Exactly.
My Gripes with STID!
- Thread starter DeMilburn
- Start date
Exactly.
I don't understand why. The folks in charge have included it as part of Spock's backstory and its midway through the first season. Well into Spock's development. It's one of many examples of Spock showing emotion to one degree or another. I thinks it's interesting from an in universe perspective and out. it makes Spock more complex.
This looks a lot like core mythology discussions in software games with bugs where players try to rationalize known bugs as part of the story. Sometimes the bugs just aren't fixed because they're not a priority, but it's absurd to incorporate the bugs as if they are part of the mythology. No, they're not. They're just something that happened along the way as the product got more mature and more well-developed.
Not to mention that the comics and novels have used "The Cage" for decades as backstory for the Trek universe and no one has complained.
Yup. It makes him look like someone with the capabilities to grow and change. It only becomes a "technicality" when used as an explanation for something happening in the Abramsverse.
Bugs are unintended consequences. Are you trying to say that Roddenberry didn't intend for Spock to be that way even though he wrote "The Cage"?
Kolinar, (sp?) the final shedding of all remaining emotion, isn't just for half blooded Vulcan's - it is for any Vulcan who desires to try and achieve it. That proves all Vulcans have emotions and must work to shed them.
Spock is further handicapped by emotions because of his Human half and I cannot believe this is something that still needs to be explained after almost 50 damn years.
Spock is further handicapped by emotions because of his Human half and I cannot believe this is something that still needs to be explained after almost 50 damn years.
Let's be clear on one thing: Gene Roddenberry wrote both "The Cage" and "The Menagerie". If he wanted smiling Spock taken out, all he would have done is said the word because he was also the executive producer.
Of course, Spock's mutiny was driven solely by logic in that episode. No emotional attachment to Pike.
Of course, Spock's mutiny was driven solely by logic in that episode. No emotional attachment to Pike.
I recall Orci specifically commented on this over at trekmovie: McCoy knew that Khan's blood had the properties needed to help Kirk, but couldn't chance that any of the other augments might.
Because it's a well-known as a stray inconsistency that's more due to quirks of the production process than any deep, programmatic development of Spock's character. It's not an abstruse point and you're being a bit faux-naif about it, I think.
In general the point that NuTrek Spock is noticeably more emotionally labile and demonstrative than TOS Spock can't really be refuted by a laundry list of times-when-Nimoy-had-a-facial-tic (or looked at a woman, or displayed initiative or curiosity, or what have you). Because in all of those occasions if you take context and the tenor of the performance into account, they don't add up to anything remarkably similar, say, to Spock doing the Khan scream. That's why people notice the difference. Trying to obfuscate it with a blizzard of trivial not-really-counterexamples typically not only fails, but misses the point, which is why Bill is still trying to convince people about how convincing his "refutations" supposedly are. "I've refuted this a gajillion times," he thinks... and he hasn't.
If Roddenberry wanted those elements taken out of the Spock character, why leave them in for "The Menagerie"? He was both the writer and the executive producer. He could have cut the smiling scene out and redubbed "The Women!!!" to sound less emotional.
Kolinar, (sp?) the final shedding of all remaining emotion, isn't just for half blooded Vulcan's - it is for any Vulcan who desires to try and achieve it. That proves all Vulcans have emotions and must work to shed them.
Spock is further handicapped by emotions because of his Human half and I cannot believe this is something that still needs to be explained after almost 50 damn years.
Agreed on both counts. It's a zen thing, and for Vulcans, their philosophy states that full enlightenment can't come until all emotions are purged. Certainly among six billion of them, some are better at it or more committed to it than others. It's got to be a process that takes time, maybe even a lifetime. In ST09, we see young Vulcans being cruel bullies. Is that logical? We even see the head of the Vulcan Academy saying Spock is handicapped. Is that logical or a statement of hidden emotional distaste and a display of ego and jingoism? Sybok is full of emotion. He is Vulcan. So emotions are in there in any Vulcan (including Spock), and can even be used in a controlled way (it's not like Sybok was a raving looney of emotions, he just had a weird calling).
The character of Spock was made half human so the emotions could play into the character. If he truly had no emotions or they were easy to keep in check, how interesting would the character have been? It's not about concrete examples in TOS from "ticks" to shouting ("The women!"). There was a human side there waiting to go off. Instead, Spock tried to deny it or internalize it. Part of the tension in TOS (seeing episodes for the first time) was whether or not Spock would ever go off on an emotional rant. The fact that he could become more comfortable with emotions and displays of them (friendship, sentimentality) as he aged also shows he had them. TOS Spock would be too uptight and in control to "tell them to go to hell," even if that's how he really felt. In TUC, he had no problem stating those sentiments.
That the personality of TOS Spock evolved over time is alone proof that he felt, whether he showed it as often and openly as Spock in ST09 or STID does or not. Spock Prime even admits to Kirk that he's "emotionally compromised" by the loss of his mother and Vulcan. I'm sure he had his own outburst privately when he had the chance, and it didn't have to be provoked.
+1. Great post.
Because the production process had to deal with limited resources? Far as I know, the whole reason an episode exists that reuses the original pilot footage was budget constraints.
But it would've taken very little effort. They were already cutting up "The Cage" anyway. Roddenberry had no issue going around and calling things apocryphal. I have no indication he ever did that with "The Cage".
Heck, when Trek was really big, they could've cut out the five seconds of Nimoy smiling and toned down the audio of "THE WOMEN!!!" and sold it as a special edition!
There was a limit to how much of "The Cage" footage they could cut out, since AFAIK Roddenberry was solving a scheduling problem (time constraints as much as budget, I guess) and trying to get the production back on track, which involved delivering a two-part episode requiring one weeks' production time. I don't see why he would've had to declare it "apocryphal," living with any minor inconsistencies it introduced was certainly no bigger deal than living with The Alternative Factor.
You're talking about five seconds of footage. I really doubt it would've broken the episode to cut just before he smiles.
It really isn't an inconsistency though. Just like Roddenberry wanted a ship with a history, he probably saw this as giving the character some history.
At the end of the day, Abrams Spock works for some people and not for others. Such is life.
They still made cuts to fit it into the needed format.
Five not-particularly-important seconds, yes.
Or he just wasn't that worried about making every onscreen moment about the character align with the ideas they came up with later. Because it wasn't like nerds were going to come along fifty years later and analyze every frame to "prove" that his intentions were in line with what some other guy did with the franchise after his death.
One thing you're forgetting is that Spock did a mindmeld with Pike as he died not long before this. Spock got to FEEL what Pike was going through as he died. He even discusses this with Uhura in the Kronos scene and says he wishes never to have that feeling again. However, in Kirk's death scene he asks Spock how he chooses not to feel and he replies is "I'm failing." It is likely that this was an influence on him at the time still. It could be implied that Spock was not only losing his friend, but was, in the truest scene of the word, "reliving" the feelings of death.
None of this matters. It still aired. It's still on the record. All the posts in the world will not change that.
You're fighting awfully hard against 5 seconds of something you feel is "not particularly important" if that's actually the case.
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