I love Star Trek. I love Kirk and Spock and Picard and Data, and pretty much everything about both the original series and The Next Generation. (Not so crazy about DS9 and Voyager, and not really even familiar enough with Enterprise to have an informed opinion - I do like Scott Bakula, though, and that Jolene Blalock makes a fine looking Vulcan...)

Anyway, if you've read my bio on this site, you know that my first television memory is of Star Trek, and that the crew of the starship Enterprise has played an important role in my life. For a long time, Spock was the biggest influence on me; I practiced raising one eyebrow, and walked around trying to look at things "logically."

Then puberty hit, and suddenly the stoic, almost monastic, Spock didn't seem quite so appealing. Sure, the girls liked him, but he didn't really like them (Well, he did, but he only acted on his feelings every seven years, which wasn't near often enough for me - I acted on mine about every seven minutes.). In fact, it was almost as though Spock was afraid of girls, and for me, that hit a little too close to home. Kirk, though, wasn't afraid of women - He was whatever the opposite of being afraid of women was. And he had his priorities straight: 1. Starfleet 2. Spock 3. Babes. I thought that was about right. And so, while Spock was still cool as I entered adolescence, Kirk was uber-cool - He was the handsome, confident, man-about-space that I aspired to be.

At some point, I put together the idea that the characters of Kirk and Spock were played by actors named William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, and since there were no new episodes of Star Trek being produced, I made it my business to watch whatever these guys did. I sat through episodes of Mission: Impossible just to watch Nimoy as Paris, and I hated to admit that I was bored; Paris seemed to me to be Spock minus ears and in disguise, and somehow Spock without the ears just wasn't the same. (To Nimoy's credit, I was, like, 12 years old, and I'm sure there were nuances to his performance that I missed...).

But Shatner was Kirk in whatever he did. Whether it was Kingdom of the Spiders (Kirk in a cowboy hat) or The $20,000 Pyramid (Kirk in a leisure suit), in the 70's, or TJ Hooker (Kirk in an LAPD uniform) in the 80's, the charm, bravado and confident masculinity were all still there, along with the sparkling eyes and half-smile.

In the years since, Shatner and Kirk and I have all gotten older, and as my priorities and influences have changed, I've come to see a different, even more valuable aspect to the whole Kirk bravado thing.

 

more to come...