I think Kirk was in "Command mode" where he's not going to let his personal feelings interfere with his job!
Spoilers Strange New Worlds 1x02 - "Children of The Comet"
- Thread starter Mudd
- Start date
Just call it magic, then.
I can accept this, I mean, they were in the middle of a crisis. But not so sure about the fact that at the end of the episode he started making jokes (while they were still in orbit on the planet where his brother died). Couldn't he at least wait until they were in warp before he started being a comedian?
Kirk does sort of walk off to be by himself for a few moments after he realizes his brother is dead. Then he pulls himself together.
Kirk had to compartmentalize the death of his brother at the time- they were in a no-shit crisis. I'm sure he mourned later, in private and off-screen. Which is how it ought to work.
In Disco mode, half the episode would have been taken up with him crying to Spock or Bones over his dead brother and barely able to function.
In Disco mode, half the episode would have been taken up with him crying to Spock or Bones over his dead brother and barely able to function.
If that works for you, go ahead! Just like the magically growing comet!
That's basically what I was refering to. It's not that he's not hurt. It's that he has to soldier on, and he does.
Oh, was this what you thought I was saying?
I didn't say the comet changed sizes. I just said it was a very big one. Or you could call it something else. Something very, very big composed mostly of ices, with some tech slapped onto it. Something that looks very much like a comet, but bigger. A super-comet... or... humongo-comet? Humoncomet?
Agreed. But they often had to have the jokey, feel good end to an episode. TOS but other series of the era as well.
Maybe they should have played/sang "Sabotage".
A
Amaris
Guest
This. Kirk seems the type (loosely) to compartmentalize, to understand that what he's experienced is a tragedy, but it has to wait until the mission is over and the lives of his crew aren't hanging in the balance.
Ooh, are you thinking what I'm thinking? They should bring back the "comedy music" bits at the end of episodes when characters joke around.
Mourned later after the crisis is over? Sure. In private? Sure. Off-screen? No. That's the sort of thing that ought to be part of the narrative.
I don't know about "barely able to function," but having an episode with a subplot dedicated to Kirk grieving over his brother's loss would have been a good thing. Grief is an intense, long-term experience. It's artistic dishonesty to portray it as something that you are torn up about for 120 seconds and then never deal with again. The very format of 1960s U.S. dramatic television prevented TOS from being artistically honest in its depiction of such events, and that's a shame. It prevented TOS from reaching the full heights of artistic accomplishment for which it had the potential.
For whatever it's worth, the Crucible novel trilogy by David R. George III, published in 2006 for the 40th anniversary of Star Trek, posited that after the deaths of Edith Keeler and his brother, one after the other, Kirk spent the entire rest of TOS in a state of chronic depression.
* * *
My crush on Jess Bush continues unabated. Chapel's scene with Spock was wonderful. And Celia Gooding is absolutely delightful. She works to capture a bit of Nichelle Nichols's performance while bringing her own special something to the table as well, and she's given the opportunity to do more in one episode than Nichelle got the opportunity to do in twenty-five years of playing Uhura.
My only real complaint with "Children of the Comet" is that it falls prey to a bad habit the writers on DIS fall into fairly often -- having characters talk about their pasts instead of dramatizing it. I wish "Children of the Comet" had started with Uhura not quite being able to articulate why she wasn't sure if Starfleet was her long-term career goal, spent the episode intercutting with flashbacks to her life in Kenya, put the flashback to the loss of her family right before the "all is lost" moment, and then intercut scenes of her and Spock figuring out how to stop the comet from crashing into the planet with a flashback of her starting the process of moving on with her life and enrolling in the Academy, with an epilogue where she confesses what happened to her family to Spock and then ties in the resolution of the comet crisis with her starting to have resolution over her family's deaths. Show, don't tell.
In fairness, that might have been prohibitively expensive, since this episode was clearly a visual spectacle and they probably needed to minimize the need to construct new sets or shot on location after building the comet set and shooting on location in those desert sequences.
I have the perfect explanation! Kirk is some kind of sociopath! Do you remember when in The Ultimate Computer after ships are lost and hundreds are dead (killed by his starship), he makes jokes about computer? He is simply incapable to grieve like the rest of us.
I'm here for adventure, but I'm not here for psychologically dishonest portrayals of humanity. We need some moping, because moping is a part of life. I agree with you that Star Trek is not exactly Amour, but it needs to be more than Buck Rogers in the 25th Century too.
One of the things I really like about Star Trek: Strange New Worlds so far is that it is essentially doing with Pike what I wish TOS had done with Kirk after Edith and Sam died -- it is depicting Pike as going through what amounts to a long-term grieving process over the inevitability of his own impending fate. He's still getting up and going to work and he's mostly keeping it to himself with some help from his two closest friends, Una and Spock. But he's clearly going through a lot of pain and trauma, and it's not going away any time soon. SNW is doing an excellent job balancing this with its adventure plots, just like DIS has in its depictions of the grief and trauma its characters have gone through.
The resemblance is interesting, considering the episode was also about communicating with music.Wow. I also had no idea. It looked CGI. That takes the alien emissary from the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the next level, and this sort of animatronic technology was already pretty impressive by 1977.
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