Kirk Your Enthusiasm (8)

What do you think?

1. Kirk was always very hands-on with the Enterprise – he knew how to man every single bridge station, and was definitely competent and comfortable with at least some physical repair work (witness The Doomsday Machine…which, incidentally, involved Decker Sr.) I always had the impression that he preferred not to interfere much in the engineering section because Scotty was just as possessive as he was of the ship, and for that very reason he knew he could trust him with her.

   So yeah, I think Kirk’s a lot more conversant with engineering than ‘attractive new magnetic bottle technicians’.

2. There might be a structural imperative wave keeping Kirk in the narrative and at the franchise’s steering wheel…though he was fruitfully refracted into Chris Pine for the 2009 reloop and Patrick Stewart took the con definitively for his generation and even mine. I seem to remember that Roddenberry’s unproduced ideas for a reunion in the mid-1970s included Spock sinecured back at the Vulcan Science Academy, Bones turned veterinarian ‘cuz “they were the only patients with any sense he’d ever treated,” and Scotty becoming “an alcoholic”; I can’t seem to recall where Kirk was in this scheme, which may well mean that the universe only wants me to remember him in charge and he found some trick to keep bending his way back…

3. That *is just how it is! Kirk reminds me in many ways of Ernest Shackleton; “lost at sea,” unless he’s back on his ship, having adventures and running the show. Kirk (unlike Spock) wasn’t happy on the happy planet. Kirk wasn’t happy being kicked upstairs to Admiral. Kirk wasn’t even happy in the Nexus, which was by definition the answer to everyone’s dreams. Kirk was only happy back in [his] captain’s chair.

   In a way, that first Trek film was an corporate take on fan fiction: an opportunity not as much to extend an increasingly profitable franchise (although it was that), as a chance to spend time with old friends in new stories.

4. Yes — great call, Peggy, it’s fanfic. For better or worse.

   PS: My brother the tall ship sailor says that it’s common knowledge that ships and sailors alike rot on dry land. Better to stay at sea, forever.

5. Not sure The Motion Picture should be ennobled by comparison to fanfic; I liked everything in the ’70s “New Voyages” paperbacks better than what Paramount came up with for their big-screen try — but I’d agree that that first flick sparked the true spirit of fanfic by making the faithful rise up en masse and vote for the way they knew it could be done better — which, from Wrath of Khan onward, more or less, it was…

6. I was thinking about Shackleton also, both in the sense of his foundering in dry-dock and in his need to be engaged in a desperate rescue situation.

   I think Stephen Collins had almost as thankless a task as Decker, in trying to fill the Captain’s chair, so he was drawn up to be supplanted and bland, begrudging, competence is about as well as he could do under the circumstance.

   Roddenberry was hardly unique in recasting his space ship and crew along nautical lines (notwithstanding the “Wagon Train” quote attributed to him). In some ways, however, the Enterprise crew, while on the bridge, operated more like a bomber pilot crew during WW II than a Napoleonic era ship’s crew. Certainly Kirk demonstrated the cool efficiency under fire, and the component functions of the Enterprise crew had something of that practiced air. But one of the future-retro charms of TOS was the underplayed naval theme, which worked less well, IMHO, when it was exaggerated during the Picard command. But in his far-reaching command over his ship and the way he loomed like a benevolent demi-god over the lives of her crew, Kirk, in my memory of him, puts me in mind of Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubry. A bomber crew develops esteem, affection and strength from a good captain pilot, but the Captain of a large sailing vessel is the omnipresent, omnipotent head of a tight community.

   One of the pleasures of TOS was the way it conflated the camaraderie of people serving in combat, with the genuine affection and comfort of mutual friendships formed over years of living and serving together, another way in which the naval model fits better than one drawn from aviation history. No one in prior history logged as many hours and days on an airplane than did common, close-knit sailors living together, encapsulated and contained on board a ship, where there is us and the rest of the world/universe. There is a scene in “Apollo 13” when Lovell speaks of what a good ship those men had. I wonder if it is accurate? If not, it worked dramatically.

   Spock’s particular, though often subordinate, science mission also fits better within the naval tradition, as does the general imperative to seek out and explore. It’s interesting to recall that at the time TOS aired, NASA was in its Mercury/early Apollo phase, and for that generation of astronauts, it was still military aviation flying first, and all of this exploring and science stuff as an add-on (and for good reasons at the time). The roles of scientist/explorer for the early astronauts were sometimes awkward fits. To the extent they can be considered still actually active after Apollo 11, reality would follow fiction in the way the later astronauts embraced those roles, and the way NASA chose its crews.

7. Walter Koenig, in his deliciously paranoid film diary (Chekhov’s Enterprise) wondered whether Collins was being groomed to replace an ageing Captain.

   Of course Walter gets rather anxious, his new role as Security Chief has a woeful imperative, and, as he explains at great length, he thinks that his prematurely grey and abundant body hair might also be cause to send him into oblivion. It’s a good book..

8. “That’s just how it is.” Unequivocal. Like Kirk. Fire phasers.

9. But Kirk is an equivocal swan beneath the alpha positivist interior….his legs are going spindly, twisting round and forming odd plastic shapes. His dedication inevitably becomes a neurotic fixation, and that’s what makes your legs perform like Daffy Duck’s. Trust me.

10. Infinite inadvertent ballet positions in infinite combinations, Greg. Go not gently into that black hole, Walter — go with a high-pitched scream.

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