#tos: operation annihilate

[anghraine]

You know, this is not the Star Wars x Star Trek comparison I would have thought I'd make in a million years until I watched TOS and discovered just how skewed the pop culture osmosis version of TOS is, but...

"Operation: Annihilate":

MCCOY [looking at Sam Kirk's corpse]: Is this your brother, Jim? KIRK: Sam. It is my brother. Was my brother. MCCOY: I'm sorry, Jim. The boy's unconscious, but he's still alive. KIRK: Peter? MCCOY: I'd better get the boy and his mother back to the ship. I can't do much for them down here. KIRK: Get ready to beam up. MCCOY: McCoy to Enterprise. Prepare to beam up party of four. SPOCK: Captain, I understand how you must— KIRK: Yes. Yes, Mr. Spock. You heard my sister-in-law say something about they being here. Your guess?

A New Hope:

WILLARD: When we heard about Alderaan, we feared the worst. LEIA: We have no time for sorrows, Commander. You must use the information in this R2 unit to help plan the attack.

[startrekgaysex]

there is always some kind of crazy bullshit happening to my friend mr spock. spores. mating cycles. amoeba thing. blindness. painful mind melds. brain theft. babygirl has been thru it all

[trek-tracks]

would both of you just shut up for two seconds

[spockeveryday]

[wwillywonka]

guys be quiet he's sleeping

[renownedtholianpunctualityyyyy]

Star Trek TOS “Operation — Annihilate!” sketchdump (in varying degrees of quality)

One of my favourite episodes! 🌈💙✨

01. Spocky. ‘Why, thank you, Doctor McCoy!’ 💙☀️

02. Angery Bones

03. Colourful Spock Jank

04&05. McCoy, Kirk; Spock graphite, from the end of the episode. Sass.

[dilfoez]

scotty and bones in the bg and scotty is just holding bones????

[your-name-is-jim]

Come on Jim you keep grabbing him like that

Just kiss him already

DAMN

[vonnebenan]

me at work every time someone mentions star trek (which happens surprisingly often)

(just found this in my drafts. no idea what i wanted to use it for.)

[potionflavored]

Spock 🤝 suffering

(part 13)

[anghraine]

Operation Annihilate hurts more if you've seen Discovery because Spock does understand what it's like to lose a sibling.

I haven't seen Discovery yet, but I'll admit that my personal experience of TOS and interpretations of what it was doing with its characters and themes in the 60s are very deliberately not informed by the decades of much-later retcons of the original show. Spock in particular*, I think, has been targeted hard by retcons ever since they reset his entire character arc in 1979, and I feel like the later generations of Obligatory Spock Appearances that I have seen (in AOS and SNW) keep ever-more-drastically losing sight of what made him compelling in the first place, across a lot of different axes (including his flawless eyeshadow and narratively central homoeroticism :\).

I don't want to sound hostile or aggressive about the ask at all, though! I didn't mind receiving it, and I don't have any grievance with Discovery fans or people who do feel the need to try to reconcile all the different major Star Trek projects with each other, as long as they don't show up in TOS fans' notes to lecture us on how we've got to engage with ST their way.

I do get "well actually, in [other ST thing] it turns out" on a pretty regular basis, though, so—well, I'm only rambling further about this because I have quite a few new ST followers and want to be clear about what to expect. I'm not trying to attack anyone outside the corporate media hellscape.

I like other Treks than TOS, but I am fundamentally very opposed to the X Cinematic Universe media franchise world where every story in a setting must be perceived as part of a single consistent narrative all the other stories are hammered into, and you've got to keep up with all these different, largely independent projects to truly understand The Whole Story. I'm like, nope, Paramount/Disney/whomever isn't the boss of me, and for me, the TOS movies are kind of the Aeneid of Star Trek to TOS's Iliad, and Prodigy is, like ... uh, Troilus and Criseyde in this analogy, and otherwise, /shrug. It's like, all three texts are fantastic, and I'm intrigued by how the latter two texts talk to each other and to Homer, but they are all very, very different and I have no interest in forging a grand unified narrative of the Trojan War in my head. So it is with Star Trek for me!

I'm not only like this with Star Trek btw—I'm the same with Star Wars (and Lucasfilm is even more aggressive than Paramount about pushing every single thing as integral to The Whole Story). In general, this is just how I as a person respond to fundamentally separate storytelling projects that engage with an ostensible shared setting or shared characters or whatnot.

(I'm not really fannish about any other part of ST, so I didn't bother finding Matter of Troy analogues for TNG/etc, though I enjoy them enough in a non-fannish way.)

So anyway, all of that is to say: for my personal experience and interpretation of how TOS characterizes Spock, it's actually important to me that he really was every bit as isolated his entire life as TOS indicates, until he joined Starfleet and especially until the five-year mission.

For me, Spock's guilt over Amanda in TOS and the stakes of the fraught dynamic between them are deeply bound up in him being her only child (and not only by blood). For me, the "no bigotry on the bridge" scene in "Balance of Terror" really is the first time Spock has had a relationship with anyone who would advocate for him in that way. I see TOS Spock as the child of two parents who care about him but have always been far more preoccupied with each other and themselves, and as someone who was wholly ostracized by all his peers on Vulcan, and who even among the somewhat more welcoming humans, has been continually disrespected in very, very racialized ways.

And for me, part of the heartbreak of that Spock moment in "Operation: Annihilate!" is that TOS Spock and Kirk do have wildly different histories apart from both being bullied, and Spock has never experienced anything like this grief. Spock never had a Sam in his life, nor an Aurelan (who Kirk seems to have been close to as well), nor a Peter and the other two boys who implicitly didn't make it. Spock has spent his life fundamentally alone. But he also has never experienced the kind of horrific losses Kirk has, either—family members, immediate communities, and entire swaths of planetary populations lost, just hundreds or thousands of people ripped away over and over and over while Kirk watches or finds them afterwards.

Something important about Kirk and Spock's relationship to me, though, is that they don't have to personally experience the other's life to profoundly understand and connect to each other in the way they both desperately need. This is one of the reasons they're closer to each other than to any of their other friends or colleagues (something explicitly stated in TOS multiple times). And in S1, I think we really see that evolution with Spock in particular, where in early episodes like "The Enemy Within," he might unbend enough to say, "If I seem insensitive to what you're going through, captain, understand it's the way I am," but by the season finale, he reciprocates Kirk's accommodation of his cultural norms when it really matters.

I think TOS Spock tries to express his compassion in an emotional, human-normative way, down to the phrasing, because at this point, he prioritizes Kirk's suffering at such a time above his own values and preferences. It's more important to reach out to Kirk in Kirk's terms than to Be Vulcan About It, until Kirk needs him to be Vulcan about it. The instant that Kirk makes it clear that he can't deal with human sympathy and needs something productive to focus on, Spock instantly shifts gears to Being Useful because that's what Kirk needs from him, even when it is excruciatingly painful or risks blindness or ... really, anything.

-

*Kirk, notoriously, is also hit super hard by pop culture-filtered characterization retcons from The Wrath of Khan onwards and especially in AOS, well beyond the AU premise. But I think the subtler discomfort seen in modern ST re: TOS Spock as a masculine figure is nearly as egregious.

[self-made-purgatories]

Wishing everyone a joyous Slap His Ass Saturday!

yeah yeah I know he has a scrawny little ass or whatever but I still would not hesitate to smack it like this flying fried egg if given the chance. I will gladly cut myself on it right after I cut myself on his cheekbones

(blooper reel; and thanks to @annie-in-the-real-world for the gift of Slap His Ass Saturday)

[spockeveryday]

[yuttikkele]

oh yeah about operation: annihilate! We get introduced to Kirk’s family for the first time and they all DIE almost IMMEDIATELY?!?!? Why is Kirk’s trauma always sidelined like this 😭

and what the heck happened to Kirk’s nephew afterwards? Who the heck is he gonna live with?

Jim really pogged through all the pain like crazy

[gaytricorder]

attack of the chicken cutlets

[thomas-jefferson-miku-binder]

the sheer contrast between episodes that will fundamentally change the way your perceive the world and those around you (The City on the Edge of Forever, Operation - Annihilate!), and 50 minutes of the cast just goofing around and doing the most batshit insane stuff ever (Shore Leave, I Mudd) is genuinely what makes Star Trek TOS work so well for me.

all that interspersed with the occasional gay porn