If you think that Spock sought to learn how to be more human, then you should be able to point to specific episodes – and probably more than one – in the series in which he deliberately worked to become more human, or said that he wished to be human. Can you?
I’ll grant that Spock was a changed man – well, he’d protest against that phrasing, so I’ll say a changed Vulcan – after his resurrection. But I still don’t think he ever replied to a suggestion that he be more emotional by anyting more than a genteel, “Fuck that shit. You guys are idiots.”
Any examples? What ideas did Shatner have that Roddenberry wouldn’t do?
I really, really hope the result, if Roddenberry had listened to Shatner, would bear no resemblance of any kind or manner, narratively or thematically or in any sense esthetically, to Star Trek V.
I think you got whooshed. The Capitaine was making a joke about Shatner’s habit to begin a season slim and trim, slowly get thicker about the middle as the months progressed, and then to slim down again by the end.
Warp was used in two different ways in TOS, especially in the early episodes. There was warp in the sense of the FTL drive, but the ship also warped into orbit, in the sense you gave for water based ships. These had nothing to do with one another.
As for time warp, that predates space warp, since Pike gives a Time Warp factor in the first pilot. They wisely decided to drop that idea.
In fact there are opposites which demonstrate the exact opposite. In “Amok Time,” “The Naked Time,” and “This Side of Paradise” Spock experiences emotions. He is shown as somewhat wistful about having to give them up, but he never says that now he understands what they are. A man struggling to suppress his love of alcohol is a far more interesting character than one who has no desire for it at all.
Perhaps Abrams had the same misunderstanding as Cal, which is why he had Spock drop his stoicism so easily - something for which Abrams should be horsewhipped.
“Logic, Logic, Logic. Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.” Spock to Valeris, STVI:TUC.
Also from the same movie: “If I were human, I believe my response would be…go to Hell. ..If I were human.”
No one suggested it (except maybe Amanda. “How do you feel?”) but it happened. Human emotion wore off on him, and he didn’t seem to regret it much. (Oh dear, I’m Trek deprived. When I wrote “human emotion” there the first think I thought of was the new V show. ugh. someone help me!)
Hmmm . . . Never knew that. (During the show’s first run I was too young to know it existed, and reruns are not necessarily aired in their original sequence.)
That’s reasonable. I was born right after the show was cancelled, and I’m sure I never noticed the sequence in the 70s. But in the eighties, Channel 30 in Memphis made a big deal of airing every episode in sequence (it was an independent station, and Trek was pretty much the center of their lineup for many years) so it was more apparent.
Come on, Shatner had to wear a corset during the filming of most of the Star Trek movies. You could probably have filled a lake with the amount of sweating Shatner poured out.
One book tried to say it was posture making his belly poke. Seems Bill had to wear to wear lifts and have higher heels in order to match up to the other males. They said the resulting posture looked belly poofing out ish.
Take it with a grain of salt. I saw some of them in person in the 70s. They didn’t ALL look out of shape, but some looked untrim enough to make an impression on this young convention goer. The models they hired to paint up as green Orion slave girls, tho… YOWSA!
To be more clear, I mean to say that I think Spock was not really “insulted”, but was indulging Kirk after Kirk’s blatant (intentionally so) human-centric statement.
Exactly. The point is – and this can be mentioned in jokes occasionally – that in the Hard SF Trek universe, the idea of a human mating with any extraterrestial – even of a species that sexually reproduces in a way mechanically similar to our own
(not unlikely, it’s a practical way for any animal that lives in air* rather than water – on Earth, most land-dwelling vertebrates and invertebrates alike copulate, while aquatic mammals who have gone back to the sea still copulate, as it were) – is not like a human mating with a sheep or a horse mating with a donkey, it is like a horse/human trying to mate with a spider. Scaling the spider up to horse size ain’t gonna help.
*Oh, yes, that’s another thing. No nonhuman will share the same air with a human, ever, unless at least one of them is using some kind of breathing apparatus.
Needless to say, there will be no such thing as a Universal Translator. The Enterprise will have a database of all known languages and, under the Communications Officer, a staff of xenolinguists almost as big as the engineering crew; they have to go to work before the captain can answer the hail from the ship of unknown origin. They will always do so fairly quickly, sometimes mentioning in passing how the comparative study of the languages of various unrelated sophont species has revealed certain ubiquitous patterns that transcend not only culture but species and even mode of communication (whether by modulation of air flow through mouth parts or an organ that sends and receives radio waves); and, with knowledge of these, and application of the right computer algorithms, the xenolinguists can prepare a rough-and-ready translation to English of any message in any new language, even if it is received purely in digital format without their even being sure what sounds or characters or colors or whatever the character-strings are supposed to represent, in about . . . six hours, or ten minutes broadcast-time. Sorry, Captain, whaddaya want, miracles? Meanwhile, you get the chance to do what you always do – build dramatic tension by guessing their intent from situational clues!
I’m not so sure; given carbon-based life using oxidation as a primary energy source (a pretty broad category of “life as we know it”), oxygen and nitrogen are pretty much the only plausible candidates for making up the bulk of the atmosphere. There may be issues that preclude breathing the same air in particular cases (seriously different oxygen percentages, different types of oxygen processing that involve inhaling or exhaling CO, etc), but it can’t really be ruled out in general.
