Did they kill “baby Spock” with the katra in Search?

[Search4]

The reborn Spock is alive and a “blank slate” in Search. Just like a baby. If removed from Genesis he would presumably stop aging and be able to learn, develop, speak, grow up... become a person. (He could already walk.). Like all of us post babyhood.

Did Kirk McCoy et al take the possibility of this child maturing away? Yes. Did they ask? No. Did they have the moral right to end his development for an experiment?

Did they in effect kill baby Spock?

Was it more logical to end baby Spock versus transplanting old Spock?

This is a Tuvix-level violation IMHO. Makes for a good sorry but... is it right

 

[mos6507]

Probably more of a merge. Spock probably remembers the limited experience of baby spock including the pon farr with Saavik which would have been interesting to bring up later.

 

[Bad Robot]

I think it's just as well they didn't bring it up later. Anyway baby Spock as an adult would have limited capacity for cognitive development, not unlike B4.

 

[CorporalClegg]

Given the exchange at the end with Saavik's look of embarrassment, it's fair to assume Spock 2.0 remembers their night together.

*In fact it's very likely the reason Nimoy put it in there was to clue the audience that Spock remembers.

 

[BigDaveX]

The Fal-Tor-Pan is described as a "refusion" rather than an overwriting of whatever's in the resurrected Spock's mind. Besides, Spock appears to be pretty much comatose after he reaches the age he was when he died, so it's possible that all the weirdness down on the Genesis Planet short-circuited whatever mind Spock had after his resurrection, and left a blank slate ready for the Katra to occupy.

 

[BillJ]

One of those weird things that we'll never know the "truth" of.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Given the exchange at the end with Saavik's look of embarrassment, it's fair to assume Spock 2.0 remembers their night together.

*In fact it's very likely the reason Nimoy put it in there was to clue the audience that Spock remembers.

Totally agreed.

 

[cooleddie74]

This is a really good burrito.

 

[CorporalClegg]

Only good burritos on Disco.

 

[thribs]

That Saavik thing is even more disturbing if you take novel canon into it. Spock has known her since she was a kid.

 

[Qonundrum]

Given the exchange at the end with Saavik's look of embarrassment, it's fair to assume Spock 2.0 remembers their night together.

*In fact it's very likely the reason Nimoy put it in there was to clue the audience that Spock remembers.

Which adds to the canon/fancanon Saavik was partially Romulan, thus upending continuity in TNG with Simon Tarses (she couldn't enlist because she's got "the blood of a current enemy") but legitimizing Caithlin Dar (I unfortunately can't think of a reason except I'm a partial apologist of TFF and it was nice to see a Romulan in Kirk's movie era). She was teaching sailors words in TWOK and now she's getting it on with Spock, just without the Barry White song "I've Got So Much to Give".

 

[Lance]

Spock does ultimately marry... somebody. Sure the reference to the marriage of Sarek's son is not explicit, and we now know Sarek and his family successors is murky enough lol, but I'd still bet a sack of magic beans that the groom was Spock and the bride was Saavik. Wasn't the implication that she was pregnant with his child in TVH? It's only a shame when Spock himself reappears in TNG that this isn't addressed somehow.

 

[thribs]

In the novels it was Saavik who he marries.

 

[Timo]

We have little idea about how this katra-merging business is supposed to go, alas. In the previous century, we see Surak's katra go from a stone pot to Archer's head to the head of a Vulcan elder in a more or less smooth chain of mergers that doesn't erase the originals, but ST3 makes it clear that this doesn't count as "it": the ST3 thing has not been done "since ages past" and "even then only in legend". Sure, Vulcans love to rewrite their history just as much as the next humanoid, but still...

One really wonders how that ancient legendary thing came to be. Did they have a spare body available for the lost soul there, too? Was it again the body of the previous holder of the soul, somehow made more lively than at the moment of the departure? It doesn't seem as if it could be a scenario with the katra accidentally leaving a nicely living body and needing to be put back in same - Spock depositing his to McCoy did not result in Spock's immediate death and would not have required a re-merger as far as we can tell even if Spock survived the Chamber of Horrors experience.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Bad Robot]

I would guess Spock is the first case of a vulcan's body being resurrected after death, in this case by the Genesis effect, and therefore the first time a transferred katra had its original body to return to.

It might be that in ancient pre-Surak times, the transplanting of one's katra was "rumored" to have been done by means more sinister and unethical, such as robbing someone else of their living body. One gains supposed immortality at the expense of another.

In more civilized post-Surak times, a person's katra is instead transferred into a receptacle or carried around within another person's body at will. And not everybody's katra is preserved, just important leaders, thinkers, teachers, blessed lunatics.

 

[Timo]

...And even their katras are apparently "neutered" at mummification, so that even when one opens the lid of the pot and the mummy leaps out and into the body of the hero, it is unable to take over to the degree we saw Spock's katra taking over Spock's rejuvenated body.

I mean, what happened to Surak's katra must have involved the extra bit of neutering - as we cannot easily argue that what happened to Spock's katra would have involved extra resurrection preparations from the get-go. Or at least I really can't see Spock going the putative extra mile for resurrection in the ""Remember!" scene...

Yet if resurrection-merging is stuff of the legends (and true legends at that, as we see it works fine in modern times), but does not involve extra steps when the katra departs, what made Vulcans stop the practice? Why would anybody give up this good thing (even if it involved kidnapping and murder) so long ago that people who remember Surak's revolution clearly enough no longer remember the resurrections except as legend? Why would anything short of Surak's emotion-purging fanaticism put an end to this quest for eternal life? It may involve a bunch of high clerics at a scenic location in ST3, but surely it could have been done on some dark back alley in the darker times, too?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[thribs]

Archer having Surak’s katra didn’t overwrite him. Who’s today that’s not the case with Spock. He’s still “baby Spock” in there.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Does Spock retain a bit of McCoy the way a Trill retains memories from its symbiont's previous hosts?

 

[Timo]

One would think so - it's the dramatic choice, after all. A bit of the Vulcan soul lingering was important to ENT, and is important to DSC right now. Which may well be why Vulcans are so shy about their melding even in TOS and outright banned it (outside bedrooms at any rate) in ENT: it's a messy business, with all sorts of trash and dangling ends left behind.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SpyOne]

Which adds to the canon/fancanon Saavik was partially Romulan, thus upending continuity in TNG with Simon Tarses (she couldn't enlist because she's got "the blood of a current enemy") but legitimizing Caithlin Dar (I unfortunately can't think of a reason except I'm a partial apologist of TFF and it was nice to see a Romulan in Kirk's movie era). She was teaching sailors words in TWOK and now she's getting it on with Spock, just without the Barry White song "I've Got So Much to Give".

I don't think this is necessarily a conflict.
Simon Tarses' problem wasn't that one of his grandparents was a Romulan, it was that he had lied about that.
Of course, the reason he lied was he believed it would be a problem. But we don't know if he was right about that.