Looking at Kirstie Alley’s Saavik, the only thing that made her appear to be Vulcan was her ears. Her eyebrows were not arched and it was established in the deleted scenes that Saavik was supposed to be half-Vulcan and half-Romulan. It got me thinking that due to her more human appearance, what if they had just made her half-human? It would have tied into Spock taking her as his protégé, helping her deal with emotions, as he had to do. This would play better in the third film with her relationship with David Marcus and if the character was brought into Star Trek VI, the betray would be easier to grasp. If they had Kim Cattrall from the very start, I would have been able to believe the half-Vulcan and half-Romulan backstory a lot more, but not with Alley’s portrayal.
What if Saavik was Half-Human, Instead of Half-Romulan?
- Thread starter Kamdan
- Start date
I don't think it would have changed a thing as far as Alley's Saavik was concerned, IMO. Background stuff aside, Saavik could have just as easily been a young, full-blooded Vulcan who had yet to reach the level of Spock.
If you check the stage directions in the script, Saavik is first described as having a "fair" complexion (ie. not wearing the special "LN1" sallow makeup used on Nimoy - and all other Vulcans). Samuel Peeples obviously didn't recall/know that, in TOS, Romulans supposedly had a shared past with Vulcans, and looked like them.
Ms Alley has strangely arched eyebrows anyway, and she didn't want the ends shaved, so the scripted "fair" complexion and not-like-a-full-Vulcan description definitely influenced her unique look. Perhaps the half-Romulan cadet allowed people to assume she was half human at the Academy?
At least if she had been half-human, it would've been a meaningful distinction. The whole "half-Romulan" thing was kind of silly, because biologically, Romulans are Vulcan. They only migrated a couple of millennia ago, not remotely long enough to have diverged into a separate species. At most, they're just a different ethnic group. And the differences in their behavior are strictly cultural. So there's no sense to the idea that Saavik would be more emotional because she was half-Romulan -- which is exactly why they cut the idea out of the film, because they realized it was stupid. And which is probably why Vonda McIntyre, in her novelization of TWOK, invented Saavik's backstory as a refugee on Hellguard, so that it was her upbringing, not her genetics, that was responsible for her emotionalism.
Or the emotionalism could simply be because she's young. Remember smiling Spock?
Or her emotionalism could be an indication that Saavik embraces her Romulan heritage and culture as part of herself, while separating herself politically from that Empire. Studying the Vulcan culture after being "adopted" by Spock would not necessarily have to involved rejecting the Romulan one. The language she privately spoke to Spock in (in the torpedo room) could have been Romulan.
She is a child of two worlds, and she includes them both within herself.
Yet McIntyre still uses the half-Romulan as part of same Hellguard existence, as well.
Maybe Rodenberry (or the writers) still believed in the concept of race / sub-species in 1969... Spock going through the Atavachron only a couple thousand years also caused his biology to change, as well which would be analogous to the differences in Romulans. I always thought the TNG brow-ridge was a bit silly, but they were trying to reinforce the differences between Vulcans and Romulans, as well, so that idea has only been reinforced as time has went on...
Maybe the difference is larger and they're a different species of the same genus? There may not have gotten along even before Surak. Other possibilities would be that in the interim of their schism that either the Vulcans and/or Romulans did some genetic engineering and/or interbred with some other aliens in their own region of space.
Well, people refer to humans as being half-Chinese and half-caucasian, etc, but humans are all one species, too. We also attribute broad, defining, behavioural stereotypes to each group.
In STs III and IV, yes.
But Kirstie Alley was specifically told that Saavik (in ST II) wasn't fully/typically Vulcan.
Yes, because when she wrote the novel, she was working from the script and wasn't aware that the references to Saavik's Romulan heritage would be cut out of the finished film. So she had to incorporate it. But she found a way to flesh out the concept that made more sense than the nonsensical assumption that Vulcan logic is genetic rather than learned and the patently incorrect assumption that Romulans are a different species from Vulcans.
Roddenberry had no input into TWOK or any of the later movies except as an "executive consultant" -- meaning they let him read and comment on the script as a courtesy, but were under no obligation to listen to anything he suggested.
Only if they deliberately genetically engineered themselves. As I said, 2000 years is not enough time for speciation, at least not for a humanoid race whose generations are decades apart.
And whether the Vulcans and Romulans are different species or ethnic groups is irrelevant. The point is that Vulcan logic and control are learned, not biologically innate. In fact, the whole reason Vulcans needed to embrace logic is because they are innately hyperemotional. Therefore, just being biologically half-Romulan would have no bearing on Saavik's ability to control her emotions. Since Vulcan emotional control is learned, the only reason she'd have trouble with control is if she hadn't been raised as a Vulcan -- if she'd grown up among Romulans, or (as McIntyre had it) as a feral child on an abandoned colony.
(Of course, we run into the same false assumption whenever someone blames Spock's lack of emotional control on his "human half." So Spock himself and other Vulcans do buy into the prejudice that Vulcans are innately more logical, even though they know better. If anything, since Vulcan passions are intrinsically more intense than human, being half-human should make it easier for Spock to control his emotions. The only way it makes sense to attribute Spock's relative emotionalism to his human heritage is if the psychological and behavioral influence of his mother during his upbringing undermined his lessons in Vulcan control.)
Maybe, but there's absolutely nothing in the movie that tells us that. I hate to bust out the C-word, but if it ain't on screen, it ain't canon.
Her on screen behavior is very un-Vulcan which is evidence itself, no?
They stayed with it in the later novelizations, too. The canon has explicitly indicated they ARE a different species, the speculation is better suited in corroboration and explanation, rather than retcons.
Sure, that's why I said 1969. Everything just followed (mostly) with continuity and building on what they already did. Separate species was the baseline and never contradicted. If anything, TNG on has only reinforced that with the brow ridges which is noticeably lacking on their portrayals of Vulcans.
No, I was postulating that they were always separate species in the same genus, even before the Romulans left Vulcan.
I would normally agree but All Our Yesterdays seems to say otherwise and that it's at least partially nature, with mostly of nurture "tuning."
It's comments like this that make me wonder whether people have actually watched Star Trek.
Can you define what "Vulcan" behavior is? Is it defined by Sarek who showed open disdain for his son because of his career choice? Is it defined by Stonn who was fornicating with another man's wife? Is it defined by T'Pring who pitted two friends in a battle to the death so she could continue banging someone other than her husband? Is it defined by T'Pau who showed open contempt for humans? Is it defined by smiling Spock of the first two pilots, a man who time and again showed open disdain for those with emotions?
All that is within the body of The Original Series.
Then we go to the spin-offs with characters who showed open disdain for humans in Broken Bow...
Broken Bow said:
Administrator V'las was downright creepy in the amount of emotion he showed in Kir'shara. We also have the V'tosh ka'tur from the episode Fusion. Not to mention Sybok from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Captain Solok from Take Me Out to the Holosuite.
The evidence overwhelming suggests the Vulcans aren't as in control of their emotions as Spock would like his human friends to believe. Saavik could very easily fit in and still be a full-blooded Vulcan.
The only unusual thing about Saavik in two movies (let's not forget that Curtis played her as fairly orthodox Vulcan) is the hair stuff in TWOK. Hardly warrants that she is half-Romulan though.
Of course if you know before you see the movie that she was meant to be half-Romulan you automatically search for un-Vulcanesque behaviour ... but let's be honest, who here did actually know that when he first saw the movie and who really thought that Saavik is anything but a typical Vulcan?
Of course if you know before you see the movie that she was meant to be half-Romulan you automatically search for un-Vulcanesque behaviour ... but let's be honest, who here did actually know that when he first saw the movie and who really thought that Saavik is anything but a typical Vulcan?
When has it ever done that? I just searched Chakoteya's transcript site for episodes that included the words "Romulan," "Vulcan," and "species," and I couldn't find a single definitive statement that the two are biologically distinct species. The closest thing was Troi's line in "The Neutral Zone": "They are related to the Vulcans, but as each race developed, their differences grew wider." But she said "race," not "species," and "race" can mean an ethnic or phenotypic subgroup within a species. And Troi's statement is in the context of a discussion about the Romulans' behavior and mentality, implying that she was speaking of differences in their culture and value systems as opposed to their biology.
Of course, I could point out that the definition of distinct species is two populations that can't produce fertile offspring together, but by that definition, pretty much all Trek humanoids would be the same species. So it's hard to define what the word "species" even means in the Trek universe.
What happened to Spock in AOY is pretty much nonsense as presented. Why would just going back in time cause his behavior to change? Riker didn't suddenly become racist when he went back in time to 1890s San Francisco. There's no sense or sanity to the notion that a time-traveling individual's personality would be magically transformed to match what most of his people were like at the particular time he's visiting. So there has to be another, less stupid explanation. There's a remote chance that Spock was somehow being telepathically influenced by the collective consciousness of the Vulcans of the era, their own savagery overriding his control, but that seems unlikely given the distance involved. Perhaps the atavachron simply altered his neurochemistry in a way that undermined his control and his intellect, and he and McCoy jumped to the wrong conclusion about the reason for it because Spock wasn't thinking clearly.
Romulans and Vulcans have always been the same species in Star Trek. The two cultures have lost all contact with one another, and developed quite different cultures, but they've always been the same species. As for 'All Our Yesterdays' it is tempting to think Vulcans have a communal telepathic link. I'd say the Immunity Syndrome implies that by Spock's reaction to the death of the Intrepid's crew. But instantaneous telepathy across light years would have it being an outrageously quick FTL communications system.
