© 2010, Laura Mitchell
On their way to Altair VI (in the solar system visited by Forbidden Planet’s United Planets CruiserC57D) to represent the Federation at a postwar presidential inauguration on a rebuilding world, the Enterprise senior officers must contend with an increasingly irritable and violent Mr. Spock. The starship’s First and Science Officer has taken to screaming and even throwing objects at crew members, such as the tureen of Vulcan orange plomeek soup that he flings at Nurse Christine Chapel. Spock hesitates for a long time before confiding to Captain Kirk the reasons for his aberrant behavior. Once every seven years, he explains through his agitation, the highly civilized and logical Vulcan individual experiences the primitive drive of Pon farr (along with Plak-tow or “blood fever”), impelling him to return home to mate. Like Earth salmon who must go back to that one stream where they were born, or the giant eel-birds of Regulus V who must revisit each eleven years the caverns where they were hatched, the Vulcan must either reach the hallowed ancestral grounds of copulation or die trying.
© 2010, Laura Mitchell
Compelled by the growing neurochemical imbalance in his system that is fated to kill him within one week if he does not arrive at the sacred land of his family near the capital city of ShariKahr, the half-Vulcan First Officer twice makes unauthorized attempts to reset the Enterprise‘s navigational course in the direction of his home planet. Then Mr. Spock finally comes clean to Captain Kirk about the underlying cause of his actions. Secluded in his quarters and holding a sharp object in a quivering hand behind his back, Spock tells Kirk of the ancient nuptial ceremony, shrouded in centuries of secrecy and off-limits to out-worlders, harking back to the barbaric times on Vulcan before the philosopher Surak brought peace and stability to his society by persuading his fellows to adopt the doctrine of pure logic.
Disobeying a direct order from Admiral Komack, played by Byron Morrow, regarding the urgency of the Altair VI proceedings, Captain Kirk risks his career to bring Mr. Spock to the appointed consummation of his wedding vows at the temple of the Koon-ut Kal-if-fee. “I owe him my life a dozen times over, Kirk clarifies to Dr. McCoy. Just before entering orbit around Vulcan, Spock solicits Kirk and McCoy, as his closest friends, to accompany him in person to the occult rites.
The sacramental “marriage or challenge” ritual of Spock and his betrothed T’Pring, played by Arlene Martel, is presided over by the stately T’Pau, played by Celia Lovsky. Captain Kirk immediately recognizes T’Pau, accompanied by musicians and carried on a litter by attendants to the stone-pillar encircled arena, as one of the most powerful individuals on Vulcan, and “the only person to ever turn down a seat in the Federation Council.” Spock formally greets T’Pring, to whom he was institutionally and telepathically bonded at age seven by mutual arrangement of their parents, under the baking sun and in the lean atmosphere of Mount Seleya: “T’Pring, parted from me and never parted, never and always, touching and touched, we meet at the appointed place.” The composed young lady with the elaborate beehive hairdo replies, “Spock, parted from me and never parted, never and always, touching and touched, I await you.” “What thee are about to see comes down from the Time of the Beginning, without change.” says T’Pau in her opening remarks for the highly significant occasion. “This is the Vulcan heart. This is the Vulcan soul. This is our way.”
T’Pring has not seen Spock for many years. As time went by, she became more and more ill at ease about being the “consort of a legend.” Spock was the first Vulcan citizen to enlist in Starfleet, and became famous for his achievements. During the Enterprise Science Officer’s long absence, T’Pring fell in love with the less than entirely self-confident Stonn, played by Lawrence Montaigne. On the verge of matrimonial union, she unexpectedly spurns Spock. She interrupts him just as he is about to strike the official gong-shield with his mallet. The Vulcan female instead chooses the option of Kal-if-fee or challenge, a brutal component of the wedding ceremony left over from the times of antiquity when Vulcans killed to win their mates. Not wanting to risk Stonn’s demise, T’Pring shockingly selects Captain Kirk as her “champion.” “Kroykah!,” commands T’Pau. Kirk is forced to engage in a one-on-one struggle to the death (using the AhrnVohn rope cloth and the lirpa weapon with sharp curved blade) against his Plak-tow -entranced best friend.
Captain Kirk is caught completely off guard by this turn of events, in a way revealing his lack of ability to apprehend the otherness of Vulcan culture. It never occurred to Kirk that such an illogical remainder of “combat to the death” could exist at the heart of a hyper-logical and scientific society, a charter member of the United Federation of Planets. The situation of friends constrained to go at each other’s throats as if they were mortal enemies, and with everything at stake, exemplifies the “dueling relationship” between self and other in forms of play which are to an increasing degree obsolete in the postmodern culture of simulation. In Italian dubbing, the episode is called Il duello, or The Duel. The reversibility of the fight scene in Amok Time is manifest in the switch from Kirk’s belief that he is helping out his alien friend who is in a “weakened state” to the reality that it is Spock who is “leading” the Captain into a perilous situation the latter cannot control. In his seminal work Man, Play and Games, French ethnologist Roger Caillois develops an “ideal typology” of games and festive rituals in different human societies across time. Caillois, one of the founders of the notable Collège de Sociologie, distinguishes between games of “aesthetic representation,” which are mimetic or competitive, and games of fascination, which are aleatory or vertiginous (based on chance or giddiness). The four types of games identified in his cross-cultural inquiry are mimicry (imitation and illusion), agôn (competition), alea (chance and combination), and ilinx (vertigo). In the games of alea and ilinx that dominate the culture of simulation, cool ecstasy prevails over heated engagement, fate decided by numbers over symbolic rivalry and challenge, and narcissistic self-absorption over facing the adversary as double or shadow. With the passionate staging of a “primitive society” observance in the hot furnace of the collective Vulcan soul, framed by some of Star Trek‘s most evocative music and the danger of imminent death for one of our two heroes, the essence of cyborg Spock’s predicament of alienation is magnificently choreographed and brought to the fore.
Dr. McCoy steps in to save the day by “simulating” Captain Kirk’s death. He pulls off a great diplomatic coup, keeping Kirk and Spock alive while satisfying the honor of Vulcan tradition. Spock draws blood across Kirk’s chest with a swipe of the double-edged lirpa. The Captain has difficulty breathing, and T’Pau calls for a pause. “The air is too hot and thin for Kirk,” Bones pleads to the officiating matriarch. “He’s not used to it.” McCoy receives permission to inject Kirk with a hypospray shot of tri-ox compound, giving the physiologically inferior human a “fighting chance” in the fatal combat. The battle continues towards its climax, intensified by even more riveting music. Still in a half-conscious state, Spock moves in on his opponent and seems to strangle his superior officer with the rope weapon. The Doctor runs out and shouts to the First Officer to let the Captain go. Kirk gasps suddenly and appears to die. Dr. McCoy examines the prostrate Kirk and pronounces: “He’s finished. He’s dead.” All participants, guests, and witnesses of the by now cancelled wedding believe it. McCoy hails the Enterprise with his communicator, and he and Kirk’s apparent cadaver beam out.
Mr. Spock is abruptly disenchanted, awoken from the mating trance, and devastated. “I grieve with thee,” the high-ranking T’Pau tells him. As the First Officer prepares to transport back to his ship, the High Councilwoman who is “all of Vulcan in one package,” as Kirk earlier referred to her, raises her hand in the Vulcan salute and says to him, “Live long and prosper, Spock.” “I shall do neither,” Spock somberly replies. “I have killed my Captain and my friend.”
Returned to the Enterprise, Mr. Spock walks into sick bay and “turns himself in” to Dr. McCoy. “There can be no excuse for the crime of which I am guilty,” the Science Officer states. “I intend to offer no defense. Furthermore, I shall order Mr. Scott to take immediate command.” But the still alive and kicking Captain Kirk enters from a back room with a better idea. “Don’t you think you’d better check with me first?” Kirk says with good humor. A wide grin forms instantly on the normally impassive half-Vulcan’s face. “Captain… Jim!” Spock cries out. He grasps Kirk by the shoulders with affection. McCoy makes plain that what he really injected Kirk with was a neural paralyzer that knocked out the Captain and feigned his death.
In the episode’s coda, the duel continues as Dr. McCoy makes a final verbal thrust at his still unmarried alien shipmate. “There’s just one thing, Mr. Spock,” begins McCoy. “You can’t tell me that when you first saw Jim alive, that you weren’t on the verge of giving us an emotional scene that would have brought the house down.” Spock parries the potentially embarrassing comment. He calmly explains that his “outburst” was merely an expression of his “quite logical relief that Starfleet had not lost the highly proficient Captain.” “Of course, Mr. Spock,” deadpans McCoy. “Your reaction was quite logical.” “Thank you, Doctor,” responds the First Officer, falling for the bait. Bones has the last word: “In a pig’s eye!”
Captain Kirk’s death can only take place once the profitable franchising of The Original Series’ celebrity cast finally comes to an end (with the 1995 movie Star Trek VII:Generations). The simulacrum of Dr. McCoy’s hypospray was the inescapable way for our culture of hyper-reality and “assimilation” of conflict to reintegrate the savage agonistic ritual or “symbolic exchange of death” introduced by Theodore Sturgeon’s original script. The medical procedure of televisual simulation short-circuited a more ingenious simulation which would have stayed closer to the duel seduction of the fight scene. McCoy’s act of pretense diffuses the reality of Mr. Spock’s identity problems, and amasses more evidence against the First Officer that he does not have his dualistic or cyborg destiny under control. He has failed to handle skillfully the question of borders. Spock has not grasped the importance of living an ambivalent relationship to a fate that one is chosen by and that one chooses. In Amok Time, Spock’s unresolved dilemma reaches its limits. He is a pariah, looked upon by humans as a Vulcan, and vice versa. He is coming apart at the seams, threatened by the illogic within logic, the entropy lurking within homeostasis.
In the consumer culture system of identities and differences, there is much value and little sense. Authentic meaning – on the contrary – emerges through direct action, real social relations, conflict, confrontation, and challenges. In our culture, death itself has been emptied of challenge and stakes. It has been sanitized and confined to the margins in the dissociation of life and death. In the ceremonial duel encounter of non-Western cultures with an other relationship to death, intensified meaning or stakes are immanent to an obligatory system of rules that is other than the contemporary arrangement of the coded model and its repeated instantiations.
The Vulcan “marriage or challenge” ceremony and Kal-if-fee are best understood as an initiation rite common to many ethnographic cultures where mutual exchange among generations, or even between the living and the dead, is enacted in formal custom. In the admission into a secret society or warrior class, the spiritual practices of the shamanic apprentice, or the passage to adulthood or matrimony, the participant’s symbolic death “becomes the stake of a reciprocal / antagonistic exchange between the ancestors and the living and, instead of a break, installs a social relation between partners, a circulation of gifts and return gifts.” (Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death) The “challenge to the death” suggests an observance of communal rather than individual sacrifice, and the metamorphosis of the initiate into a truly social being. Genuine transformations take place in a ritual space, as decided by the vital group. Death is given and received according to convention and the socializing cycles of a culture. It is not annihilation, but rather something that is symbolically reversible within a generalized economy of generosity and sacramental obligation. The strict separation between choice and fatalism, or chance and necessity, is overturned. Death is not opposed to life. It is a more fundamental system of death / life which precedes life and makes it possible. Western culture divides life from death, and exiles the latter. The Protestant Ethic displaced Catholic heavenly salvation into the divine election won through the achievements of the Spirit of Capitalism. Death is abolished through one-way economic accumulation, passively idealized as “natural inevitability,” or artificially deleted by the dream of techno-scientific immortality. Without a symbolic relationship to death and the nonliving, we are left with a genetic simulation of life.
It is the real risk of death in the hand-to-hand combat between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock that ignites our passion for Star Trek. There is a system of obligations between the Captain and his First Officer, a covenant of longlasting friendship where gifts are given and returned. Spock sacrificially expends his association with Kirk and McCoy. Knowing that the challenge or Kal-if-fee was possible, he counters the humiliation that he sensed would result from his long absence by bringing along the comrades in whose presence he has most consistently examined the wound of his divided soul. Note that Spock’s parents, especially his father, are missing from the wedding ceremony. Our culture has forgotten the value of initiation, which must be practiced away from the parents, in the company of peers and mentoring elders. One first step is involvement with cultural artefacts like Star Trek in their original moments. “Having abandoned initation, our society has difficulty in leading boys toward manhood.” (Robert Bly, Iron John)