While TWOK's aspirations were never as lofty as TMP, I never thought of the film as being middle of the road or nonsensical. From an emotional standpoint, it's the only mature film in the series, as Kirk and company have to face some of the very same real issues that people in the audience face, as opposed to the trumped up "fate of the galaxy" or "coming to terms with my human/vulcan/robot limitations" sorts of emotions the other films offer. It's the only film that really humanizes the characters in a way that is understandable to many.
I question the assumption that ordinariness is equivalent to maturity. Just because a theme is conveyed allegorically rather than in a literal and overt way, that doesn't make it childish. It may look that way to the casual observer, but that's just the protective camouflage that writers like Serling and Roddenberry used to cloak their adult or subversive messages in a form that network censors would mistake for superficial kid stuff.
There are certainly other Trek films in which characters deal with real, human issues. In TMP, Kirk had to overcome his own ego and desire for control in order to become a more effective leader, and Spock came to a life-changing epiphany about the error of denying the value of his emotions. TSFS was about the willingness to sacrifice for the sake of a loved on. TVH was a statement about conservation, part of a movement that's had a positive impact on the real world, since humpback whales are no longer endangered. TUC was an allegory for the end of the Cold War and the importance of setting aside old fears and enmities in order to move forward. GEN was about facing mortality and loss, just as much as TWOK was. And so on.
TWOK works as both a popcorn movie, with the space battles, and as an attempt to actually have a drama, with ideas and themes never really dealt with in ST, let alone space opera in general. Aging, failed relationships, "accidental" children, and the like. In 1982, this was practically unheard of in science fiction.
Rare in mass-media science fiction, perhaps, but mass-media SF has never been more but a fraction of the genre as a whole, and has generally been much more limited and superficial than prose science fiction. Generally the state of the art in mass-media SF is 20 years behind what's in the literature. Although TOS was ahead of the usual curve because it had participation from some of the top prose-SF authors of the era, like Matheson, Sturgeon, Spinrad, and Ellison -- writers who were taking SF in more sophisticated, literary directions at a time when most mass-media SF was still rehashing the tropes of pulp magazines from decades earlier.
What so many people found off-putting about it was not just the slow pacing but the fact that no one really behaved very much like any person they knew.
That reaction has always puzzled me. The whole point of the story was that the characters had been apart for years and had lost their way, and needed to find themselves again. Acting out of character was part of the story, the problem they needed to overcome. Which only reaffirmed their relationships, because it showed they aren't really complete or at their best except when they're together.
I don't know that TWOK is where the idea of the renegade Kirk surfaced. For starters, there's nothing concrete that says he was such. We get Carol's "never a boy scout" line and McCoy's informing Saavik that Kirk beat the no-one scenario. Then Kirk acknowledges that he reprogrammed the simulator. That could be taken as Kirk nodding to his rebellious youth, or we could just as easily have a wisftul 50-something Kirk simply reminiscing about adding a few lines of code to a computer program, without any of the rebellion implied by the scene.
Yes, as I said, it was really more TSFS that established the "renegade" idea by having him steal the ship. By itself, the
Kobayashi Maru anecdote could simply be a youthful indiscretion; it took the subsequent movie to establish that it might be part of a pattern.
The swaggering Kirk started to appear in the later second season and was more common by the third, as Shatner played him with much more bombast. Even the Kirk in TMP has that swagger in scenes, and the notion of him swiping command out from under Decker's feet suggest he will go around the rules if necessary, even if technically he is playing within them. The odd thing is that the more respectful, first-season Kirk is reflected in the animated series, which seems to take place after the episodes of the live show.
I don't see how swagger or bombast is evidence of breaking the rules. Captain Styles in TSFS was so full of swagger that he literally carried a swagger stick, but he was also clearly a stickler for the rules and a symbol of the authority that Kirk was defying. (Indeed, the
swagger stick is traditionally a symbol of authority in the military.) Swagger and bombast, as a rule, are more often associated with the authority figures that anti-authority heroes are pitted against.
People on this board talk about Kirk's womanizing patterns as if it were a myth. I disagree. Consider the number of significant past love interests of his that we saw (or heard mention of), just within the series (in no particular order):
1. Janice Lester -- Turnabout Intruder
2. Ruth (unknown last name) -- Shore Leave
3. Areel Shaw -- Court Marshall
4. Janet Wallace -- The Deadly Years
5. The Blonde lab technician he almost married (who may or may not have been Carol Marcus) -- Where No Man has Gone Before
6. Count Carol Marcus separately here, in case she's *not* the blonde lab technician from #5
This list isn't even counting the women he meets and falls in love with in the space of a single episode (examples being Rayna, or Edith Keeler). Or the women he was "involved" with when he wasn't himself (Miramanee, Janice Rand. Granted Rand wasn't consensual so she probably shouldn't be counted here.).
All of which is par for the course for TV heroes in the 1960s-80s. Even a sensitive guy like MacGyver had a similarly huge number of old flames and love interests of the week, because that's just how episodic TV works. Kirk was downright chaste compared to someone like Napoleon Solo or Jim West.
Heck, look at
The Six Million Dollar Man. The great love of Steve Austin's life was Jaime Sommers, right? But Jaime was actually the second old flame introduced in the second season; just six episodes earlier, we'd met another "Lost Love" (the episode title) whom he'd proposed marriage to but who'd turned him down because she didn't want to compete with his astronaut training. She was never heard from again and totally forgotten by the time Jaime rolled around. Steve has another romance three episodes after "Lost Love," and seduces a woman during an undercover job in the episode after that. Then the 2-parter "The Bionic Woman" comes along, and Steve and Jaime are about to get married, but then she dies (temporarily), and yet Steve has another romance in
the very next episode!
So yeah, Kirk had a lot of romantic interests, but that doesn't make him a womanizer (in the sense of a man who aggressively pursues superficial sexual conquests), it just makes him the lead character of an episodic television show. A TV hero can be deeply sensitive and sincere and devoted to his romantic interest in a given episode, cherish her as the greatest love of his life, and then have that entire relationship erased from memory in the very next episode because that's how TV storytelling worked in those days, with each episode being its own distinct reality that only occasionally acknowledged the existence of other episodes.
True he never schlepped anybody green, but that's beside the point here, I think.
I think you mean "shtupped." To schlep is to carry a difficult burden.
...TOS's fan base consisted predominantly of women...
What are you basing that assertion on?
Nonfiction books and articles by members of first-generation Trek fandom such as Bjo Trimble, Joan Winston, Sondra Marshak & Myrna Culbreath, etc. Actually I may have misspoken; the fanbase as a whole may have been about equally male and female, but it was the female fans such as Trimble and Winston who were the most vocal and active in organizing the first conventions and publishing the first fanzines. The overwhelming majority of fanfic authors in first-generation Trek fandom were female; the first volume of Bantam's
The New Voyages fanfic anthology doesn't include a single story by a male contributor. And of course first-generation fandom produced women who have remained important to the Trek community to this day, such as Paula Block and Margaret Clark.
