Some Blundering About Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1×05: Spock Amok

“Spock Amok”* or “Hijinks Ensue”

Influences: “Shore Leave” (TOS), “The Trouble with Tribbles” (TOS), “Turnabout Intruder” (TOS), “Amok Time” (TOS), “Turnabout Intruder” (TOS), “Data’s Day” (TNG), “Lower Decks” (TNG)

* “Spock Amok” is clearly a double-reference to the TOS episode “Amok Time” and also to the Warner cartoon “Duck Amuck”. It kinda works?

Oh good. A goofy one.

To be honest, I think we’re a little early in the series to do a goofy one. Watching the gang cut loose doesn’t carry the same weight when we haven’t spent a lot of time watching them be not-cut-loose. Also, this gang is pretty chill on their on-days already. There’s nothing shocking or subversive about watching Chapel cruising for casual sex or M’Benga going fishing, or whatever Ortegas was doing – why didn’t we get to spend more time with Ortegas? (We also do not see what Hemmer does. And while I’m not as in love with Hemmer as some people, after the reveal last week that he wanted to be a botanist, why not have a scene of him chilling out somewhere on this giant greenhouse space station?)

So really, it’s mostly about the Spock/T’Pring plot and the Una/La’an plot. And… Hoo boy. Really, watching Una and La’an play Enterprise Bingo because they’re uncomfortable with their reputation as buzzkills is definitely a plot that would work better in season three than season one. I’ve been saying this about Una since we learned her name back in “Q&A”: this whole “We finally get to see the softer side of the brilliant, cold, detached Number One” thing only works if we sometimes get to see the brilliant, cold, detached side of her as well, and that’s one front on which Strange New Worlds hasn’t delivered (The other front? Actual Strange New Worlds. This week’s Strange New World is the oldest, Earth-adjacent starbase). And I like Una. I think she’s been great. But she hasn’t really been “Number One”, and that means that you don’t really get a lot of punch out of these “But really Number One is still a soft and compassionate person with normal needs and wants” scenes. It is abstractly interesting to see what mildly-subversive-rulebreaking-fun would look like for the Enterprise crew: phaser duels in the halls, using the transporter to recharge your gum, etc., but it doesn’t have a lot of weight to it. Taken in tandem with last week, sure, it’s good to see some fun. It doesn’t do much for me, though. It’s nice, and maybe that should be enough? The climax of their story is Una deciding that rather than sneaking out in space suits to sign the deck plate, she’ll set up a pressurized force field so they can rawdog it on the hull. This sounds very cool and awesome. Maybe in IMAX? The cinematography lets me down here. It’s shot too close, maybe? Or maybe CGI space shots are just sufficiently normalized here that the impact is muted. Whatever it is, I can very clearly see that they were going for a sense of grandeur and majesty. I just don’t feel it. They get to see the R’ongovia ship unfurl its solar sails and fly the flag of Federation while standing unprotected among the stars (I mean, aside from the forcefield) and they are clearly moved by it, space being the sort of thing one normally only sees on a viewscreen or through glass. But, of course, I am still watching it on a rectangle of plastic, and I just saw basically the same FX shot from Pike’s POV a few seconds ago. This is like if you were watching The Wizard of Oz on a black-and-white television. Sure, the music and Judy Garland’s reactions tell me this is a big deal, but that’s for them, not me.

Oh, the R’ongovians. Are also there. I dig the whole, “Their civilization is based around radical empathy, so Pike wins the day by empathizing with their misgivings about joining the Federation,” thing; that’s good old-fashioned A-Plot/B-Plot/C-Plot thematic mirroring, what with Spock and T’Pring trying to empathize with each other and Una and La’an trying to empathize with the rank-and-file. But it’s the weakest of the subplots, not really going into a lot of depth or earning its reveals. Possibly interesting that the R’ongovians seem to get hung up on the concept of democracy, which has some multi-layered logic to it. You might at first think that radical empaths would value democracy. But if they reflexively adjust themselves to match whoever is speaking, governance based on many disparate voices all talking at once is probably disorienting for them (To clarify, I don’t think this is meant to be any sort of “Alien Power”, but rather a cultural bias in how they approach social interaction, or at least political interaction). This is likely why they insisted on speaking only to a single representative – having Pike, April, and Spock all come at them from different directions would have been a problem. Also, Uhura is just literally there and isn’t allowed to contribute anything to the plot, and that makes me sad. On the plus side, we see Pike wearing the SNW version of Kirk’s Casual Friday Green Wraparound uniform. Not sure it make a lot of sense for him to wear it to a function of this import. Also, I think of that uniform as “casual”, but Pike’s version appears to be leather, which tells me things I was not ready to learn about how Pike spends his leisure time.

So the main thrust of the episode is that Spock and T’Pring are having some relationship troubles. Spock has a nightmare where his Vulcan Side and his Human Side have to fight in the ritual of Kal-if-fee, which means fighting with the giant bladed Q-Tips while onlookers play the Kirk-Spock-Fight-Song on their hexagons full of tiny bells. This is the most enjoyable TOS homage we’ve had so far, but it’s also, like, deep, man. When you realize that Spock tells T’Pring about this right now – about how he has literal nightmares about his human side and his Vulcan side doing the Kal-if-fee fight – and that in ten year’s time, she is going to use this against him. She is literally going to force him to reenact his nightmare. Honestly, the fact that Spock’s relationship with T’Pring seems to be going well right now is very uncomfortable given how it ends. So Spock’s deep fear is that he isn’t Vulcan enough for her. That she finds his human side gross. Given that it turns out that punishing Vulcans who embrace emotion is her job, this seems like a reasonable fear. But the really wonderful thing they do in this episode is to show us what her actual issue is: it’s not that he’s too human. It’s that she fears that he’s only marrying her out of duty and that if he had his freedom, he wouldn’t choose a Vulcan, or at least not her – which is triggered bad when he misses their special cone-shaped dinner for a work thing. Remember, theirs is a culture that has arranged marriages. You would think that an unemotional Vulcan would be okay with marrying for duty. But SNW remembers that Vulcans have emotions, they’re just private about them. They took T’Pring, who the audience is kinda primed to hate, and made her the avatar of what relationship anxiety would look like in a Vulcan. Vulcans are intensely private about their emotions, so secure attachment in a Vulcan relationship must require a really intense reading of your partner’s subtle cues. A Vulcan would, indeed, marry purely out of duty. But a Vulcan wouldn’t lie about this. Because Spock is culturally Vulcan, biologically half-human, and psychologically somewhere in-between, T’Pring can’t trust that he would be honest about his feelings, and she can’t trust that her experiences reading the subtle clues to Vulcan emotions are accurate for him, and on top of that, Spock works much harder at hiding his emotions than other Vulcans, precisely because he’s half-human and terrified of letting his human side show among his people.

And, like, Spock’s experience of Vulcan culture is not an entirely happy one. He was bullied as a child. He had a learning disability that was misdiagnosed. He was the victim of a terror attack. His pet died tragically. His father was emotionally distant and berated his career choices. It Spock were to say, “I really do not want anything to do with this whole traditional Vulcan arranged marriage and I’m not really even all that into Vulcans romantically, but I’ll do this because I’ll feel guilty if I don’t,” that would, point of fact, be entirely believable behavior (Okay, small note here – Spock went into Starfleet over his father’s objections rather than going to the Vulcan Science Academy. This is a counterpoint to the idea that Spock might enter a loveless marriage purely out of duty. But it’s not a contradiction; people are messy). This is why Spock’s defense when he skipped out on dinner, or back in episode 1 when he skipped out on Engagement Sex, landed so poorly with T’Pring: for Spock, he’s saying, “I want to be with you, but I can’t”; for T’Pring, he’s saying, “I view you and my job as competing obligations rather than things I am emotionally invested in.” Every time Spock says, “I don’t want to do this but I’d feel guilty if I didn’t,” T’Pring wonders if he said the same thing to Chris when he booked time off to go see her, and the more he does it, the more it hurts.

So they swap bodies. Because that is a thing Vulcans can do now. I get it; we had Spock stash is soul in McCoy when he died (Does… Does that mean that Spock and McCoy had sex on the astral plane? Not complaining if true, just curious), and one time Surak’s soul got stuffed in Scott Bakula for a bit. But it was a lot more nebulous in those cases, and it didn’t really seem like taking on someone’s katra was really getting their whole identity so much as something more nebulous and soul-ish. This, instead, is much more Goofy Body Swap Episode. Which, of course, this is. They do go very high-road with it. T’Pring immediately calls out the fact that this seems like the sort of thing that would lead to hijinks, but it mostly doesn’t. They come out to Pike basically right away, and Spock comes out to Chapel right away. Circumstances require both of them to do each other’s jobs, but only Spock gets any hilarity out of it, cold-cocking a revolutionary. T’Pring approaches the R’ongovia negotiations from a position of skepticism about the Federation, and that turns out to be the right move with them, but she doesn’t make any amusing faux pas.

Spock, meanwhile, has to go do T’Pring’s job. And it turns out she’s a cop? We had previously established in last season’s Discovery that the Vulcan version of the criminal justice system involved sending people to Time Out at a meditation retreat so they could have a good long think about what they’ve done. T’Pring speaks about it primarily in terms of shepherding Vulcans who have strayed from the “path of logic”. You could be forgiven for thinking that it’s actually illegal to be illogically emotional under Vulcan law. It’s almost an afterthought that Spock clarifies that the dude she’s looking for incited an uprising. Spock’s ultimate solution of decking Barjan for being an asshole is kinda fine, but if the point of the scene is “Oh see, T’Pring would never do that, but Spock would,” maybe establish at any point in the series’s 60-year history that Spock is the sort of dude who would punch someone in the face in response to a snide remark about his friend (Obviously, if you talk smack about his mom, Spock is going to lose it, but generally he’s more into wrestling holds and strangulation than a right hook). I do, on the other hand, like that Barjan, despite being part of the emotion-embracing Vulcan counterculture, is incredibly racist toward humans, rather than thinking they’re cool and exciting. It strays from the fished-out pool of “Logical Vulcans hate humans for their emotionality, but a Vulcan who is more open about emotions will find humans fun and cool.” Turns out that you can embrace emotion and still be an asshole.

Not 100% sold on the end of that plot though. They swap back by asking Chapel and M’Benga for help, and they find an entirely medical solution, involving some zaps to the forehead to, uh… Make their souls uncomfortable enough that they’ll pop out? Weirdly, I feel like something more cliche and magical would work better here; there’s an uncomfortable interface with M’Benga using medical science to reverse a quasi-mystical soul-swap, even as he admits that katras are basically magic. If they’d put in the work to earn it, maybe, or even if we were in the world of Star Trek: Enterprise where space medicine was a lot more, “I’ll just rub you with urchin goo and hope for the best; medicine is not an exact science and our understanding of evolution is comes mostly from Chick tracts.” By which I more seriously mean that the confidence with which M’Benga and Chapel approach the problem conflicts with the extent to which their solution feels like an ass-pull. You could see other generations of Trek reaching the same medical intervention, but only after a few scenes of them trying stuff and failing before finally conceding that katras are magic and the best they can do is a desperation move where they try to spook the katras and hope they will just magically do the right thing.

And then we end on the unsubtle hinting of Chapel being interested in Spock. Interested enough that she will give up her happy freewheeling life of ethical non-monogamy and settle down for a decade of fruitless pining. This is upsetting, but far less upsetting than it is inevitable; we all know that Chapel is going to crush on Spock, so it has to happen at some point in SNW. But they did such a good job at establishing that isn’t who she is at this point in her life that any movement in the direction of her becoming the wet rag who spends years pining for a man unable to show affection is both unwelcome and premature. This just doesn’t justify a shift like that.

This episode is fine. Not as good as a complete product as some of the previous ones. I would’ve liked the “light” episode to have more variety to it, spend more time with the others, be goofy in more ways than the world’s most tame body swap (Spock doesn’t even notice that he’s got lady bits until Chapel points it out to him. This is possibly the only body swap episode of any show ever to not at least include a little nod to the experience of trying out the alternative equipment load-out. I mean except the first time Star Trek did that, because it was the ’60s and they were more concerned with getting in their required amount of gender role essentialism).

Anyway, I really like the denouement between Spock and T’Pring, with them both owning their own anxieties. And more than that, I’m fascinated by one particular observation from Spock: that he likes being in Starfleet because it’s the first time in his life that he hasn’t felt rejected for being “too human” or “too Vulcan”: in Starfleet, it is enough for him to be “Just Spock”. Starfleet values him as an individual rather than as a Vulcan, Human, or hybrid. I love this because of the contrast with Una a few weeks ago: Spock rejoices in the one thing that left Una uncomfortable. She lamented that it wasn’t enough to be “Just Ilyrian”, but Spock is content to be “Just Spock”.

I wonder how much that difference will play into whatever destiny Una has coming.