“First Vulcan to graduate at the head of her class”

Perhaps many Vulcan Space service officers got transferred to the Interpid for a special mission?

 

In the pre-TNG iteration of TOS continuity, where it seems like the Federation as we know it came into existence within the last generation or so, I would be prepared to accept that Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet / at Starfleet Academy, even given the existence of the Intrepid. I don't buy it these days, though.

 

But even back then, there was absolutely nothing in canon to suggest that Spock was the first. So where did the myth even come from? Most of the widely accepted fan lore back then that wasn't from canon came from The Making of Star Trek or the Concordance, but I can't find any hint of it in either of those. I'm bewildered that this notion ever came about in the first place.

 

Side note: Am I the only person who finds the number of Federation Councillors wearing Starfleet uniforms kind of disturbing? Constitutional officers in civilian governments shouldn't wear military uniforms -- it undermines the principle of civilian control of the military.

 

There's no proof that the uniformed officers in the TVH Council scenes actually are Federation councillors rather than some kind of Starfleet observers or witnesses waiting to testify. After all, both of the Council meetings we see involve Starfleet business -- one is Sarek and Kamarag debating Kirk's culpability in the Genesis affair, the other is the verdict of the Enterprise crew's trial. So it makes sense that there would be Starfleet representatives present to debate, testify, or observe, in addition to the Federation councillors.

It looks to me like most of the Starfleet officers there, with one or two exceptions, are in the front rows, set mostly apart from the ones in civilian attire. So that supports the idea that they represent a separate group. If they were fellow councillors, they'd probably be intermingled more with the others. And being in the front suggests they could be there to testify.

 

Good point! I like that interpretation a lot more.

 

It might just be because we never saw any other Vulcan's in Starfleet. Yes, we did get a reference to the Intrepid's Vulcan crew, that was one reference, and fans seem to be pretty quick to forget about stuff that didn't actually see happen on screen.

 

But it's not like we saw that much in the way of other Starfleet crews. And there were other Vulcans on the Mirror Enterprise, as Spock's personal guards. So it seems like it would be an odd conclusion to jump to.

And even if someone did make that assumption, the question is, how did it spread to the rest of fandom? People always talk about it as if it were a documented fact, part of the unquestioned conventional wisdom of Trek lore. Somewhere, somehow, it must have gotten written down and propagated. The question is, what's the earliest verifiable published statement of the myth?

 

I don't remember seeing it explicitly stated in of the stuff I've read.

 

On the official Star Trek website it says on Spock ( https://www.startrek.com/database_article/spock ) -- Spock was the first Vulcan to enlist in the Federation Starfleet, serving aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise under Captain Christopher Pike as a lieutenant, and later for James T. Kirk.

You think the official Star Trek website of all things would be on top of stuff like this, especially since Trek's current flagship show Discovery outright shows Terral as being in Starfleet well ahead of Spock.

 

Nah, it wouldn't. Probably ran by interns who use Google.

 

Trek fandom existed for decades before StarTrek.com did. So all the "conventional wisdom" myths would've become entrenched long before then and would've just been repeated as accepted fact -- the "ten percent of the brain" sort of thing where everyone just assumes it's true because they heard it was true and never questioned the source. There are a bunch of such myths that have only been debunked in recent years thanks to the efforts of the Fact Trek team, like the one about Trek being the first show with a second pilot or the one about it showing the first interracial kiss.

That's plausible.

 

I was poking around on Google Books about, using the search terms "first Vulcan" "Spock", and the earliest reference I could find was from Memory Prime in 1989. Of course, Google Books doesn't index things like fanzines, and there are probably plenty of official publications not indexed, too. Then in the 1990s it seems to specifically show up in a lot of Diane Carey novels.

EDIT: From searching the Internet Archive, I see two references to Spock being the first Vulcan, both from stories about Harve Bennett's Starfleet Academy film: Cinefantastique, vol. 22, no. 5, and Gross and Altman's Captains' Logs. I think that would have been pitched around 1989, so maybe it was an idea that Bennett came up with for that that filtered out into fandom from there?

EDIT EDIT: And the earliest reference I can find on Fanlore is from a 1996 fanzine.

 

1989 is pretty late in the development of conventional fan lore. An entrenched myth like this would probably have emerged in the '70s.

 

See my edit. If you can find a pre-1989 reference to the concept, I'd be happy to see it.

 

Hmm, it's possible. I just have the impression it's one of those things I used to take for granted as fact when I was younger, but I could be misremembering.

On the other hand, older documents might be less well-represented in online archives than more recent items. Although as your link shows, the Internet Archive has CFQ back to 1970, and I think its Starlog collection is pretty complete too. Does Fanlore have a good collection of older materials? If there are no references in material going that far back, then it probably is a more recent idea. Wild.

 

It's one of those facts I take for granted too. Google Books is built up from ebook editions and scans of library books, so older, fannish material is unlikely to be in it. I don't know how deep Fanlore's coverage is, and it's also dependent on people actually using the term "first Vulcan" to describe a story when writing it up.

Best of Trek seems to be in Google Books (some of the volumes at least). I know a couple forum members have read them systematically, but I just have a couple.