Popular public opinion holds that Captain Kirk is a macho posturing slut banging his way across the galaxy, he is a cowboy showing Romulans who has the bigger dick and after blasting the hell out of them he retires to teach a green chick the ways of love.
Did anyone who believes this actually watch the damn show? Kirk takes his duty to his crew so seriously he comes off as brooding, Spock seems more of a risk taker.
Kirk is a hetero single guy in a time when sex with aliens is normal, he is actually pretty chaste all things considered. I never said goddamn Kirk put it back in your pants while watching the show(I did say it for Riker who actually endangers missions with his cock!).
The only captain more responsible is probably Picard even if the early seasons strangly make him seem naive and politically correct to the point of idiocy(sending your chief engineer off to a random ship?!). And Picard lets his dick do the thinking all the damn time like he is 15, exibit one Westley.
In which alternative universe does “popular public opinion” have anything to do with the character as written or intended by the author?
Kirk is considered the space- player because that is funnier than being the dedicated, professional leader. That, and the fevered imagination of adolescent fan-boys of all ages who liked to live vicariously through the character.
Kirk has the *reputation *of a womansier and a swashbuckler even in universe. In universe and in real life, people with such reputations have their actions embellished. Kirk seems quite clearly of that sort.
Right. He IS an admitted risk-taker – bluffing, acting on hunches, cheating at tests which gets him commended for creative thinking. That gets extrapolated to the rest of his personal life. A (male) action hero is usually conceived of as “women want him, men want to be him”. And men who want to be wanted by women, will often be wanting something more than admiration for their leadership skills, y’know.
What we do often see is him being the object of desire of the female guest character of the week, which is usually unconsummated, but the audience’s imagination fills in the blanks with “well, of course they couldn’t show that in 1960s TV” and “well, what does happen in between episodes with others he encounters if he’s so irresistible?”. As the costume designer said, what is not shown and left to the imagination is more arousing than what is shown.
Kirk would often have women falling for him and, when it was necessary for drama, it he fell for them, too. Memory Alpha lists romantic relationships of one type or another with 22 different women, with additional ones implied.
They often did not result in any sexual relationship (though not always), and some were old lovers from his past. The original characterization of “space stud” was a joking one – those pointing out knew there was usually no sex involved. But people took the characterization literally.
Yes and actually both Kirk and Picard fulfill a fairly well known trope. Kirk is supposed to be one of the youngest captains to ever get the command of a Star Ship and thus as is the reputation of military and naval men who achieve success at such a young age, he becomes a hard fighting, womanising, swashbuckling hero in the conciousness, even if his actions are unremarkable when compared with others. Picard, remember was the most experienced Captain in Starfleet (which is why he got the Enterpirse D) and he is a clam, collected, reserved man, who fights when he has to and brings his experience to the table to outmanoeuvre his enemies. He is prim and proper with everyone, even though the actual Picard had just as many dalliances as Kirk did.
But yes, his studliness was implied more than depicted. He was far more devoted to his ship and his crew than to the chance to get into some alien princess’s pants.
Kind of a hijack, but I saw Shatner’s one-man show last night and it was terrific. He got a standing ovation when he walked out and had the sold-out theater in the palm of his hand for almost 2 hours. If you have a chance, go see it!
I think the problem here is having an action/adventure show when you have excluded humanity from having problems. In other words, I blame the writers, starting with Roddenberry.
The idea is to have this action show but then the rules for the Federation are that everyone (humans) gets along. But then how do you have conflict? And how do you have conflict without having every episode be against Klingons and Romulans? Then there was this idea of lost colonies that the Enterprise kept finding, which were usually based on violent periods (20s gangsters, Rome, etc.) that they find so they can have conflict between humans. Or an alien influence that sets the crew against each other.
Further, against all protocol, you then have the captain and the top officers going off and putting themselves into danger, something that TNG tried to fix. This is all the TV show premise, the main character is in charge and the one that goes off to deal with things, but not how it would actually happen.
So, with all of the baggage of how a TV show works, especially in the 60s, you have the captain getting to do all of the “fun” stuff, including the action and romance. Therefore, Kirk seems to be this “macho slut” because of how they wrote things then.
I would have been more surprised by a show set prior to the mid 90s NOT having everything in the world happen to the main characters! No matter how outlandish that makes it.
Again, the idea of the Prime Directive is great and all. But for some reason, the writers set up this situation where it’s break the Prime Directive or have a crew member be killed. (I’m thinking of Justice.) The problem was that it was Wesley that was in trouble, who is a child but also the son of someone, at the time, in whom Picard was interested. The question then becomes, what would Picard have done had it been random crew mate #23, an adult main character (Worf, Ryker) compared to what he did with Wesley. In theory, he should have done the same thing for any of his crew, which is to violate the Prime Directive to protect his crew. But, as far as I know, we never see the other side of it.
And, to me, that’s what made TNG weak in many areas. To be fair, it’s what makes most shows weak, in that there is always a “main character” exception to the rule. At least, that how it comes off and, back to TNG, we never find it if it was a general exception, save the crew even at the cost of the Prime Directive, or just done for a friend or someone the captain knew.
There were too many other problems with the Prime Directive, not the least of which was that Picard never got punished for breaking it. As far as the show was concerned, the Prime Directive read, “No Federation starship can interfere with an alien society under any circumstances, unless it would be inconvenient not to do so.” You used to be able to predict if a ST:TNG episode was going to be bad if the Prime Directive was mentioned.
The PD really was a mistake in the first show, a writer’s convenience so that you couldn’t just have the Enterprise phaser the bad guys out of existence to solve the crew’s problems. If the show had been made up with forethought (as opposed to making it up as they went along, as all 60s TV shows did), they would have laid down rules and regulations as to what constitutes interference, and punish captains who broke them. But when the captain can ignore the prime directive and suffer no consequences, it’s a toothless concept.
Why is it even illegal to steal Federation ships and explode them, if Kirk did it without being punished (and in fact was rewarded for it with a welcome demotion)
