#I like TOS' Pike much more than SNW's and not only bc SNW Pike is played by a zionist

[bumblingbabooshka]

I know I'm like decades late to the party and SNW is out and all but I think the events of "The Menagerie" would be even more interesting if Pike and Spock DIDN'T have a particularly close interpersonal relationship because I remember watching that episode and being a bit curious about why Spock would risk SO much for this man who, in-episode, I don't recall ever having any special bond portrayed with Spock. Spock, in that episode, is more the eager ensign than anyone of special importance and the episode doesn't set any scene aside to show that Pike has especially warm feelings towards him.

Of course, Spock served with Pike for eleven years and their relationship could have grown in that time and I expect the audience is supposed to assume that. (Or make the assumption that any crewman would do the same for their captain but Spock being Vulcan and not shown as particularly close to Pike DOES make you wonder! Especially since this is something Spock elected to do on his own and obviously planned in extreme detail and was willing to DIE over) In-universe, the events of the Menagerie are shown to justify why Spock wants Pike to go to that banned planet specifically - not to justify why He feels He has to do this for Pike but I just find it curious that there isn't even one scene where Pike and young Spock speak in depth to one another. Instead, Pike has that sort of scene with the Doctor. There's only moment I can recall that approaches that and it itself is interesting to me! There's a trilling, musical noise in the air and both Pike and Spock follow it to discover that some plant is emitting the noise. Pike stills one bunch of leaves and Spock stills the other, granting silence. Spock then turns to Pike with a smile and Pike looks back at him for a moment, face blank, before turning away. I like that TOS' Pike has a colder edge to him than Kirk and I can't help but think of his relationship to Spock from Spock's perspective where he's just abandoned his family and was effectively disowned and here, with Pike on Pike's Enterprise, is perhaps the first time he's ever felt like he might belong somewhere and be an asset to someone. Those feelings (whether or not Spock acknowledges them) might be strong enough that it doesn't quite matter how Pike feels about Spock as long as it isn't negative. In fact, maybe the experience of being praised and liked to any extent by a cold, commanding man ties into issues Spock canonically has with Sarek. Here is a man cold and distant enough to feel familiar but with that Human warmth and willingness to show emotion and give praise which Vulcan as a whole and more specifically his father has not been willing to grant Spock. I also can't help thinking of this from the perspective of Spock as a gay man either. Pike's clear longing for domestic bliss, a home with a wife and his beloved horse, can be juxtaposed with Kirk fairly easily to me: Kirk is shown throughout the series to be lonely and to fall in love with women but there's never really the possibility of him leaving the captaincy to be with them. He belongs to the Enterprise, with Spock. Pike's happy ending is being with a woman and Spock sees him there. Meanwhile, I think we all know that Kirk's happy ending does not entail this. It entails being on the Enterprise, a captain, and being with Spock as an extension of that. (Spock, revealed in this episode to have been part of the existing Enterprise staff, is almost an extension of the beloved starship) Perhaps the reason there's no explanation for why Spock is willing to go so far for Pike, to risk his life for a man we don't see as being particularly close to the Vulcan, is the same reason for the inexplicable curing of Spock's fever after 'killing' Kirk, is what I'm saying

[neyafromfrance95]

So spapel has absolutely consumed my brain. I can't stop pleading to the snw gods to apply a canon fix-it because the idea of them permanently breaking up and Christine being tragically in love with her emotionally unavailable ex forever is too heartbreaking. Like, I'm already tense waiting to see how it all goes to hell this season (Christine's commitment issues combo with Spock not being able to reconcile acting on love vs. logic is my current guess) but whatever happens, the state of them in TOS with the new context of SNW is purely awful, and I don't want it for either of them!

anon, i understand you completely! i think we all do!

but the thing is, we do not know the future of spapel's relationship post-tos!movies, so there can be hope for them. after all, christine is still madly in love with him in tos and an added context from snw could hint that spock loves her too, he simply surprises his feeling for whatever reason.

besides, i have always thought that we had to fill in a lot of blanks in tos when it came to the characters' personal lives since unlike snw, tos was more plot-based than character-based, imo.

that being said, snw and tos are two different productions. just like there is no way pike is going from looking like anson mount to looking like jeffrey hunter in 5 years, snw!spapel's relationship won't ever grow into exactly what their dynamic was in tos.

snw presents their dynamic as that of the soulmates, not simply the first loves bc i believe spock loves t'pring and surely christine has had loved others in her life too. but to our knowledge, christine is the only one for whom spock decided to feel his vulcan emotions and spock is the only one with whom christine wanted to have a strings-attached relationship.

their relationship has been developed exceptionally well so far. i believe that it will have equally satisfying, but hopefully open-ended conclusion in snw. my only fear for now is that they will rush the breaking up storyline, rather than pushing it for much later.

what is interesting to me, is how often the intensity and the danger of vulcan emotions, the very emotions that spock let loose for christine, are emphasized. so i bet that's done for a reason. spock has already let his feelings for christine get in the way of his duties as the first officer - punching a vulcan man, almost starting a war, endangering his own life during the mission...

and listen, i love all of this as a shipper, but if i lived in the federation, i would be seriously pissed by the fact that my life may depend on a high-ranking starfleet officer who is so compromised.

it would be just so bittersweet, if the reason why spapel broke up is that a love like theirs wasn't compatible with being the starfleet officers, and it would be so much more impactful if christine was the one to act logically by breaking away, and maybe that's why spock is the way he is in tos, bc he hasn't quite forgiven chapel for leaving him.

i just hope i'm not massively setting myself up by having such grand, high-romance expectations.

but well, nothing in canon gets in the way of us imagining that 70 years old spock and christine got reunited and restarted their relationship anyways, haha!

[data-is-my-favorite-android]

Let’s talk about Star Trek canon and what we consider bendable (but still compliant enough) to remain canon and what changes we consider significant enough to be divergent.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I confess it’s because I’m already on high alert looking for signs that SNW is going to ultimately follow its own path (if you’ve read anything else on my blog in the last week you know why lol). So I’m probably reading too much into things or thinking about this too hard for my own good, but the question of what can bend and what can’t break to remain canon-compliant still stands, and it’s an interesting one.

Btw, most of the stuff I’m thinking about centers around Spock, not only because he’s a long-time favorite of mine but also because, of the characters shared between TOS and SNW, his was the most fleshed out in TOS.

All shows with an established canon have inflection points, and some of those points are “harder” than others, more fixed and enshrined as important, immutable events/facts in the course of a story. If you bend them too much or break them, the existing story as the audience knows it is quantifiable changed. Softer inflection points can bend the facts in a way that might make audiences give writers the side-eye, but are permissible bc in the grand scheme of things they don’t tinker with the core backbone of the known story. The audience can still accept that these events occur in the same universe.

For SNW’s part, it has already committed several minor breaks with canon which are related to soft inflection points. In TOS, Spock was the only noticeably alien member of the crew, for instance. Discovery sort of changed the rules on that, and SNW followed suit. There’s lots of behind-the-scenes/budget/practical reasons why TOS didn’t show other aliens on the Enterprise, whereas now Star Trek properties have the budget and the technology to invest in prosthetics and special effects for more than one core character. And that’s a good thing! We love aliens 💕 But it is a notable difference.

In TOS, Spock states that he has never mind-melded with a human before, but Spock mind-melds with La’An in SNW. Bones doesn’t know shit about Vulcan biology while Dr. M’Benga seems to know more (at least when it comes to pure Vulcans; Spock has always been trickier bc of his human genetics). Some of the ship’s technologies are more advanced than in TOS. And of course Nurse Chapel has WAY more personality (which is a wonderful improvement and I am so freakin’ happy that the writers brought her on board and really dedicated effort to making her a nuanced character).

These are all fairly minor and can mostly be chalked up to the fact that they’re relatively obscure, trivial facts, and that we have better production technologies and want to show them off and we need to make Star Trek feel like it’s in the future, which means updating the aesthetics and functions of the tech. When it comes to characters like Uhura, Chapel, Pike, and Una, it’s pretty easy to tweak their characters (because there wasn’t a lot of detail in the source material to begin with) and update them for modern audiences and values without violating the audience’s sense of continuity too much.

But there are larger deviations happening too, and they’re operating in a gray area that make them /just/ plausibly canon-compliant enough but also are arguably not. Whether they are truly “hard” inflection points depends on whether they indeed have larger ripple effects downstream.

In Amok Time (TOS), for instance, nobody knew Spock was engaged, including Nurse Chapel and Uhura. Literally everyone was shocked. It is also (not stated outright but) heavily implied that Spock and T’Pring have not seen each other since they were very young. In fact, it is stated that Spock hoped he would never undergo pon farr, though he was certainly old enough to have gone through at least one. You can write that off as either an error on the part of the writers or that his human genetics may alter the internal clock for his pon farr, but the fact remains that a) he probably hadn’t been in contact with T’Pring for quite a long time (possibly since childhood) and b) for sure NOBODY knew or suspected he was engaged/betrothed in TOS. And that’s… not an inconsequential difference between TOS and SNW, in my opinion. It isn’t necessarily an obvious and outright deviation, but it is definitely not an insignificant revision SNW made.

(Also it seems like everybody in Star Fleet knows a fair bit about Vulcans by this time in SNW, whereas in TOS there’s very much this sense that working closely with Vulcans is extremely rare and they guard the secrets of their lifestyles and culture well.)

Like I said, this has just got me thinking about the malleability of canon and what is acceptable to mess around with and still claim adherence and what isn’t. A lot of these things are small infractions, but Amok Time and the information it conveyed about Spock’s character and Vulcan culture therein is a MAJOR cornerstone of Trek lore. It’s one of the most notable episodes of the TOS canon, arguably a hard inflection point as a whole, and you wouldn’t think the writers would want to muck around with it. But they did. T’Pring is VERY present in Spock’s life in SNW. Nurse Chapel is absolutely painfully aware of her, and Uhura may also know of her too (though I don’t think they’ve directly interacted). Other Bridge members also know who T’Pring is by name, if not on sight.

These facts by general consensus still don’t seem to outright break canon, even if they do represent a more significant break from info established in TOS. The hard inflection points of Amok Time are that Spock has a fiancée and goes into pon farr, and when he arrives on Vulcan she forces him to fight Kirk so she can end up with Stonn. This effectively ends their betrothal. Explicitly break with any of those points and you have divergence, but all the other details are just that: details. And SNW takes place more than ten years before the events of TOS, which leaves lots of room to play and makes it easier to avoid doing things that would DIRECTLY violate canon. But idk, the changes they made particularly in regards to T’Pring and Spock’s relationship are already subtly shifting away from canon. It’s certainly bending the narrative details of one of the more important episodes in TOS. It wouldn’t have been hard for the SNW writers to leave that aspect of Spock’s life alone. They didn’t have to bring T’Pring in, and they also didn’t have to bring Chapel in either (or Stonn now that I think about it!). Spock also seems to be actively confronting aspects of himself in SNW that he largely avoided discussing/examining in TOS (though this could be a matter of perspective. It just always seemed to me like he was never really comfortable/never really reconciled his human and Vulcan halves in TOS, but it’s been a while since I’ve watched TOS end to end, so maybe I’m not remembering some things right. He seemed happy to live among humans, but he always had trouble embracing or admitting to his own humanity). His character development already seems on track to put him well ahead of the curve of where he started in TOS.

So with all that in mind, what exactly would it take to definitively signal a break from canon and the establishment of a new timeline in SNW? At this point, it probably all hinges on something significant Spock does, or maybe Pike. If Pike figures out how to bend fate or avoid it entirely, that would obviously create an AU. But that branch point is ten years in the future, so I’m not quite sure how they could show him avoiding that without a weird time skip or something. But Spock? If he breaks it off with T’Pring (and/or T’Pring gets with Stonn who has already shown up), that could signal a clear departure. If Spock gets with Nurse Chapel, that could also do it (though that’s a little more gray; you could say that TOS Chapel’s unrequited love for Spock is rooted in an earlier failed attempt at a relationship). Spock has a LOT more hard canon inflection points in TOS than anyone else, so his actions and development in SNW bear the most weight.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that Star Trek has always played around with alternate universes and divergent timelines, and that is true—but rarely does the eye of the story shift to follow one of these branches. The cinematic Star Trek universe made a whole new timeline, but it can get away with that because that story is told through a different medium (movies vs tv series). For the shows, it’s harder to justify. Discovery had to REALLY do a lot of heavy wrangling to remain canon compliant, and some fans were mad about the deviation it presented up until Michael went to the future with the Discovery and her name was stricken from all records.

Personally, I appreciate a core canon, but I love me some AU shit. I love exploring different expressions of the same characters, seeing different choices lead to different (or shockingly similar!) results. I think a lot of fandoms are becoming more open to the flexibility of multiverses, in part bc of the influence of fanfic, and in part bc of other properties/mediums doing the same (namely comics and their spin-off Hollywood franchises). Whether Star Trek and SNW follows suit remains to be seen.

Idk, ya’ll have any thoughts on this? I’m spending way too much time mulling this over lol