways — and that’s what I thought we were getting here. Instead, it was “Starship Mine” but funny, and like you, I don’t have any complaints. The pair needed to work on their friendship and both could learn how to cut loose, and this was also nicely setup in the episode that featured Uhura.
But here’s a question for you: Are we seeing enough of Una making important command decisions? I’m getting a little nervous as she seems to be sidelined in many situations for one reason or another. Is it because the bridge is too crowded? Or there’s more invested in Spock as a character? Whatever the answer is, I want to see Pike rely more on Una as a sounding board and officer who can carry out command functions.
Mark: It’s true, Una has been out of commission or captured by aliens in the majority of episodes so far, with her only being a sounding board for Pike’s personal issues in “Children of the Comet,” and being thrust into command in “Ghost of Illyria.” I only hope that it’s a fluke that it’s just the run of episodes we’ve had so far that haven’t had much room for her as first officer. After all, we know precious little about, say, Ortegas or Hemmer, but I have a feeling it’s coming.
Back to this episode, I love how Leiterman takes every opportunity to highlight the difference between Romijn and Chong’s height to comedic effect, not to mention that they take on their “Enterprise Bingo” list with clinical, command-level precision and seriousness. And when they determine that it isn’t thrilling enough, they end up doing a remarkably risky spacewalk without EVA equipment. It’s all handled with (over-)serious music and cinematography.
Will: Their last scene was pretty poignant, especially in light of last week’s episode about loss and sacrifice. I hope we revisit “the scorch” — for someone to save it from the inevitable refit or really anything else.
Mark: It’ll be replaced by the time of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, I’m sure, when the ship gets a “refit” (replacement with an entirely different, bigger ship).
Will: Coming one day to Paramount+!
Radical Empathy
Mark: The final bit of this episode we should discuss is the negotiations with the R’ongovians. They’re empaths in a different sense than the Betazoids. They meet every situation with the same energy as the people they speak with. With Tellarites they’re belligerent, with Vulcans they’re logical, and with Pike they’re a certain brand of “aw shucks” hospitable. Of course, they don’t let on about that up front.
Will: It was, of course, one more occasion for Pike to be right and save the day. But that got me thinking: Is he too right too often? Kirk and Picard are both fairly flawed individuals, but Pike seems to always have the right answer and the right approach for whatever happens. I’m not complaining — he’s a central reason why this show is must-watch — but this is a different approach to writing a captain.
Mark: Yeah, it’s as if he’s got “must save the day, or some part of it, once per episode.” It’s not annoying, not yet at least, but its presence in this episode, where he isn’t a spotlighted character, has certainly put that issue on my radar.
And of course, it seems like it should be a lesson that Spock, not Pike, has learned by the end: Spock’s entire thread for the episode is the “radical empathy” motif, it’s learning to put himself in someone else’s shoes. So why not have him give the absolute candor answer to the R’ongovians? It’s not like Pike has learned something or grown as a person, it’s simply that he’s solved the puzzle.
Will: “Absolute candor,” eh? I see what you did there. Also, as much as I am loathe to criticize this show, it sure was awfully contrived that the R’ongovians wanted to talk to Spock just after he had his little brain switcheroo accident. The things that happen for the sake of plot advancement, Mark.
Mark: It’s a comedy of manners, everything is for the sake of maximum plot discomfort. Take it up with Molière or Shakespeare or one of those guys. Also, when they spoke with T’Pring/Spock, why didn’t they pick up on the underlying deception? Because, as much as Vulcans cry about not being able to lie, they do it all the time, including here. Maybe that’s why they cut their negotiations short.
Will: T’Pring passing herself off as Spock was not a lie, Mark. It was an omission.
Mark: Dammit, Will, you’re a lawyer, not a Vulcan.
Will: IDIC, LLAP.
Mark: I am once again asking you to watch Deep Space Nine. It has Ron Canada as a Klingon lawyer!
Will: Isn’t a Klingon lawyer just a disruptor?
Mark: For a Klingon lawyer, the courtroom is just another battlefield for a different type of combat.
Stray New Words
- The lack of Dr. M’Benga-related fly fishing shenanigans seems like another casualty of keeping these runtimes relatively constrained. Alas.
- Still, that hat was a masterful piece of costuming.
- Vulcan dreams are remarkably short on subtlety.
Mark Turetsky
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
