Janice Rand in Trek Lit.- Possible Spoilers

I've been reading some more recent Trek novels lately, set in the post TMP era. There was a mention of Rand leaving the ship during the original 5 year mission because she was pregnant. She had a daughter that died at age 2.* After that she went back to Starfleet and was the transporter chief of the Enterprise in TMP. I'm assuming she got pregnant on board the ship. Who was the father?

*I think I've heard this about Rand's daughter before, maybe in one of the movie novelizations.

 

That story is related in Peter David's The Captain's Daughter, the novel about Demora Sulu. The father isn't named, but the implication is pretty clear.

 

Pretty clear and pretty unbelievable; it's implied to be Kirk, if I remember right, despite Kirk always shown as taking every effort to keep himself apart romantically and sexually from the crew. (There was one exception, Helen Noel, but in a deleted scene in "Dagger of the Mind" it established that at that Christmas party Kirk thought she was a civilian on board temporarily and she didn't bother to correct him.)

David's presentation of Kirk did always lean more towards the cultural perception than what we saw in the show, though.

 

If I remember right the theory is that Rand got raped by Kirk's evil side when his good and evil halves were split and that was how she was impregnated. I don't think Kirk ever knew who the father was though.

 

My impression was that it was supposed to havebeen the evil Kirk too. I also had the impression the child inherited a genetic instability that led to her death from the half Kirk.
I've read that another novel explicitly named another father but I haven't read that one yet.

 

Which is impossible, since we saw the entire assault and it didn't get beyond a forced kiss before Rand scratched his cheek, escaped into the corridor, and called for help.

The Captain's Daughter never gives a clear hint that it was Kirk, just that it was a fellow crewmember that Rand believed had a "great destiny" and who was dead at the time of the book (after the Generations prologue). There's certainly no suggestion in the book that the pregnancy was the result of rape.

In Ex Machina, I referred back to Rand's pregnancy but tried to make it clear that it was not Kirk, because that just makes no sense. After all, first-season Kirk in particular was determined to avoid any romantic entanglements with his crew. Rand needed to beg him to even look at her legs (in one of the series' most sexist moments). Although looking back at that scene in ExM now, I realize I didn't make it as explicit as I meant to -- I just say she had an affair with a crewmate and left to spare him from the resultant scandal. Although I don't think one would generally use the word "crewmate" to refer to one's commanding officer; it seems to imply more of a peer than a superior. And the "affair" part implies it was ongoing and perhaps that the crewmate was married.

 

My impression was that evil Kirk forced himself on Rand and that Evil Kirk was the father too.

 

I wonder how Kirk would react if he found out. (I can only assume Janice didn't tell him.)

Although it brings to mind the question, does Kirk remember everything each side (good and bad) did after he was reintegrated? Maybe he already knows...

 

Yes, Ex Machina was the one I have read recently. And I was actually wondering that if it was meant to be evil Kirk from when he was split into a good and evil half.

 

Absolutely not. I can't imagine where you could've gotten that idea, since I explicitly said (in Rand's own POV) that she'd had an affair with a crewmate and had left to spare him from a scandal. No woman who'd been raped would ever describe it as an affair. My intent was to rule out Kirk altogether, and I just regret that I didn't make it even clearer.

 

About the only reason I could think of that would rule out Janice's pregnancy being a result of evil Kirk forcing himself on her (we never see the whole scene where he does this, IIRC. And even so, he could have caught up with her later, couldn't he?), was that - and this is assuming birth control in Trek's time is 100% effective - if Janice had been raped, she might well be too ashamed to talk about it to anyone, including the medical staff.

 

That would be okay from a purely in-universe perspective at least, but it would be disgusting from the perspective that this is a narrative. It would essentially be writing Kirk as a rapist; the separated parts of his personality were explicitly supposed to still be him.

Even just the sexual assault is discomforting enough that I avoid that episode whenever possible, but making that narrative choice would just be beyond the pale.

 

This is a bizarrely common misconception. Come on, it was 1966. Network censors would barely allow the acknowledgment that consensual sex had happened between two characters, let along nonconsensual. Good grief, except for Gomez and Morticia Addams, every married couple on TV still slept in adjoining twin beds. There was no way in hell that the censors would've allowed the scene to go out with even the implication that a successful rape had happened off-camera.

And it's easy to pop in the DVD or watch the episode on Netflix or read the transcript and see that, yes, we absolutely did see the entire scene and Janice's uniform didn't even get loosened. Evil Kirk forced a kiss, then pushed Rand to the floor, then she scratched his face, got away, ran to the door, and called for help from Fisher. Evil Kirk ran after Fisher, leaving Rand behind in her quarters, and knocked him out. Logically, she would've immediately locked her door, and it would've been only moments before security arrived.

I can't believe that any fan would so glibly, cavalierly talk about the possibility of a major character being raped by another major character as if it were nothing more than a way to resolve a minor continuity question. I find it prurient and tasteless to even offer that speculation.

 

Hmm. I wonder what he thought her Starfleet uniform meant, then.

 

You know that that "flashback" was supposed to be the false memory Helen planted through the neutralizer and not the actual events, right?

 

Exactly. First-season Kirk was so adamantly opposed to any hint of romance with his crew that he was embarrassed to realize he'd even just danced with a woman under his command. He wouldn't even have done that if he'd known she was part of his crew. That's how completely absurd it is to imagine he would've had an affair with Rand.

Now, by the second season, Kirk's characterization had been eroded somewhat by what I presume to have been network pressure to make him more like a typical womanizing '60s action lead, to the point that he was shown flirting with non-Mirror Marlena Moreau at the end of "Mirror, Mirror." But even that was no more than just striking up a conversation. And first-season Kirk would never have dared to be even slightly unprofessional with a woman under his command.

 

I'm curious, Christopher -- If you were so against the idea of Kirk impregnating Rand (which I agree with, BTW), why acknowledge Rand's daughter at all? It just seems strange to me to use part of another author's idea just to discount the other part.

People don't usually attend parties in their work clothes. If Noel was at the science lab Christmas party, she almost certainly wasn't on duty and wasn't in her uniform. If she was a recent transfer to the ship, it'd certainly be understandable if Kirk didn't know her by sight yet.

And since we never hear anything that Kirk says to the regular Marlena after their introduction, any "flirting" only exists in the individual viewer's mind. All we can really say for sure is that Kirk took a second look at the notepad report he'd signed a moment before. For all we know, Kirk remembered his proper place right after he approached Marlena and he grabbed the notepad and muttered some follow-up question as a quick cover.

EDIT: I just remembered a couple of first season examples of Kirk romancing a woman on the bridge. He's quite flirty with Lenore Karidian when she's requesting transport in "The Conscience of the King" and he lip-locks with Areel Shaw at the end of "Court-Martial" (even making a joke about it leading to a possible breakdown in discipline).

Of course, neither one of those women was under Kirk's command, so I guess we'll give him a pass on those.

 

Speaking of that episode, how does one justify Spock's creepy response to Rand about the impostor's "interesting qualities"? The idea of Spock glibly referencing a sexual assault to the victim was repulsive.

 

I think that was part of the early TOS attempt to give Spock an "alien" sense of humor. They quickly realized it wasn't working, and they dropped it.

I'm sure the very different 1960s attitudes towards sex and sexual assault played into it, too.