The mystery of "Himmmm"

It's been a rough couple of weeks. Discount Cheeto Hitler is refusing to admit he lost the election, which he did, by a fairly wide margin. The response of the Biden campaign to Trump's refusal to concede is -- and I am quoting directly here -- "[T]he United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House". On the personal side of things, one of my housemates is having (non-virus-related) breathing problems off and on, and at the time of this writing is in the ICU again. We're waiting to be COVID-evicted on the first of January, because none of us can get enough work to pay for anything. I have started feeding the rats entire sandwich cookies for brekfiss, because it makes me feel better.

So you will all forgive me for thinking way too hard about Star Trek.

I've seen conflicting reports on whether the novelization of The Motion Picture is canon or not. Roddenberry seems to have thought it was, inasmuch as he wrote it and he (incorrectly) assumed he'd be in charge of everything forever. Paramount now says that none of the novels are. Fair cop; there's a lot in the TMP novelization that is weird and awkward and better ignored. 

As previously mentioned, it is not a very good novel in its own right. This is because it's not really a novel. It's an expansion on the screenplay, as scribbled out by the screenplay's main author, and all of his attempts to turn it into a written story fail on the basis that he has no apparent knowledge of how novels are formatted. There's a lead-in to the events of the film that's far too long and terribly written. The text as a whole has the overwrought yet telegraphic quality of a pulp novel -- unsurprising, given Star Trek's roots -- that makes you wonder if the whole thing was written as a series of tag lines for the movie poster. The point of view ping-pongs around wildly, often switching multiple times in a single scene, as if the narrator voice hasn't quite mastered the art of showing what people are thinking from the outside and can only get the information to the reader by darting into someone else's head for three sentences, then rocketing out again to get back to the action.

On the other hand, if you have the film for reference, it provides a fair amount of information that isn't directly on screen. The character notes on Kirk/Spock/Decker, and to a lesser extent McCoy, do fit with and expand on what's depicted in the film. There's a chunk near the end that gives a look into Vejur's internal motivations, which never made it into the movie, because that's not how movies work. The parts of this that can be cross-checked with official canon do seem to fit, and none of it seems overly-suspect to me on a thematic basis. Roddenberry is a terrible prose writer, but he did at least seem to have a good grip on his own characters.

So far as I am aware, this 1979 publication is the first to suggest that Kirk and Spock have developed some sort of low-level telepathic link. The novelization makes it clear that both of them are explicitly aware that it exists, and neither of them seems especially surprised that it happened. McCoy notes that it's "common knowledge" that this kind of Vulcan-style rapport can develop even with non-telepaths in cases of close friendship. If Bones considers it common knowledge, it probably is, at least among humans who deal with Vulcans a lot. 

The existence of this link is both what drives Spock to seek Kolinahr, and what prevents him from achieving it. It is at first ambiguous in the movie what the "presence" Spock senses is, although the non-Spock events of the film imply heavily that it's Vejur. The novelization confirms that Vejur is the "great presence", but the thing that makes him stop the ceremony is not Vejur, but hearing Kirk through the telepathic link, which happens in the first place because Kirk has just heard about Vejur, and is understandably wishing his XO had not yote off to Gol to become a logic monk. The Vejur POV section near the end of the book fills the audience in on why Spock -- it finds his thoughts pleasantly orderly for a carbon-based bug, but is puzzled by what happens to his order when he thinks about his friends. It really segfaults when Spock's thoughts turn to Kirk. Kirk is the attachment Spock cannot give up, and finding this in his mind is what prompts T'Sai to tell him "your answers lie elsewhere".

This adds a bit of context to the Sickbay scene. Memory Alpha interprets the "this simple feeling" line as referring to the physical sensation of touching another living being, but the novelization makes it pretty clear that Spock is speaking not just of emotional connection, but specifically the connection he has with Kirk. Kirk's end of it is much simpler: Spock is clearly having a whole mess of feelings, this is totally fine, it's mutual. 

[Also worth considering, but pointed out in neither the book nor the movie, is that Vulcans are touch-telepaths. Their psi techniques involve contact with the hands or fingers, most recognizably the mind-meld. Vejur has put Spock through the wringer and his shields are likely in tatters. He has just been dragged onto a ship full of chaos, then stuck in a room with at least three people who are very concerned and hovering over him. Instead of begging for isolation, he catches Kirk's hand, which would make Kirk overwhelmingly the loudest thing in the room. Character moment: Spock would now rather pull himself together in the familiar presence of his friend than withdraw and do it alone.]

It is less clear whether Kirk has any direct experience of the telepathic link. He's never hinted to be anything but psi-null, as most humans are, although several episodes of TOS imply that he has some pretty decent natural shields, mostly owing to Kirk being a stubborn sod. Canonically, human ability to tell when someone else is making telepathic contact seems to vary depending on how self-aware the target is. Kirk does have a reaction to Spock's mention of hearing his thoughts on Vulcan, during the incredibly awkward conversation in the Enterprise lounge. The book being poorly-written, it doesn't say what the reaction was, exactly, but it's pretty evident that Spock heard right, and Kirk wasn't reaching out on purpose. 

Kirk does note, in his internal monologue, that the "touching of two minds" was held in high esteem by the Vulcan poets of old, far above the animal passions of pon farr. Being as pon farr is not a thing Vulcans talk about with offworlders, this sounds like a cultural reference he could only have gotten by doing a lot of academic digging, or having a convenient Vulcan friend point him to some relevant authors. Universal translators aren't entirely universal by this point in the timeline, so either Kirk found some obscure translations, or he reads Vulcan. A lot of it, too -- poetry is notoriously difficult in any language.

It's also not clear exactly when this rapport developed, although it's heavily implied to have crystallized organically, rather than by any one incident. (Kirk's cultural note comes before Spock mentions having heard him at Gol -- he knew about it before Spock took off, and has missed it very sharply.) Kirk, on the whole, is unusually unbothered by the idea for a psi-null human who has limited experience with other people tromping through his head, most of it bad. It's possible he never thought too hard about their tendency to finish each other's sentences. He does show some knowledge of how Vulcan psi abilities work, particularly in "Devil In The Dark", where he knows enough about mind melds to know it's equally invasive for Spock. 

I'd argue it had to be in place before "Amok Time", or that plot would make even less sense than it otherwise does.

"Amok Time", of course, is the famous episode where the xenoanthropologists among us got to hear all about Vulcan marriage and mating customs. More salaciously-minded people might remember the fight near the end, which starts with the death of Kirk's shirt, and ends with the two of them rolling around in the dirt. My personal favorite moment is the excruciatingly awkward talk where Spock tries to explain what's going on without actually explaining anything, and Kirk ends up agreeing to break a bunch of regulations to take him to Vulcan, partly so he won't die, but mostly (I suspect) so they can end that conversation and never, ever have it again. 

If you've stuck with me this far, I'm sure I don't need to go through the actual episode summary, but I'm not the first to point out that it's suspicious that just thinking he's killed Kirk suddenly makes Spock disinclined to participate in literally anything going on in that goddamned arena. It's a mighty strange instinct that drives a man to murder to win a mate, then removes all motivation for action once the deed is done. Call me crazy, but if that's how pon farr works, I don't think Spock is the first Vulcan to have stabbed his best friend over a girl. 

Die-hard slash writers tend to think of the fight as a direct metaphor for sex, which strikes me as rather silly even for Star Trek. Spock's reaction does make a lot more sense, though, if you figure that T'Pring was so thoroughly uninterested in him that their ceremonially-established betrothal bond was basically gone, but Kirk and Spock had already developed their own connection. McCoy's wonder drug is described as a 'neural paralyzer', and simulated death well enough to fool Vulcans, suggesting that it suppressed neurological activity as well as physiological processes. Feeling the presence at the other end of a telepathic link wink out would rather hit like a bucket of cold water, especially since in the context of koon-ut-kal-i-fee, the strongest bond would normally be the betrothal bond. 

T'Pau is not stupid. If she didn't wonder what was up when Spock beamed down with two humans and then only remembered to introduce one of them, she probably got suspicious when he managed to cobble together sentences to try and get the fight called off. She definitely knew what was going on by the time Spock beamed up all eloquently sadface and planning to turn himself in for murder. I can only assume that McCoy got a message to Vulcan after everyone was safely on board, explaining what happened -- he might possibly also have edited all the swear words out, if Kirk were feeling lenient. And that T'Pring got an earful after T'Pau phoned up the Admiralty and made sure Kirk was marked down for an excused absence. 

One wonders exactly what the significance of this would be in Vulcan culture. Humans tend to see Kirk and Spock as "just" friends, but humans also tend to believe everything fundamentally runs on sex, whereas Vulcans see sex as a distasteful yet necessary inconvenience at best. It's entirely possible that the relationship as we see it on screen is the Vulcan equivalent of an epic love story. From their point of view, the half-breed scion of a prominent family ran off to join the French Space Foreign Legion, and and while excelling in both command and science, found his best match in a strangely canny human who refused to pair off and settle down like all the other humans do. Vulcans in later series have remarked that Spock is famous among their people; who's to say this isn't one of the many reasons? They probably don't quite fit the Vulcan ideal of childhood ceremonial bonds and pure, seamless logic, but neither do they quite fit the human idea that your most practical life partner, best sexual match, and closest confidant should all be the same person. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable story to find in a franchise whose original concept involved investigating things outside the human experience.

The Vulcan they deal with most often, Spock's father Sarek, seems to treat them as a linked pair, at least after he gets over himself enough to talk to his son again. Hence storming into Kirk's apartment in the third movie. It's reasonable to assume Kirk knows what happened, because it's his ship and that's his job, but Sarek jumps straight to assuming that Kirk carries Spock's katra, because who the fuck else would it be? (Undoubtedly it would have been Kirk had Spock not specifically been sneaking off the bridge so that Kirk couldn't stop him.) Sarek is so committed to this conclusion it takes a mind meld to convince him otherwise. Kirk is pretty big on the 'other half of me' rhetoric throughout, and Sarek makes nary a contradictory peep.

This also makes a lot of "Journey To Babel", where Spock's parents come on board the Enterprise, far more amusing. Kirk gets along hilariously well with Spock's mother, Amanda. Amanda watches him bristle at Sarek on Spock's behalf, explicitly tells him she approves of him, and the rest of the conversation is basically both of them going "argh, Vulcans," followed by an affectionate eye roll. They both tend to pleasantly agree that "yes of course you're not having any feelings," when their respective Vulcans are clearly having a whole bunch of feelings and are too stubborn to admit it. It's no wonder Spock is so comfortable with Kirk, if this is what he grew up with -- particularly with Amanda to translate, and to be open about the fact that she behaved this way because she loved her husband and her son.