#tos: this side of paradise

[anghraine]

It's genuinely kind of baffling to me that Leila Kalomi so regularly is the Spock "love interest" invoked as proof that Spock can't possibly be gay he had an ex-girlfriend didn't you see the episode with his girlfriend he could be straight or maybe bi but definitely definitely couldn't be gay.

Anyway, this is Leila's description of their previous relationship in "This Side of Paradise":

ELIAS: Did you love him? LEILA: If I did, it was important only to myself. ELIAS: How did he feel? LEILA: Mr. Spock's feelings were never expressed to me.

-

LEILA: Come back to the planet [with the docility sex pollen spores] with me. You can belong again. Come back with me, please. SPOCK: I can't. LEILA: I love you. I said that six years ago, and I can't seem to stop repeating myself. On Earth, you couldn't give anything of yourself. You couldn't even put your arms around me. We couldn't have anything together there. We couldn't have anything together any place else.

Like. Leila herself acknowledges that Spock would never willingly enter any kind of relationship with her unless drugged into it, even as little as taking her in his arms. And Spock, uniquely among the many people exposed to the spores, experiences physical pain in the transition to artificial happiness/belonging/"love":

SPOCK: No. LEILA: It shouldn't hurt. SPOCK: No, I can't. Please, don't! LEILA: Not like this. It didn't hurt us. SPOCK: I am not like you!

Early in the episode, she is very clear about how much she cares about what Spock would choose while fully functional:

ELIAS: Would you like him to stay with us now, to be as one of us? LEILA: There is no choice, Elias. He will stay.

Spock specifically asks her questions that would reveal the spore effect and allow him to make an autonomous choice. Leila refuses to answer until the spores painfully take him over. And even once she herself is freed of the spores' effects, her approach to Spock and his autonomy doesn't significantly change; it isn't really something she values about him.

Compare this to someone like Eve McMahon even in as terrible an episode as "Mudd's Women," in which Kirk is the one affected by the aphrodisiac and Spock is immune. Eve is strongly implied to be interested in Kirk, and she knows he's being affected by the drug that nobody has explained to the Enterprise crew; he asks her not to come into his bedroom, and she ignores that for a moment to carry out the seduction, but she knows it's wrong and is so horrified that she breaks it off and leaves. The even more ethically ambiguous Helen Noel in "Dagger of the Mind" also has an arc that leads to her insisting "This isn't right" when Kirk's autonomy is compromised, and reminding him of what's real. Chapel ultimately accepts in "Plato's Stepchildren" that Spock's no always meant no and could never be otherwise without some violation of consent that she finds horrifying. Leila is not uniquely terrible (Deela in "Wink of an Eye" is a lot more unambiguously chilling), but this isn't just how all women in TOS behave, either.

There's also an intriguing thread of very distinct mutual hostility and incomprehension between Leila and Kirk throughout the episode, in which neither comes off looking great, but Leila plainly cares quite a lot less about Spock's autonomy. A lot of this is mostly conveyed by performance (Shatner very convincingly bleeds jealousy as Kirk here), but Leila definitely doesn't get the nature of Spock's and Kirk's relationship even as it exists in S1:

SPOCK: Emotions are alien to me. I'm a scientist. LEILA: Someone else might believe that. Your shipmates, your captain, but not me.

Kirk very much does not believe that, just to be clear. I feel it's worth mentioning that this episode was aired directly after the one that concluded with this—

—and right before the one in which Spock insists he's acting based on logic and probability and of course wouldn't leap into danger. Kirk's response is just this:

That is also the one in which Spock torpedoes all his scientific principles in pure panic over Kirk:

SPOCK: Captain, are you all right? Jim? Jim!

SPOCK: Kill it, captain, quickly! KIRK: It's not making any threatening moves, Spock. SPOCK: You don't dare take the chance, captain. Kill it. KIRK: I thought you were the one who wanted it kept alive, captured if possible. SPOCK: Jim, your life is in danger. You can't take the risk. KIRK: It seems to be waiting. SPOCK: I remind you it's a proven killer. I'm on my way.

Anyway, Kirk is immediately jealous and resentful of Leila and regards her as the problem. He doesn't know much of anything about Spock and Leila's previous relationship and certainly doesn't seem to know how ephemeral it was (Leila's descriptions of how limited it was both occur in scenes where Kirk is not present and she pretty obviously tries to suggest it was a real romance when he is there). So Leila doesn't know what the relationship between Spock and Kirk actually is like and how bizarre Spock's spore-influenced behavior is going to seem, and Kirk doesn't know what Spock's relationship with Leila really was like, so we just end up with this wild uncomprehending mutual resentment between them.

Even before Kirk knows what's going on with Spock, he seems to think removing Leila from the picture would fix things. While it's not quite true, when he does figure out how to break the spore haze, his first priority is getting Spock away from Leila and back at his side. Spock makes it extremely clear what drives his refusal to return to Leila and the artificial happiness of the spores, as powerful as it was for him:

LEILA: I can't lose you now, Mister Spock. I can't. SPOCK: I have a responsibility to this ship, to that man on the bridge. I am what I am, Leila, and if there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them.

Like, this whole situation is so fucked-up and puts such an emphasis on Kirk's oblivious jealousy of Leila, her lol what consent possessiveness around Spock (combined with the repeated revelations about how extremely minimal their relationship was and remains without literally drugging him), and the spores affecting everyone in basically the same pleasant but unhealthy way (rather than the highly idiosyncratic and physically painless effects of losing inhibitions in "The Naked Time") apart from it being specifically painful for Spock as he begs for it to stop. The whole interest of the episode turns on the essential melancholy of Spock's position: his only options are a) artificially- and painfully-induced contentment that is his sole experience of happiness but foreign to him or b) the fundamental self-inflicted purgatory of life at Kirk's side that is nevertheless truer to what he really is (I am what I am). It is not remotely difficult to read all this in repressed gay terms rather than proof!!! of Spock's attraction to women.

The thing is, of all the obligatory Spock "love" interests in TOS, there are multiple other ones that you could make an argument for. The most obvious is the Romulan commander; he's in his right mind, she's not the source of the dubcon, they have fantastic chemistry even if Spock's manner is deliberately ambiguous, she's super cool and hot and his age, and he definitely respects her. I guess there's Droxine, too; their interactions aren't even dubcon, just strange and bad and don't go anywhere. Even Zarabeth is only mildly sketchy compared to Leila and has a much better motive. But for some reason, the "well akshually" responses to gay Spock posts always seem obsessed with But His Canon Girlfriend Leila in particular.

[anghraine]

In the iconic words of James T. Kirk:

Mr. Spock is much stronger than the ordinary human being. Aroused, his great physical strength could kill. But it's a risk I'll have to take.

"They tried to kill eachother!!" oh my godddd that was only a couple of timessss and they were literally flirtingggg shut uppppp

[trek-tracks]

For all your heatwave needs

[9151967]

Jim Kirk + Loneliness in Star Trek: The Original Series

Dagger of the Mind, The Conscience of the King, This Side of Paradise, And The Children Shall Lead, Requiem for Methuselah, Mark of Gideon

[dedicatedfollower467]

for reference:

Amok Time = the canonical Fuck Or Die Episode

This Side of Paradise = the canonical Sex Pollen Episode (technically happiness/euphoria pollen but the sex part is heavily implied)

Plato's Stepchildren = the canonical Aliens Made Them Do It Episode (actually featuring Kirk/Uhura rather than anything with spock, but like. the potential is definitely there)

All Our Yesterdays = the canonical Huddling For Warmth Episode

The Enterprise Incident = the canonical Undercover Agent Sex Episode

[anghraine]

#it got gayer har har har (via @ladytharen)

If TOS has taught us nothing else, it's that it can always get gayer :P

Spock is Gay ➞ A Collection of Evidence

[tprings-hair]

1x24: THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

pt 1 pt 2

[chazchaschad]

This episode was so great actually

[iamenits]

Free Space | @leonardmccoyevents’ Leonard McCoy Bingo 2025

[spockeveryday]

[anghraine]

It's honestly kind of funny to me that catapulting into Kirk/Spock shipping has launched my usual "meh, not into jealousy as a metric of romantic love" shipping tendency out the window and instead I'm genuinely charmed by the extent to which they reflect the same unhealthy seething jealousy.

This is most obvious with Spock, but you'll get McCoy joking about Spock falling in love with a computer (not an android, a stationary computer) and McCoy being A Normal Guy Joking About His Friend Having a Hobby is immediately contrasted with Kirk's barely repressed jealousy (you can all but see him thinking "time to talk another computer to death" while McCoy just laughs at his own joke about it). Kirk gets more and more generally insecure until Spock publicly declares that, while he does like an efficient computer, Kirk is irreplaceable and he doesn't want to serve anyone or anything else, and Kirk looks like he's about to kiss him on the bridge.

(Kirk still talks the computer to death, btw, for plot reasons. But big "Edith Keeler must die" energy.)

I also enjoy Kirk's horror/outrage at Leila Kalomi and her obvious gloating over "taking" Spock from him in the docility sex pollen episode and Kirk's willingness to do or say anything to get Spock back vs Spock bleeding intensity throughout "Requiem for Methuselah" as Kirk falls in love with Rayna, then Spock numbly listening to McCoy's speech about how he can never understand the glories or agonies of romantic love triangles or passionate love before waiting for him to leave and then wiping Rayna from Kirk's mind. Just two bros who are totally normal about each other!

[ccxssi]

This side of paradise in a nutshell

[trek-tracks]

The Sp in Spock stands for "sweetie pie." ("ock" is the sound when he hits you with a tire iron)

[9151967]

Love that, upon returning to the ship, Bones decided to touch up his makeup before going to the bridge ♡

[zirconpetals]

Obsessed with the way they keep holding each other throughout the conversation after Spock comes to

+

[etherealspacejelly]

"jim didnt need to make spock angry to get rid of the spores' influence in this side of paradise. any strong emotion would do. if star trek was a good show he would have just kissed him." - me just now