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Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Original Series Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: James T. Kirk/Spock Characters: James T. Kirk, Spock (Star Trek), Leonard "Bones" McCoy, Sarek (Star Trek) Additional Tags: PWP, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Misunderstandings, Comedy, epic spock fail, spock's entire family demands babies with Vulcan ears, captain 'shirt what shirt' kirk, how to shut down your Vulcan in one easy step, spock's horny thoughts, Sex, Oral Sex, Penetrative Sex, docking: Vulcan edition, Vulcan Biology (Star Trek), for every fic a different Spock dick, Anal Sex, Eggpreg Summary:

In which Captain Kirk does not wear a shirt, Bones just manages to avoid being collateral damage, and Spock learns a valuable lesson about the importance of not agreeing with one's father when one has not been listening to the conversation.

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okay now I'm curious and I dunno if this is really such an archaic foreign thing to young people today or if I'm just out of touch

Please reblog, I'd love to see a lot of responses!

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he was so real for this. i really must

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Vulcan porn?

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We go together or not at all: [60/∞]

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silly seals from outer space

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Inspired by @spacefroggity post here

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Spock is not listening

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

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Young Spirque (1884), oil on canvas

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(<3)

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do you think spock was bricked up

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what happened on tarsus iv?

this is my attempt at creating a definitive list of information on what kirk experienced on tarsus iv for fic writers and other fans who want to know wtf is up with kirk's backstory.

(I have a longer, more general post on tos kirk's backstory here.)

"Kodos the Executioner, summary. Governor of Tarsus Four twenty Earth years ago. Invoked martial law. Slaughtered fifty percent of population Earth colony, that planet. Burned body found when Earth forces arrived. No positive identification. Case closed."

let's start with this quote from spock, detailing the information he found on their ship's computer.

first of all: at its core, this episode is tos's take on the nazis who escaped capture. adolf eichmann was only found in 1960, and would certainly have been in the public memory as a high profile nazi who managed to make a new life under an assumed name. he was not the only one to have escaped capture, and I don't think I need to explain which conspiracy theory the circumstances of kodos's faked death call to mind.

this episode was an exploration of what form cruelty and authoritarianism might take in star trek's universe, with a huge amount of influence from shakespeare's work. the two together make up this central dilemma: is it kodos? might kirk be condemning an innocent man? if it is kodos, does kirk have the right to act as judge, jury, and executioner? is it possible for someone who carried out terrible acts to live a new life somewhere else, and not have the violence follow?

SPOCK: According to our library banks, it started on the Earth colony of Tarsus IV, when the food supply was attacked by an exotic fungus and largely destroyed. There were over eight thousand colonists and virtually no food. And that was when Governor Kodos seized full power and declared emergency martial law.

MCCOY: I've heard of it.

SPOCK: You may not have heard it all. Kodos began to separate the colonists. Some would live, be rationed whatever food was left. The remainder would be immediately put to death. Apparently he had his own theories of eugenics.

MCCOY: Unfortunately, he wasn't the first.

SPOCK: Perhaps not. But he was certainly among the most ruthless, to decide arbitrarily who would survive and who would not, using his own personal standards, and then to implement his decision without mercy. Children watching their parents die. Whole families destroyed. Over four thousand people. They died quickly, without pain, but they died. Relief arrived, but too late to prevent the executions. And Kodos? There never was a positive identification of his body.

the thing is, this introduces a number of inconsistencies. it could easily be chalked up to confusion between multiple drafts of the script, but if you want to look deeper and see where the information comes from, you'll notice the two survivors have very different stories than the official starfleet record.

specifically, spock says that they died quickly and painlessly, and though he is sure that karidian is kodos, he does not seem to treat him as a legitimate threat to anyone's safety. we don't know if kodos ever directly killed anyone, or if he only gave the orders. but kirk and leighton seem to agree on the violence: leighton refers to his own injury as "the bloody thing (kodos) did", and kirk recalls kodos "blasting" others out of existence. it's possible kirk was saying it to confuse kodos, so kodos might say "that's not how it happened" and give himself away. it's also possible that leighton sustained his injury at a different time than the massacre. it seems likeliest to me in any case that the information on the ship's computer is not the entire truth.

which also means you can headcanon whatever you want and nobody can tell you definitively that you're wrong. be free with your tarsus iv headcanons.

exploring the tarsus iv lore (or lack of it) has led me to this sort of consensus in the fandom that kirk was looking after a group of children. I think it's a very cool way of exploring how central it is to his character that he has to be in control, protecting people, and fighting back, and I've read and enjoyed some absolutely fantastic fics with that premise. even william shatner seems to agree. in his novel collision course (which gives kirk and spock a sort of alternate first meeting as teenagers and gives some great insights into how shatner viewed kirk's backstory), kirk ().

the ship's computer specifies the number of survivors later in the episode as nine, and lists them as

Kirk, J., Leighton, T., Moulton, E., Riley, K., Eames, D.

before kirk cuts it off. once leighton dies, the last two surviving are kirk and riley.

the novelization by james blish names a couple more characters, and in order of age: Leighton, T., Molson, E., Kirk, J., Wiegand, R., Eames, S., and Daiken, R., which was what they called the role of kevin riley initially. he is specified as being five years old at the time, and kirk is not a child or teen but a midshipman.

and collision course names still more characters. edith zaglada, an eight year old girl who kirk saw killed. donny, tay, and billy are named as other survivors. this novel doesn't get into kodos's motivations or kirk's circumstances, but it gives us two new characters, griffyn and matthew, who are teenagers employed by kodos as bounty hunters for escapees of the initial massacre. starfleet arrives just as edith is shot and griffyn is trying to convince matthew to shoot kirk. we don't really know if kirk knew any of the other survivors, but he mentions edith's name specifically a few times as a death that affected him a lot. it's heartbreaking to watch city on the edge of forever with that in mind. I also can't find a source for anyone calling him JT, but collision course does call him jimmy during the flashback chapters.

crucially, the novel isn't technically canon. so you can have your gang of children led by JT, or you can have jimmy stick with a couple of people, or you could do something totally your own. none of these are wrong! do whatever your heart desires.

if you want some practical details, there's a great post here by @spirk-trek and pt 1, pt 2, and pt 3 of a great post by @pywren. I may make my own tarsus iv headcanon post if anyone is interested, and if I do I'll link it here.

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THE BIRDCAGE (1996) dir. Mike Nichols

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He's too diva I couldn't help myself 💙🖖😭

06/25/25