Star Trek has been a passion for me ever since I can remember. I loved outer space and Star Trek played into that, it also played into my love of order and things like ranks and command structures. Star Trek: The Next Generation was my 'contemporary' Star Trek growing up, and still my favorite. However I also grew up with the movies from the original cast. In some ways, I like the original cast's movies even more than the original show.
For those of you that know a lot about Star Trek, you know that there's a thread of continuity through the movies, even though they all tell their own story. Particularly 2nd through the 4th movie follows a particular arc. While I could talk about Star Trek all day, this blog has a point about finding myself, and it is on that point that I want to hone in on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, while also touching here and there on the others. Particularly, I want to examine the relationship between Admiral Kirk and his son David Marcus.
David was not part of the show at all, neither was his mother Dr. Carol Marcus. To introduce characters like this in a movie could seem contrived, but in this case it was very well done. Firstly it works because we know that the Kirk of the series days was a 'girl in every port' kind of guy, so it's not out of character for him to have gotten a woman pregnant on the fly. It also works because it's written very naturally and played very well by the actors involved.
When we meet David, he is following in the footsteps of his mother, a scientist, working with her on the Genesis project. It's a Star Trek movie so it doesn't take long for trouble to start. A Starfleet ship is coming to try and take Genesis, supposedly with orders from Admiral Kirk. David is outraged, he doesn't know Kirk is his father at this point, but already thinks of him as an asshole.
Carol contacts Kirk and he comes to the rescue, leading to father and son coming together for the first time. While on the surface, David is very much his mother's son. It doesn't take too long for Kirk and David to show quite a similar temperament, which leads to a lot of confrontation. The introduction of father and son comes in the form of David mistaking Kirk's intentions and attacking Kirk. While not a trained fighter, David is as quick to defend what is important to him as Kirk is. Other similarities come into play as well, including them both sharing the propensity to break the rules to achieve their desired results. ST:II and to a lesser extent III, have an under-current theme of the 'Kobayashi Maru' or the no-win scenario. Kirk wouldn't accept it in his academy test or in his career, David would not accept it in the creation of Genesis. In both cases, they eventually had to face reality that you can't always cheat your way out.
There is a great debate, especially in the genetic age we live in, of nature vs nurture. How much does someone's genetic stock matter versus the conditions they were raised in and the education they received. Star Trek presents us an interesting take that bares similarities on my own situation. Here is David, who has the scientific passions of his mother, understandable, both the nature and nurture are present for that to happen. But on the other side, a personality, a strong will, a determination and a selflessness (we'll talk about later) very much like his father. His father that he had no contact with and didn't even know was his father until well after his formative years.
I personally had little connection to my own father growing up, even when he was still living with us, he was sort of there only physically. But I do remember enjoying spending time at his shop when he owned his own business and like him I liked to tinker with mechanical things. I found out after his death that we both concurrently developed a love of technology and doing things like building our own computers, even though at that time we had no contact with each other.
By the end of Star Trek II, Kirk has gained a son but has lost a brother. His first no-win situation. This allows David to see Kirk's humanity and for them to develop a respect for each other. This was always something that struck me and stayed with me because, in this situation that paralleled a lot of my own relationship with my father, this is the conclusion that I never got. He never showed any care for me from the day he stopped showing up to see me (unlike Carol Marcus, my mom actually encouraged him to see us) until about a month before his passing, when he wanted to finally see me. I can see him intellectually as the very intelligent man that I knew he was, putting everything into his work (another similarity we share). I can remember some good times we had camping, miniature golfing, But for me, I can never get the image out of my mind of him coming home and sitting in front of the TV with a beer, completely dis-interested. That beer was the symbol of him. Maybe I've overblown that one aspect in him, much like David saw Kirk as a warmonger of a militant Starfleet. But David got to see much more of his father at his best that I ever will.
This story isn't over yet though! We will explore ST:III next time!
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