#c; leonard

[spacewonder19]

Dear Comet Leonard © Lionel Majzik

[without-ado]

Comet Leonard l optiquevideo l Québec Canada

[chelestials]

nothing is more humbling when you’re watching an edit of your favorite actor and then the screen goes black and you see yourself on your screen basically thirsting over them

[cinemagal]

Trivia for The Blair Witch Project (1999) dir. Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez

[zirconpetals]

Somebody make some kind of smart observation about their relationship or Spock's character arc based on this

[forsapphics]

The Serenade (date unknown)

Leonard Raven-Hill (1867 - 1942)

[cosmicyellow]

Gonna watch all of the simpsons, currently on season 2! Not even sure what season it's on now. 30?? 35??? 41???? I truly do not know. Haven't watched or drawn simpson related anything in YEARS. Fun fact the simpsons are what got baby me into drawing in the 90s. I would draw bart simpson's head over and over and over again :) so doing this felt super nostalgic lol, mostly from memory!!! Felt natural, felt right

[betty-fran]

A couple of thoughts on Spock and McCoy's relationship (and, probably, about K/S too).

It becomes more apparent in season three, though it's actually an ongoing trend, that McCoy often worries about Spock more than about Kirk when they're both in danger. Not because he worries about Kirk any less, but because he worries about Spock differently. In S3EP10 "Plato's Stepchildren," the most psychologically difficult episode that N and I watched the other day, this is well-read in the moment of bullying that Parmen arranges when he tries to convince McCoy to stay. Kirk, of course, orders McCoy not to accept Parmen's offer under any circumstances:

KIRK: McCoy. No matter what he makes me say or do, the answer's no. MCCOY: No, Parmen! Stop it!

And as hard as it is, McCoy holds himself back because he respects him as a captain first and foremost. He worries about Kirk, of course he does, it's natural for him, it's a habit developed over the years and close friendship, but he trusts his decisions:

(Kirk rolls in agony.) PARMEN: Well, Doctor? MCCOY: I have my orders.

But when it comes to Spock, it's more complicated. He has an awareness of the limits of Kirk's endurance (and again, he has to see him as a captain first and trust him in that), and the way he worries about Kirk is objectively logical. But his worry about Spock is more of an emotional response. He noticeably distrusts Spock's ability to recognize his own limits, especially emotionally, often referring to his emotional repression. He worries about Spock in a way that Spock himself is incapable of worrying about (or at least incapable of doing so fully), about what Spock constantly neglects - his psychological state:

(Spock is forced to dance close to Kirk's head. Flamenco-style, I think, ending with a boot directly over Kirk's face. Then Spock is allowed to rest, and he starts to laugh heartily. He crawls over to Alexander, who cannot help but join in.) MCCOY: He's a Vulcan. You can't force emotion out of him. PHILANA: You must be joking, Doctor. MCCOY: You'll destroy him. PARMEN: We can't let him die laughing, can we? (Now Spock cries.) MCCOY: I beg you.

McCoy definitely cares about him. All those scenes where he suddenly and seemingly for no reason starts lecturing Spock about his inability to feel feelings and accept his own emotions are usually the very moments when Spock actually feel feelings but trying to repress it, which makes me think that McCoy is telling him all these things at those moments not because he's an insensitive bastard, but because he's just very aware of what's going on with Spock emotionally.

Unlike Kirk, who is actually very similar to Spock in his perception of the world and his way of thinking, McCoy and Spock are really radically different people. He doesn't understand Spock as fully or as deeply as Kirk does, but he can understand Spock's emotional state (and he can be straightforward with him about it). Where Kirk accepts Spock unconditionally and completely for who he is (with Spock's inability to feel in a normal human way, this complexity of his world, this internal struggle), preserving that right for Spock to be exactly that, because again, Kirk doesn't want him to be anything other than who he is, even if it means he can't be with him the way he wants to (which brings us back to the similarity between Kirk and the Companion from Metamorphosis), McCoy doesn't need to do this. He doesn't buy into all that Spock "too complicated to feel simple feelings" nonsense, and he doesn't hold back on his choice of words when it comes to talking about it. McCoy perceives Spock through the lens of his own human perception, seeking in him what he can understand and explain through emotion. And while this is not real acceptance, it's also not an attempt to change him. In fact, it's this emotional vision of McCoy, his pressure on Spock's emotions, that quite often turns out to be true, because Spock obviously still has a human side.

When we observe the dynamic between the three of them, we realize that Kirk's feelings about Spock are obviously different from his feelings about McCoy, who is apparently his closest friend in TOS (which makes me as a viewer wonder if this was done consciously, considering that K and S relationship was really positioned as special and unique, even without any romantic reading). And McCoy undoubtedly understands how indispensable, unique, viscerally important Spock is to Kirk. He, more than once, when faced with a choice between danger for himself and Spock, tries to take the hit, realizing that losing Spock would be harder for Kirk. The whole dynamic of McCoy and Spock's relationship reminds me of a situation where your best friend falls in love (so completely and irrevocably), and trying to understand why he did it and what he found in this other person, you start to look at them, and in the process of this exploration, you unexpectedly get used to them, find your comfort in their company, and (just a little, of course) you start to understand why your friend fell in love so much. This person becomes dear to you, and you start to worry about them no less than you do about your friend, and maybe even more, because you understand that this person is vital to your friend's happiness, the most important in the whole world to him. So, in the end, McCoy now has to take care of two idiots instead of one, which hardly makes his life easy.

Therefore, the well-being of these two is personally important to him. He often reacts angrily to the actions of either of them when it could hurt the other, and more than once acts as a "voice of reason", reminding (not always gently) of this super-importance between the two of them. To a certain extent, it is Kirk, their shared concern and responsibility for him, that really holds McCoy and Spock together, and I think that if Kirk had died, this delicate attachment that exists between them would have collapsed under the weight of grief, although in the opposite situation McCoy and Kirk's friendship and Kirk and Spock's closeness would have survived. But in all this, McCoy really, genuinely worries about Spock. Unable to fully understand and accept his complexity, he simultaneously sympathizes with him and tries to help in any way he can. And he's also important to Spock, not just as Kirk's closest friend, someone who's emotionally important to him, but, actually, as his own friend too. Their relationship is more fragile and complex than a simple friendship, and often exists despite contradictions, but what unites them outweighs the rest, bringing some balance.

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Zombies of the Stratosphere (1952)

[adoctornotatumbl-r]

my dog and my brother’s dog tried to go through the dog door at the exact same time and i’m pissed that i didn’t get a picture because it looked exactly like that star trek picture where the triumvirate tries to go through the door at the same time . yall know the one

[anghraine]

The Memory Alpha wiki is helpful at times, but also really frustrating, because yeah, it's a wiki, and it's limited by its users like any wiki. But I've got two major issues with it, one really major and one ... sometimes a big deal and sometimes minor, but annoying at best.

1— The big issue: the wiki tends to whitewash the production histories of the show while also providing the most convenient and broadly detailed histories of each episode's production. So it's easy to rely on their versions, but if you do so, you're going to miss some really important things. For instance, Memory Alpha mentions that Shimon Wincelberg, the writer of "Dagger of the Mind," used "S. Bar-David" as a pseudonym, and that he was Jewish (his family fled Nazi pogroms in the 30s) and that:

He incorporated several references to Jewish parables into the screenplay.

There's no explanation on either the episode page or the page for the Bar-David pseudonym as to why Wincelberg used a pseudonym, or what the Jewish references in the episode even are. But if you go to Wikipedia, the plot thickens:

Shimon Wincelberg originally wrote a reference to Hillel the Elder's "Torah on one leg" parable, but Roddenberry mandated an attribution to "the ancient skeptic." Wincelberg, incensed by Roddenberry's rewrites, requested a name change to S. Bar-David for the airing.

If you go back to the aired episode, the villain (Dr. Adams) specifically dismisses Kirk's (entirely justified) skepticism in the context of "the ancient skeptic who demanded of the wise old sage to be taught all the world's wisdom while standing on one foot." The line about "all the world's wisdom" is "the Torah" if you check the source of this, and "the wise old sage" is either Hillel or his rival Shammai. So Wincelberg's script explicitly associates the Adams-Kirk conflict with a very major Jewish figure whom Adams evidently expects Kirk to know about, and Wincelberg was angry enough about Roddenberry's excisions that he wouldn't put his own name to the script. But the reference to a science lab Christmas party on the Enterprise is allowed to remain, and Helen's surname Noel is an unsubtle reference to Christmas.

If you follow the Wikipedia citation from that discussion, you get a whole article from 2015 about the tension between Roddenberry's intense antisemitism and the influence of Jewish culture on Star Trek. The article includes a discussion of a conversation between its writer and Leonard Nimoy himself:

"Gene was anti-Semitic, clearly," Nimoy replied as my heart sank. "Roddenberry had Jewish associates; Bill (Shatner) and I were both Jewish, as were others. To be fair, Roddenberry was anti-religion. And apart from being a ethnic-cultural entity, Jews, to him, were a religious group. But I saw examples not only of him practicing anti-Semitism, but of him being callous about other peoples' differences as well."

The article's ultimate conclusion is not remotely "fuck Star Trek"—it deeply loves it, in fact—but the legacy is fraught and complex. So that seems rather a lot to just breeze past, and Memory Alpha does this pretty regularly (the references to Grace Lee Whitney's ouster are often incredibly vague, for instance).

2— A sometimes lesser but still significant issue with the wiki is that it takes a very contemporary, Wookieepedia-style, canon-welding approach to very different, not-especially-cohesive ST projects that ... I don't like as an approach to Star Wars, either, but which feels particularly egregious for Star Trek, which I think has traditionally taken a looser, healthier, less continuity-obsessed approach to storytelling.

So, for instance, in TOS, the conflict between the Federation and the Gorn is a tragic misunderstanding; the Gorn are defending themselves against colonization. The twist the entire episode is built on is the revelation that the Gorn are the injured parties and aren't monsters at all (when the Gorn is winning the combat, he tells Kirk things like, "Wait for me. I shall be merciful and quick" and "Captain, let us be reasonable"). The Federation erred in colonizing their homes. The culmination of the episode is Kirk's defiant refusal to kill his Gorn opponent, or have the Gorn ship/crew destroyed when he has the chance; he instead chooses to try and talk to them and negotiate peace. SNW has, let's say, a rather different take on the Gorn. If you project SNW!Gorn backwards onto "Arena" to weld it all into one canon, you basically have to sacrifice the whole sense and point of the original episode (which was criticizing colonialism!) in the interests of some forced, anodyne continuity.

Memory Alpha sometimes notes continuity "issues" like these, but is never really willing to treat different projects as distinct narratives apart from the alpha/beta distinction. If you look at the citations for various statements about "canon," for instance, you'll see TOS, the original movies, TNG/DS9/VOY, AOS, SNW, and others all thrown in together into some kind of canonicity blender, without it even being clear which statement belongs to which canon. And that approach to ST is especially hard on Trek that had something important to say that's been smoothed away in the modern era of glossy but often much less ambitious Paramount productions.

[hollis-art]

5. wander

[90smovies]

[lonesomedreamer]

Now that we’ve been able to orbit Venus, we’re a lot closer to our ultimate goal, Mars—the next stage of Project Vulcan.

WILLIAM SHATNER as Colonel Jeff Martin in The Outer Limits: “Cold Hands, Warm Heart” (1964)

[rowdyluv]

‘25 US National Jr. Team Captains

RYAN AND GABE😭

[starberry-cupcake]

all knowing body-less alien in spock's body left me sobbing and nodding at the screen in an existential heap

also spock: *in danger* bones: jim, maybe you should calm down jim: I'll be calm jim: *loses it* jim: bones, turns out I'm not calm

spoiler: he was ok