If you watched TOS, you know that they were already bonded as children. The marriage takes place during the first pon farr. That restaurant scene and subsequent scene in the first episode would never have taken place. A Vulcan woman wouldn’t propose, and there certainly wouldn’t have been any public kissing. But the modern audience - or Paramount - isn’t interested in established Vulcan norms. They do seem interested in bedroom scenes and making Spock look like a weak human male.
This Side of Paradise and Pike
- Thread starter Control Voice
- Start date
If you watched TOS, you know that they were already bonded as children. The marriage takes place during the first pon farr. That restaurant scene and subsequent scene in the first episode would never have taken place. A Vulcan woman wouldn’t propose, and there certainly wouldn’t have been any public kissing. But the modern audience - or Paramount - isn’t interested in established Vulcan norms. They do seem interested in bedroom scenes and making Spock look like a weak human male.
We don't actually know there wouldn't be a proposal as part of the ritual; we've just assumed that. No such proposal was mentioned before, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Lots of rituals have multiple stages of increasing or reaffirmed commitment, so there's no reason Vulcan ritual couldn't include both childhood bonding and adult reaffirmation of the bond. Indeed, it seems barbaric not to have a reaffirmation, since there's no guarantee that adults would still desire the bond that their parents arranged for them as children. Both parties absolutely should have the right to back out of the bond once they're old enough to decide for themselves, and that means there absolutely should be a step where they decide as adults whether they really want to commit to the arranged marriage.
I do agree that having them kiss rather than touch fingers feels insufficiently alien.
You might want to review that scene and place it in context, esp. of the events which immediately preceded it. You could be misremembering a thing or two.
Oh please.Enter JJ-Spock, a fully formed senior officer, in his right mind and voraciously sucking face with Uhura. Seems legit.
Spock can't possibly have a relationship. That's ridiculous.
I don't understand this idea. Spock is presented has someone with emotions running deep, and needing control. The idea that a younger Spock might experiment, especially based upon the modeled behavior of his father, is not far fetched, as a young Vulcan.
Last edited:
I’m simply going by what we see on screen in TOS, and what one culture considers barbaric is another culture’s norm. One problem with ST 2009 and beyond that is the imposing of human norms on Vulcans. Vulcans bond their children at 7. As Spock says, “It’s more than a betrothal.” Koon ut kalifee means “marriage or challenge.” And, yes, while to a lot of humans it would seem reasonable for them to affirm the commitment, we get back to my previous argument: we can’t impose our views or belief systems on Vulcans. I would not otherwise have a problem with Spock and T’Pring spending time with one another in some other manner, though it always felt, going by TOS that they had not seen each other since they were children.
And how did we get from Pike and This Side of Paradise to here?
Welcoome to theBBS.
This strikes me as entirely unreasonable, and rather illogical.
Of course we can, since it is a fictional race that is open to interpretation by various audience members as to the value of it. Certainly, I would expect Spock to explore options, as that is logical, and made based around his own personality and experiences, rather than "duty bound" to only honor that commitment untl the appointed time. Especially since we don't know the full terms of the bonding.
We’ll just agree to disagree.
Exactly. What we can see in a single episode cannot reasonably be construed to be an exhaustive depiction of an entire cultural tradition. Imagine that all you knew about human weddings was what you saw in "Balance of Terror." From that episode, you could not extrapolate the existence of engagement rings, best men, maids of honor, wedding receptions, bachelor parties, throwing the bouquet, prenups, divorce, etc. Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it can't exist. (Hell, practically the only thing you would learn from the episode is that ship captains are entitled to officiate weddings, and it turns out that's a myth!)
Which is essentially the point. Maybe in 1967, when Vulcans were still a strange, little-known alien culture whose role in the Federation was not yet established, it would have seemed reasonable to portray them as having rituals that we would consider barbaric, such as fights to the death, brides becoming the property of the victors, compulsory arranged marriages, etc. After all, it was just for one episode and then they moved on. But if you're going to do a series where the relationship between Spock and T'Pring is a recurring element, modern audiences would be unlikely to respond well to a scenario where they have no freedom of choice and are being compelled to marry whether they want to or not. There's been too much progress in social issues over the past five and a half decades for that to be palatable, especially in the current climate when women's freedom of choice regarding their own bodies is under attack like it hasn't been since the original series was made.
See, this is the problem with the slavish insistence that nothing from past fiction should ever be changed or updated. A lot of it was rooted in old-fashioned values that were often problematical in many ways. Not every idea from the past deserves our loyalty. The good thing about fiction is that you don't have to keep the bad parts, because it's all just pretend anyway and you can always start pretending something different. Creativity is a process of trial and error, of refining things as you go. That's why we don't still talk about James R. Kirk and Vulcanians, why women in Starfleet aren't still limited to being secretaries and nurses and switchboard operators. It's good to update things with the times.
Vulcans aren't real. They don't have a cultural integrity to defend. The audience is real. Vulcans exist to entertain the audience. So the audience's sensibilities, and the role the characters are meant to play for the audience, are what's important here.
Look, I'm a big supporter, in principle, of making alien cultures truly alien. My published works are hopefully proof of that. But some ways of doing that are not as desirable as others. There are certain things that a 1960s audience might have been willing to accept in a protagonistic alien culture that would just make them too unsympathetic for modern audiences to accept them as the good guys.
Absolutely. And so would Vina.
Applying any sort of internal narrative logic that's worth a spit, the discovery of those spores exhibiting the characteristics that they did would have completely transformed human medicine with lightning speed.
Doesn't matter, since they worked out the antidote to that in the very same story.
Today, our available treatments for many life-threatening conditions entail side effects more pernicious and difficult to manage than anything we saw in that episode. We inject toxic substances and employ addictive drugs to manage pain. The tradeoffs are generally more extreme than feeling-kind-of-lazy-and-dopey-until-you-work-up-a-good-mad.
That would be interesting, since Vina was, according to Number One, listed as an adult crewman at the time of Columbia's mission. So she would be healed and restored to normal via her age, which is implied to be older than illusionary Vina.
How old would she be?
She would be 18 years older according to Number One. Adding that on to Susan Olivers age (32) we could go with 50.
Yeah, ol' Number One made it sound worse than it is. Vina could be anywhere from 36 on up. A minimum of only 4 years older than Susan Oliver at that time. I don't know if Pike would balk at a relationship with someone possibly 12 or so older. Clever of Gene to leave it vague.
We know the spores heals old scar tissue in organs and replaces small soft tissue things like tonsils and appendixes. Would the healing effects of the spores be able to regrow missing limbs, replace missing bones or reset healed bones from their wrong positions? In any case, both Pike and Vina would certainly benefit from having scars and organs repaired.
I don't know about scars and appendixes, but tonsils can grow back in real life without intervention, so maybe short-term spore exposure kick-starts regrowth of easy to fix things first.
Quite the opposite with scars, and even broken bones. The collagen used to patch over the damage needs to be constantly maintained by the body. In extreme cases of scurvy, the lack of vitamin C literally reopens old wounds as scars dissolve and long-healed broken bones come apart.
McCoy is the spore equivalent of a fixer-upper.
I think D.C. Fontana's novel Vulcan's Glory gives us a better idea of the relationship between Spock and T'Pring, with her demanding a "bride price" and a formal announcement that they would be married, and Stonn waiting there in the wings. Also, in it, Spock forms a relationship with a Vulcan widow, which shows him finding someone who is more suitable.
Although we were talking about Pike and the spores on Omicron Ceti III healing Pike, would the folks on the Shore Leave planet be able to help him? They brought Bones back from the dead, didn't they? (Which reminds me that Bones asks Spock in both STIII and STVI what it's like to be dead. He should know.)
Similar threads
