Fun Piece I Wrote About "9 Times Mr. Spock Got a Power-Up"

[Maurice]

Just for fun I followed in @Harvey's footsteps and started writing the occasional article/listicle on Star Trek. The biggie is a piece about costume designer Bill Theiss which will be on Startrek.com (and vetted by the late D.C. Fontana), but it's not due out right away. But last week something lighter I wrote got posted...

$poiler

​

9 Times Mr. Spock Got A Power-Up (link) details how the writers and Nimoy kept adding abilities and variations on existing abilities until he was in danger of becoming a veritable Swiss Army Knife. He's a floor wax! He's a dessert topping! He's both! (I figured I'd share this here instead of The Original Series forum because Spock has appeared subsequently in movies old and post-Kelvin and also on TNG.)

And, no, I don't get revenue for clicks. This was flat-rate work.

@Harvey also did a less tongue in cheek piece recently titled 10 Star Trek: The Original Series Episodes That Were Almost Made which was shared and discussed over in this TOS forum thread (link).

We've got more articles in the pipe, some silly, some scholarly.

 

[Harvey]

I just turned in a piece about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) that was fun to write. It was nice to stretch myself and put something together beyond the television series (plus, I got to finally put all of the scans I made from the Nicholas Meyer papers in Iowa to use—it only took ten years!). I'll post about this separately in the movie forum when it goes live.

I think my favorite item from the Spock power-up piece is the one about his hypnotism ability (over women, of course). This power was mostly relegated to pages Roddenberry wrote for the writer-director guide (see a pertinent quote below), but it was used in "The Omega Glory." (Thankfully, the truly cringe-worthy Spock line, "Do as my mind instructs you, woman!" was cut during editing, but it made its way into the "James Blish" adaptation.*)

Interestingly enough, Spock's hypnosis in "The Omega Glory" was not something carried over from the second pilot version of that script (which has a climax that @Maurice and i joke about all the time—more on that at a later date), but was a bit added when Roddenberry retooled the script for the second season.

However, the above does bear on our series since even Spock’s “hypnotic” look strongly affects Earth females and he goes to great pains to avoid too much contact with them. There is a back-story to this -- many years ago when Mister Spock first joined the service, he was careless on this score, perhaps even enjoyed this strange ability over Earth women. But it quickly created both personal and professional troubles. His own “love” action and reaction goes beyond what men would accept and the effects on Earth females lasted far too long for comfort. Thus celibacy became one of the many compromises he would have to make to stay in service.

* I recently discovered that James Blish didn't actually write any of the episodic adaptations after Star Trek 5! According to the Blish biography Imprisoned in a Tesseract, Blish "despised" the series, and the later volumes "were essentially written by Judith Blish and her mother Muriel Lawrence" (p.25 of that book).

 

[Maurice]

My next piece for Whatculture went live: The 14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek The Motion Picture (link).

As soon as it went live I noticed some typos and deleted a word or two, and now I can't edit it to fix. Ugh!

 

[JonnyQuest037]

My next piece for Whatculture went live: The 14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek The Motion Picture (link).

As soon as it went live I noticed some typos and deleted a word or two, and now I can't edit it to fix. Ugh!

Good list, Maurice. You've got some things I've never considered in there, like the time to intercepting V'Ger not adding up (no doubt because of all the drafts & revisions the script went through while shooting).

I personally would've included Kirk & the others finding it oh-so-amusing that McCoy doesn't want to step into the transporter when we saw it turn two people inside out not ten minutes before. As Decker would say, that concern is definitely warranted.