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Trip Tucker: Ultimate Florida Man!

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Okay I know we all joke about how the Star Trek First Contact handshake is accidentally a kiss, but the more I think about it, the more I feel it actually works in-universe and elevates the scene.

There are dozens of sci fi stories where first contact is fumbled based on a misunderstanding and it turns into a massive war. Babylon 5, Ender's Game, several Star Trek episodes in fact. Two different peoples meet but are just a bit too different and we murder each other over nothing. That's just how it goes, right? Realistic, if depressing.

And in Star Trek's first human contact, everything is set up for a fumble. Cochrane is an engineer with zero political skills, and while the Vulcans who come in have at least learned English they're far from an official diplomatic envoy. Earth is not in great shape and they've no idea aliens even exist, so there's a chance for tension. And when the captain does the traditional salute, the human can't even move his fingers into the right configuration, and instead offers his hand. In Vulcan terms, this is about the equivalent of offering a handshake and the other guy wants to shove his tongue down your throat. Plenty of room for disgust, misunderstanding, conflict, another warning about the dangers of difference.

But that isn't what happens. The Vulcan captain sees this and accepts it, reaching out to complete the gesture. He doesn't fully understand what's happening, but he saw Cochrane at least try to do the Vulcan salute, so he chooses to assume the best of him. To meet him where he's at, even if it's a bit awkward for him personally. And it works out. He and his crew are invited for drinks and music, and the dominoes are instead sent towards ending humanity's dark age and starting the Federation. All because the Vulcan captain saw past what could have been an insult and gave humanity the benefit of the doubt.

Star Trek is not a perfect universe where human-Vulcan first contact goes 100% smoothly. Star Trek is a universe where first contact is nearly a diplomatic incident, but they're able to move past that and create something better because both sides chose to be open-minded and compassionate. It might not be (fully, the scene is meant to be a bit awkward but not that awkward) intended, but damn if it doesn't work.

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Until I rewatched the TNG pilot just now I didn't know there were printers on every deck on the Enterprise that Picard can use to tell people the ship is about to go into MAXIMUM ACCELERATION.

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i think william shatner will be going back and forth between so anti spirk to the point of actual homophobia and so pro spirk it almost seems like he was in love with nimoy until the day he dies. and maybe even longer.

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because they’re gay‼️

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I know I'm being a bit of a hater here, but I'm seeing folks going "OMG, Spirk is canon!" over 765874 - Unification, and then I watch it myself and I'm like... that's it? Yeah, it's a well-produced bit of fluff from a technical standpoint, but there were gayer moments in the Original Series, and if your intention is to celebrate a ship, "somewhat less gay than a TV show from 1966" is not an ambitious target!

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hey so what the actual fuck

edit: that's the link to the video btw^^

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Link to quote source (x)

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look. spirk went canon for the first time when spock went into heat and they fucked wrestled on vulcan and spock's heat broke even though jim only faked his death. then they got divorced and spock tried to purge all emotion from his body. then spock realized that jim is his soulmate and feelings are good actually and they held hands which is vulcan for kissing and spirk went canon a second time. then spock died and they had to regrow his body and put his soul back in it and he had to relearn all his memories and finally he remembered jim and spirk went canon a third time. then they were married for a while and saved some whales, met god, had to deal with spock's terrorist cult-leader brother, space chernobyl happened and the soviet union the klingon empire fell and jim was framed for murder and spock had to find the real killer. then jim got sucked into another dimension and died (don't @ me i refuse to even watch this one) and spock got zapped into an alternate universe where he didn't know anyone and had to play spiritual guide to chris pine and zachary quinto. and NOW, thanks to executive producer bill fucking shatner, old jim got to meet even older spock on the astral plane one last time and DOUBLE HELD HANDS which we can only conclude is vulcan making out with tongue. so yes, for a fourth time, spirk has gone canon

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In my beautiful mind the star trek times midwest is less Miles Of Corn and more recovered prairie grasslands btw. Imagine.

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These things happen.

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Rear Window but with Solid Odo stuck in his quarters with either Lwaxana or Quark in the Grace Kelly role.

Maybe rather than staring into his neighbor's windows, he's watching the traffic in and out of the wormhole through his room space port. That's when he notices something fishy.

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You know, people complain about insincerity in media--the constant quippiness, the constant irony, the refusal to engage with tropes or characters without a fat layer of postmodern self-awareness in the way--but I actually think that's a problem in fandom too and may even have influenced the problem on the creator side, through fans working their way into companies and creators trying to engage with fandom.

You look at discussion of Star Wars, for instance, and it's just a steady stream of smart-aleckness. Leia is a disaster lesbian. Darth Vader is a drama queen. It's good to have a sense of humor about this stuff--after all, it's only a show and taking it too seriously definitely has its own set of problems--but it feels like that jokeyness has started a feedback loop between creators and audience where the fans keep taking it less seriously and TPTB keep presenting it less seriously. Until it all seems more like Regular Show than a regular show.

Fandom sees Jim Kirk, a serious-minded leader of men who is occasionally used for comic relief like any good character, and for comedic effect fixates on his womanizing and disregard for orders (only when necessary--which does admittedly come up a lot in a series full of stories being told for dramatic impact. Nothing too dramatic about Kirk following orders and completing his assignment without any trouble).

J.J. Abrams sees this pop culture snowballing of Kirk after years and decades of exaggeration and turns Chris Pine into a horny cowboy.

Fandom unfamiliar with the original series watches the reboot, assumes horny cowboy is the natural state of Captain Kirk, and exaggerates that even further for laughs.

Abrams sees that fans like when Kirk is a horny cowboy--it's all they talk about, after all--and ramps it up by having him casually breaking the Prime Directive and lying about it in the second movie (and having a threesome with alien space babes, for what it's worth).

And so it goes*. That's a pretty extreme case, because most characters don't get decades of pop culture warping their perception, but I feel like... at present, with this miscegenation between fans and creators, where people can show their fan art directly to writers on Twitter... it's exacerbated some.

There isn't that distance that used to impose a certain formality on fans and creators. And so I think the way fans view characters and canon can very easily infiltrate how the creators handle them, even without some crazed fanboy actually getting to pen a Disney+ show or Marvel comic.

Or maybe not. I just see a lot of shows and comics that seem like they want to be fandom catnip ahead of and above being a good story or even an artistic statement the creator is trying to make.

*Digression for Star Trek fans. Ignore if you're not a Trekkie.

Thankfully, I've seen some pushback against Horny Cowboy Kirk in Beyond and Strange New Worlds. Beyond I think portrayed how Horny Cowboy Kirk would chafe against the demands of captaincy and need to evolve closer to Shatner Kirk to keep going on the path he wants to be on. While SNW just shows Kirk as a dutiful, if risk-taking, officer on the fast-track to command thanks to his obvious competence and passion for the job. Which is, you know, what you'd expect from Kirk pre-TOS, but it's good they didn't overthink it and say that he was, I don't know, a drug smuggler all this time (Star Wars. Poe.)

So, credit where credit's due. It's not all bad.

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There’s a rift in the Star Trek fan community. A polarising issue of great importance. Are Vulcans hot? (Yes, obviously, but are they hot and also literally cold?)

Ok so I know what I think the answer is, but I’ve seen it both ways many times in fics. I’d love to know what everyone thinks. Explain in tags!

Apparently the Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual (1977) states that normal Vulcan body temperature is 32.78C. But I don’t consider that canon.

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