Tumbling Like Alice

birddad

woohoobin

I love niles so much

jvnrjoah4i3q94ruaweoijag4-deact

bitterassfandom

From TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People Who Never Existed article. First page in the couples section: Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

Article text:

Two brave men, soul brothers who seem worlds apart yet whose unity has been forged in the fire of danger and whose mission is to go where no one has gone before. That description certainly fits in the case of Star Trek’s Captain James T. Kirk, commander of the starship U.S.S. Enterprise, and his First Officer, Mr. Spock, a fascinating character who straddles not only cultures but species: his father was a native of the planet Vulcan, his mother a human.

But here’s where it gets interesting: a very similar description could be applied to a number of other famous fictional couples. In the early days of America, when the frontier was the driving force in shaping the future of the nation, James Fenimore Cooper’s novels featured a white frontiersman who grew up among Native Americans, Natty Bumppo, who made a similar journey with his companion, the full-blooded Mohican Chingachgook. When slavery was turning America into a house divided, Mark Twain’s skylarking schoolboy, Huckleberry Finn, and his unlikely ally, the runaway black slave Jim, found freedom, brotherhood and unity on a wooden raft floating down the Mississippi. And then there are Ishmael and Queequeg in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick - utterly unlike, they are bound by mutual devotion.

It was the literary critic Leslie Fielder who first pointed out this recurring theme in American fiction, in the hilariously titled 1948 essay, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” Yes, as the title suggests, Fiedler also noted that there is often a homoerotic element between the two inseperable soulmates, who often complete each other, either psychologically or culturally. The creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, took the psychological route with his two adventurers, Kirk and Spock: one is a man of passion and action, and the other is one of the two most famous personifications of reason without emotion in all of fiction - the other, of course, is Sherlock Holmes.

And what a pair they are! Of the two, Kirk is a bit less of an original. Handy with his fists, hot-headed but cool under pressure and a he-man with an eye for the ladies, he’s a Wild Western cowboy or a big-city detective transferred to outer space. His middle name, Tiberius, game him a bit of spice, but most of his magic arose from actor William Shatner’s wonderfully droll delivery: he managed the nifty trick of both embodying his character and winking slyly at it.

Mr. Spock, in contrast, is an utter original, a brilliantly conceived character whose devotion to reason and logic made for scores of compelling plots. As in Shatner’s case, much of Spock’s impact flowed from actor Leonard Nimoy, who convincingly portrayed a person to whom emotion was a stranger, yet whose courage and decency earned the audience’s warm regard for his cold-as-ice character. Together, Shatner and Nimoy turned what could have been a formulaic sci-fi TV series into a classic of its kind, and earned a place as one of history’s great fictional couples.

Note that they’re up on that list before Romeo and Juliet.