Did Spock ever struggle with his humanity on the original series?
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Yes, he did. It was expressed in The Naked Time, and alluded to in Journey to Babel, as described by Amanda. Yesteryear in TAS shows Spock reflecting on his childhood and then getting to see it when Spock goes back in time.
Quite often......perhaps two or more times a season.
Kind of depends what you mean. Did we ever see Spock struggle with his humanity as such, i.e. struggle with the fact that he was half-human? Narrowly defined, not that much. Journey to Babel, certainly, and TAS's Yesteryear. But even there, Spock was not ashamed of being half-human. Rather, he seems to have suffered as a result of others' tormenting of him as half-human as a child on Vulcan, and (if "Miss Jane Wyatt" is to be believed) overcompensated as a result.
Now, did we ever see Spock struggle with control of his emotions which, as a Vulcan, he must more strictly control than would a human? Yes, several times, in some of the most powerful moments of the series (most obviously the Naked Time, This Side of Paradise, Amok Time, All Our Yesterdays, and the Tholian Web, but also in the highly underrated post-depersonalization scene in Plato's Stepchildren). Being half human, this struggle presumably would have been more difficult for Spock than for other Vulcans. But it nevertheless would have been a struggle for any Vulcan; they have incredibly strong emotions, so strong they almost destroyed their own civilization.
This goes to a very interesting point that only sank in with me when I re-watched the series a few years ago after having not watched it for several years. Spock's half-humanity really is not part of his character in the narrative sense, and he is almost always treated as full Vulcan by the writers-- his actions and his habits of mind those of a Vulcan (often juxtaposed with those of the humans around him), his interactions with bridge crew those of a Vulcan to a human, even his physiology (which crops up as either complication or deus ex machina more than we'd like) that of a full Vulcan. (McCoy never stops himself mid-complaint about Spock's organs to say-- oh, great, there's your gall bladder, just like it would be for other humans). Narratively, his humanity is really only relevant to Journey to Babel, which admittedly is an absolute banger of an episode.
Where Spock's half-human identity is relevant, however, is in a macro sense, as a sort of shorthand cue to the viewer for irreconcilable inner conflict and tumult. Again, strictly speaking the tumult/conflict/emotional struggle would be there for any Vulcan (that's the entire basis of their civilization) but Spock's half-human identity allows the viewer to feel this struggle more viscerally. Maybe this was all accidental (I'm guessing they originally made him half-human because they worried a full Vulcan might be indeed too 'alien' a character for the audience otherwise) but together with Nimoy's performance led to something (the deeply conflicted individual who nevertheless manages to be highly effective and the coolest guy in the room, to boot) to which many people were immediately drawn
Wouldn't it be odd if it's the Human half that makes it easier for him to pursue the Vulcan ideal? In which case, some of the other Vulcans might be secretly envious of him.
A good and thoughtful post. I'll just throw my +1 on this:
Always makes me a little sad to see this installment make people's worst-episode lists. "Alexander, where I come from, size, shape or color makes no difference. And nobody has the power." A little cringe is a small price to pay.
Like others, I always found the dancing, horseplay, and other indignities hard to take, but somewhere along the line I realized the cringy sympathetic embarrassment was exactly the point. It let us not just see but actually feel that, along with the crew's jeopardy, there was a layer of abject humiliation that in some ways was even worse, especially for Spock. It also leads us to wonder about the countless other horrors that must have been endured by Alexander.
Always makes me a little sad to see this installment make people's worst-episode lists. "Alexander, where I come from, size, shape or color makes no difference. And nobody has the power." A little cringe is a small price to pay.
Add in jettisoning the fuel and igniting it in "Galileo Seven," and the "I'm worried about Jim, too" scene in "Bread and Circuses" when Spock is so graphically seen behind the bars of his cell. Spock spells it out in "The Enemy Within" in Sick Bay: "If I seem insensitive to what you're going through, Captain, understand it's the way I am."
That's a wonderful post. I agree that Spock is typically written as a full Vulcan. I have just two things to add to your trenchant analysis. First, almost any time the writers have Spock address Kirk as "Jim," I believe that's also shorthand—a reminder that he's in touch with his humanity and breaks through the military discipline and formality in a way that a full Vulcan almost certainly would not, to connect with this man whom he deeply admires and is his friend.
Second, to your excellent list, I'll add one other example—the superb bridge scene about three-fifths of the way through "Day of the Dove," where the alien's influence finally reaches Scott, Spock and even Kirk, and leads Spock to attack Scotty physically out of hate-fueled bigotry. While Kirk shoves Scotty out of the way and attempts to stop Spock—with fantastic physical acting by Shatner that seamlessly communicates, in a few seconds, that Kirk is using every hand-to-hand combat technique he has to engage with a far stronger opponent he doesn't want to harm—Kirk shouts, "Stop it! You're half human!" That seems to break the alien's hold on Spock for good.
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Due to external influence as context, I don't recall Spock wallowing for the sake of Spock out of introspective or navel-gazing tendencies. The most we get is a reminder in dialogue that he's Vulcan, which is sufficiently vague* as other stories do confirm Vulcans are highly emotionally disciplined. Spinoffs as well, look at "Sarek" from TNG.
"The Naked Time" - the virus fritter that infected Spock had him losing control of his emotions.
"Plato's Stepchildren" - the Platonians use their psi powers to manipulate the crew. The leader, Parmen, forcen laughter out of Spock, to which McCoy states doing so will kill him, at which point he forces Spock to weep. After the torture scene is done, in the next, Spock is working to control his emotions and crushes a case with his hand.
The first motion picture has Spock attempting to attain Kolinahr: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kolinahr . This is a mental disciplining technique to purge emotions, since Spock was with a lot of non-Vulcan crews for a long time and he decided he needed to refocus. I'd write "felt" except that implies an emotion, which leads to a super-cool paradoxical loop.
"I, Mudd" has Spock being unusual in ribbing McCoy - albeit in the same way McCoy has ribbed him in the past. It's one of very few occasions of Spock using a form of projection in hopes that McCoy will realize what he's saying. Being 1960s television, it's not serialized and the characters remain the same in the end - just back to more serious-in-tone stories.
"The Day of the Dove" has an alien vampiric creature provoking the emotions of numerous people as it absorbed these energies to sustain itself with. Yep, Spock is affected to - just more subtly.
"This Side of Paradise" has an alien plantlife whose spores have a hallucinogenic effect of sorts. Kirk has to beat the emotions out of Spock, since only strong negative emotions can counter the spores' effects.
Might be easier to watch TOS to see for yourself how Spock and the other crew were developed as characters and the mindsets of the production staff of the time and why they did things the way they had. I know the new shows do spur interest in the older ones as we have a lot of YouTube reaction channels from 30- and 20-something people who seem to sincerely enjoy them. Given what they had to work with in the 1960s, it's impressive that they do hold up in any way. Many from the era don't, at all.
* Keep in mind, we've seen vagueness elsewhere. Early in the show's run, Spock tells of a distant ancestor of his had mated with a human. By season two's "Journey to Babel", said distant ancestor was... his father. Spock wasn't being dismissive or rude to his lineage in either case and, as the show was new and had nothing to build off of but a blank slate, with no other references between the two tellings, and because not all whizbang ideas happen during the same 60-minute writers' staff brainstorming session, it was a subtle retcon to build upon. There's even a TOS episode that reminds creativity doesn't work on an assembly line, but for all we know, they used placeholder verbiage regarding "distant ancestor" and forgot to replace that by the time of filming. Remember, 60 years ago, they had typewriters and gooey paper-hued ink to correct mistakes with and it was time-consuming as all farfegnugen, especially with the high script count. No word processors to make correcting mistakes faster, no script assisting tools like Final Draft to keep track of scenes and character traits, etc. They had none of that. So, TOS as was every show made back then, pretty dang impressive given what they had to work with. How's that for melding two tangents together? (terrifically, I hope?)
"The Naked Time" - the virus fritter that infected Spock had him losing control of his emotions.
"Plato's Stepchildren" - the Platonians use their psi powers to manipulate the crew. The leader, Parmen, forcen laughter out of Spock, to which McCoy states doing so will kill him, at which point he forces Spock to weep. After the torture scene is done, in the next, Spock is working to control his emotions and crushes a case with his hand.
The first motion picture has Spock attempting to attain Kolinahr: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kolinahr . This is a mental disciplining technique to purge emotions, since Spock was with a lot of non-Vulcan crews for a long time and he decided he needed to refocus. I'd write "felt" except that implies an emotion, which leads to a super-cool paradoxical loop.
"I, Mudd" has Spock being unusual in ribbing McCoy - albeit in the same way McCoy has ribbed him in the past. It's one of very few occasions of Spock using a form of projection in hopes that McCoy will realize what he's saying. Being 1960s television, it's not serialized and the characters remain the same in the end - just back to more serious-in-tone stories.
"The Day of the Dove" has an alien vampiric creature provoking the emotions of numerous people as it absorbed these energies to sustain itself with. Yep, Spock is affected to - just more subtly.
"This Side of Paradise" has an alien plantlife whose spores have a hallucinogenic effect of sorts. Kirk has to beat the emotions out of Spock, since only strong negative emotions can counter the spores' effects.
Might be easier to watch TOS to see for yourself how Spock and the other crew were developed as characters and the mindsets of the production staff of the time and why they did things the way they had. I know the new shows do spur interest in the older ones as we have a lot of YouTube reaction channels from 30- and 20-something people who seem to sincerely enjoy them. Given what they had to work with in the 1960s, it's impressive that they do hold up in any way. Many from the era don't, at all.
* Keep in mind, we've seen vagueness elsewhere. Early in the show's run, Spock tells of a distant ancestor of his had mated with a human. By season two's "Journey to Babel", said distant ancestor was... his father. Spock wasn't being dismissive or rude to his lineage in either case and, as the show was new and had nothing to build off of but a blank slate, with no other references between the two tellings, and because not all whizbang ideas happen during the same 60-minute writers' staff brainstorming session, it was a subtle retcon to build upon. There's even a TOS episode that reminds creativity doesn't work on an assembly line, but for all we know, they used placeholder verbiage regarding "distant ancestor" and forgot to replace that by the time of filming. Remember, 60 years ago, they had typewriters and gooey paper-hued ink to correct mistakes with and it was time-consuming as all farfegnugen, especially with the high script count. No word processors to make correcting mistakes faster, no script assisting tools like Final Draft to keep track of scenes and character traits, etc. They had none of that. So, TOS as was every show made back then, pretty dang impressive given what they had to work with. How's that for melding two tangents together? (terrifically, I hope?)
The Deadly Years addresses the effects of Spock's human half:
My impression is that Spock's Vulcan "half" actually makes up most of him, meaning he is mostly Vulcan in medical terms. Spock's Human "half" makes up only a minor part of him like recessive genes masked by his Vulcan dominant genes.
Firstly, McCoy treats Spock as a full Vulcan on the high side of a hundred (what does "high side" mean? Google AI says it means a value just over 100 like 101 to 110.)
Stocker also treats Spock as a full Vulcan only to have Spock correct him that he is half human suggesting that Spock is more affected than he would be if he was full Vulcan.
My impression is that Spock's Vulcan "half" actually makes up most of him, meaning he is mostly Vulcan in medical terms. Spock's Human "half" makes up only a minor part of him like recessive genes masked by his Vulcan dominant genes.
Yes, exactly, and in my rewatch of the episode a year-ish ago, I pointed out the same thing. It's supposed to be hard to watch. The entire act, from commercial to commercial, is an exercise in humiliation by Parment towards Kirk and Spock to get McCoy to comply and show us just how reprehensible the Platonian's had become (I'm sure some of it was also to placate Nimoy who had a record deal)..
Humiliation is always one thing I cannot really stomach to watch. It's a great line, but ensconced in horrible actions that I cannot dignify with a watch.
It's also worth noting that when Spock gets spored and his human side struggles to force its way to the surface, overcoming his strict Vulcan mental discipline and suppression of emotions, the strain actually makes him fall to the ground in pain.
SPOCK: No!
LEILA: It shouldn't hurt.
SPOCK: No, I can't. Please, don't!
LEILA: Not like this. It didn't hurt us.
SPOCK: I am not like you!
Of course. I happen to really like Plato's Stepchildren, but I can definitely understand even hardcore TOS fans saying no thanks, I'm not going to watch this sort of thing.
Oh, right. That's a good catch. I don't watch the The Deadly Years very often. Too close to home, I guess!
Great point/reminder, thanks!
I also apologize for a couple of typos in my post above, the most egregious of which was using "to" instead of "too". (my bad!)
IMHO, if one can roll with the high concept idea of psi power being used for literally controlling others as well as reading their minds directly, it's a type of horror genre installment that is truly creepy. The point of the dance was to humiliate Kirk and crew. I would argue/opine that it's supposed to make the audience feel uncomfortable, allowing the viewer to feel vicariously what Kirk and Spock are doing and enduring?
Plus, Kirk gets one of his best-ever speeches, to Alexander.
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