Against Spock

Not everyone loved the character all that much. Oddly, this review is focused on the movies and later series.

6 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I never had the least interest in the series. The few episodes I saw in the 70's seemed neither well-done enough to be thoughtful nor campy enough to be funny.

Anonymous said...

I loved the series, and later discovered that much of its appeal came from the deep underlying levels of preparation. It was a standout for being the only decent science fiction on TV for far too many years.

I class the article as something by somebody ignorant and lazy looking for something "fresh" to say. The character developed over the course of the original series, and cannot be understood without reference to it.

Valerie

Grim said...

I'm not old enough to have seen it in its original release. When I was a boy, though, it was always on in syndication. Science Fiction meant Star Wars at the movies, but that was only once in a blue moon; the rest of the time it was Star Trek's original series and Tom Baker as Dr. Who on Public Broadcasting.

Star Trek struck the younger me as weirder than Star Wars, but not nearly as weird as Dr. Who. I could easily relate to Han Solo, fairly easily to Captain Kirk, and not very well to anyone else at all from the Trek/Who shows. But I watched them, because it's what there was.

douglas said...

Valerie, I think you have to separate the original series from all that followed. because so much had changed in the world view of the people who wrote them. It's not really the continuity of Spock- he's just a character. In the original series, he's logical, and fighting with his human side, but you get hints that ultimately, there is a part of him that wants to accept it, and there is no question that the two most major characters in the series besides him (Kirk and McCoy) would like him to accept it, and nudge him toward it (okay, McCoy shoves him from time to time). That all changes later. It's acceptance and multi-culti ideology bathed Spock.

Texan99 said...

Yes, I liked him better when he was a classic Asperger character, like Sherlock Holmes or Dr. House. But the drama suffers if you go to the he-almost-admitted-he-was-human well too often.

douglas said...

I can tell you that mild aspergers type folks like Spock- because they can really relate. My brother, for one. I'm just glad there was a 'hero' he could relate to out there.