By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Star Trek fans are always arguing about which of the franchise’s films is the worst. While there are some very strong contenders (including William Shatner’s The Final Frontier and the execrable Section 31), many old-timers still think the worst movie is The Motion Picture because of how slow and plodding it is. However, that film’s haters now have reason to rejoice because Strange New Worlds’ controversially emotional Spock portrayal fixes TMP by both deepening and contextualizing Spock’s arc in the Original Series films.
Personally, I’ve come to really enjoy Star Trek: The Motion Picture for what it is: a big-budget episode of The Original Series. However, it was infamously dubbed “The Motionless Picture” by critics who hated its slow pace, and many fans agreed with those critics, especially when comparing that first film to the exciting and action-packed The Wrath of Khan. But what really makes TMP so magical is its understanding of its best character: Mr. Spock.
The Spock of the original television show presented himself as an emotionless Vulcan whose methods and motivations were driven by pure logic. But he had occasional emotional outbursts, like his huge smile and excited exclamation that Captain Kirk was alive in “Amok Time” (Spock thought he had killed his bestie in the ritual combat required by Pon Farr). At the beginning of The Motion Picture, Spock is getting ready to undergo Kolinahr to purge him of all remaining emotions, but this always seemed pretty extreme given how rare his emotional outbursts really were.
The Motion Picture effectively sets up a multifilm arc in which Spock realizes the necessity of his emotions and the limits of logic, eventually chastising Valeris that “logic is only the beginning of wisdom, not the end of it.” But what does all of this have to do with Strange New Worlds? This otherwise very popular Star Trek show made the controversial decision to give us a Spock very different from the one in The Original Series: after he accesses some very uncharacteristic rage deep within himself to help fight the Gorn, for example, he cries when he thinks his crush, Nurse Chapel, is dead.
Strange New Worlds has lampshaded this phenomenon, with Commander Pelia even calling Spock “my sweet, un-Vulcan Vulcan.” And thanks to Ethan Peck’s killer performance, it’s hard not to sympathize with this fish-out-of-water alien whenever he’s going through situations like seeing his crush latch onto someone else. Still, many franchise diehards believe that the show has gone too far, making the character who has been famous for his lack of emotions into someone who is often just as flustered, embarrassed, and uncertain as any of his human shipmates.
However, Akiva Goldsman has stated on multiple occasions that Strange New Worlds is meant to chart Spock’s evolution into the logic-loving alien of The Original Series. Only time will tell how well the show does this by the end of its fifth and final season, but right now, all of Spock’s messy emotionality in the show perfectly sets up his arc in the original films. It’s now obvious that Spock has been struggling with emotions for years by the time he serves under Captain Kirk, and that the five-year mission continuously brought out the emotional side he had been trying so hard to repress.
The contagion in “The Naked Time” made him weep about his relationship with both his mother and Kirk, and the spores of “This Side of Paradise” turn him into a grinning lovebird ready to abandon Starfleet for his new squeeze. The time travel shenanigans of “All Our Yesterdays” made him channel the powerful emotions (both love and rage) of his ancestors, and “Amok Time” revealed his uninhibited joy.
Thanks to Strange New Worlds, we know these weren’t exactly outliers, and by the time Kirk’s mission ended, Spock had spent a solid decade dealing with more emotional outbursts than most Vulcans deal with in a lifetime. Previously, the idea was that this happened only a handful of times on the Enterprise, which made the idea of undergoing Kolinahr seem like overkill. Now, though, this newer Trek show has retroactively provided much more motivation for doing something that didn’t make that much sense (at least, to me) in the original 1979 film.
This doesn’t exactly make emotional Spock moments easier to watch, especially for old-school fans who would prefer the Vulcan as an emotionless and by-the-book character. But it does add some crunchy context to the arc of one of TV’s best characters, all while improving Star Trek’s worst movie. And that’s enough to bring an “Amok Time”-sized smile to even the most cynical fan’s face.
