It’s my favorite scene, in one of my favorite Star Trek movies.
A conspiracy to assassinate heads of state and sabotage a Federation/Klingon peace
conference has been exposed, and now the Starship Enterprise is warping to
the site of the conference at top speed to confront the remaining conspirators.
During the trip, Captain Kirk drops in on Spock, his first officer and best friend,
for a chat. Spock, who has been meditating, takes responsibility for the precarious
circumstances in which they find themselves. It was he who volunteered Kirk and the Enterprise
for the diplomatic duty that ended with the murder of Gorkon, the Klingon Chancellor. But Kirk,
who was pissed at Spock for roping him into this mission without consulting him first,
waves his friend off. “It was logical,” he says.
Then, Kirk takes some responsibility of his own. If Spock leans toward excessive logic, then,
Kirk admits, he leans toward recklessness. But, Kirk goes further. It was more than his
recklessness that got them in trouble this time. “I couldn’t get past the death of my
son,” he says, referring to his son David, who years earlier was murdered by Klingons.
“I was prejudiced by her accomplishments as a Vulcan,” Spock says, referring to Valeris,
his protege, the Vulcan officer who had taken part in the assassination conspiracy.
“Gorkon had to die before I understood how prejudiced I was,” says Kirk.
Then, Spock asks a question. “Is it possible,” he says, “that you and
I have become so old and so inflexible that we have outlived our usefulness?”
But, Kirk doesn’t buy that. Spock trusted Valeris,
which turned out to be a mistake, but he didn’t conspire to assassinate anyone,
or frame Kirk and Dr. McCoy for the crime — she did. Kirk seems about to say some
version of “to err is human,” but Spock cuts him off to remind him that he, Spock,
is not human. And Kirk smiles, and tells Spock, “You want to know something? Everybody’s human.”
Spock lifts an eyebrow. “I find that remark . . . insulting,” he says.
That, of course, is from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the final film
to feature the Classic Star Trek characters played by their original actors. On a superficial level
it’s a splendidly written scene, two old friends having a heart-to-heart, taking turns admitting
their mistakes and forgiving and encouraging each other. The performances of William Shatner and
Leonard Nimoy are quiet and subtle, the work of two actors who have lived in the skins of these
characters for, at that point, twenty-five years, and come to know them inside and out.
But, if I dig just a little deeper, and consider the scene in the context of the film, and beyond
that the fullness of Star Trek itself, I find that this scene represents both of these characters at
their best — as heroes, as role models, and — with sincerest apologies to Spock — as human beings.
Star Trek VI is celebrated, and rightfully so, as a smart and forward-looking Cold War allegory.
Released in 1991, as the real Cold War between the United States and its allies,
and the soon-to-be-former Soviet Union was coming to an end, Star Trek VI argued that the way
forward was for the old enemies — represented by the Federation and the Klingon Empire — to reject
the decades of hostility and mistrust that had defined their relationship
and embrace each other as partners in a new era of peace.
This theme is played out in the film on a political level,
as hardliners on both sides conspire to ensure peace doesn’t happen, and on a personal level,
as characters are forced to face and deal with the prejudice they feel for their former enemies.
And by “characters” I mean “Captain Kirk.”
Nicholas Meyer directed Star Trek VI, and we Trekkies are indebted to him for many things,
one of the most important being that he brought depth and dimension to the character of James T.
Kirk. Meyer also directed Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, a film that sees Kirk forced
to confront the two most inescapable — and therefore most upsetting — realizations
of middle age: that he’s not invincible, and that he’s not going to live forever.
In Star Trek VI, Meyer has Kirk grappling with something just as difficult: the inevitability
of change. Star Trek VI shows us Kirk standing, reluctantly and somewhat unsteadily at first,
on the cusp of a monumental reordering of his world. Starfleet, the service to
which he’s dedicated his life, is about to cease hostilities with the Klingon Empire. And while
Star Trek has always insisted that Starfleet is not, strictly speaking, a military organization,
it’s obvious that the long conflict with the Klingons has been a defining one.
And for Kirk, his animus toward Klingons also has a deeply personal dimension. He
blames them for the death of his son — not just the Klingon who actually killed David,
or the commander who gave the order to kill him, but every one of them, all Klingons, everywhere.
The depth of Kirk’s prejudice against Klingons is made abundantly clear in his very first scene
in the film, when Kirk and Spock are alone in the briefing room discussing the upcoming mission.
Spock reasons with Kirk to accept the diplomatic assignment, pleading, “Jim, they are dying.”
To which Kirk responds, with icy venom, “Let them die.”
That’s a lot to get past. But, getting past it is Kirk’s arc in the film. As he travels that arc,
he has to face the consequences of his prejudice. Part of the assassination plot is to kill Klingon
Chancellor Gorkon, and make it look like Captain Kirk was the mastermind behind the whole thing.
Kirk’s reputation as a maverick who does what he wants regardless of Starfleet regulations,
combined with his profound and apparently well known dislike of the Klingons,
makes him particularly vulnerable to being the patsy for this conspiracy.
After Kirk and Dr. McCoy are arrested by the Klingons aboard Chancellor Gorkon’s ship,
they are taken to the Klingon homeworld to stand trial. During the trial,
one of Kirk’s log entries, where he again makes his bigotry toward Klingons absolutely plain,
is played to establish his motive. Everyone in the courtroom,
and all of those watching the proceedings across the galaxy, hears Kirk declare,
“I’ve never trusted Klingons, and I never will. I can never forgive them for the death of my boy.”
Kirk finds himself at the mercy of his hated enemies, put there in part by his very own hatred.
True, Kirk is a victim of the same conspiracy that killed Gorkon and later tries to kill the
President of the Federation, but his prejudice toward Klingons, along with his aforementioned
reputation for recklessness, made the frame-up perpetrated by the conspirators seem credible.
James Kirk, the brains behind a plot to kill the Klingon Chancellor and sabotage peace talks?
That probably sounded plausible to a lot of people when they heard it, because their image of Kirk is
of someone crazy enough, and with enough of an ax to grind against Klingons, to do it.
That’s the image Kirk confronts in that scene with Spock. He and Dr.
McCoy only survive their incarceration thanks to Spock’s intervention. And now, with Spock,
Kirk takes responsibility for his role in making all of this happen. He doesn’t deflect,
he doesn’t deny, he doesn’t blame the whole thing on those damn Klingons, you can’t trust them,
they even conspired to kill their own leader, the savages! Can you believe that?!
Kirk doesn’t do any of that. He admits,
“Gorkon had to die before I understood how prejudiced I was.” He sees now that his prejudice,
his hate, is a weakness, a weakness that was exploited, almost at the cost of peace.
Spock’s arc in the film isn’t quite as dramatic as Kirk’s, but it also deals with recognizing and
overcoming personal prejudice. In Spock’s case, his positive prejudice toward his fellow Vulcan,
Valeris, blinded him to the possibility that she could have had anything to do with the
conspiracy. But it wasn’t just that — Spock also convicts himself on the charge of arrogant
presumption — the diplomatic mission on which Gorkon was ultimately killed was Spock’s idea.
He signed up Kirk and the Enterprise for the job without even discussing it with Kirk first.
And before he did that, he — at the suggestion of his father, ambassador and all-around
Vulcan big shot, Sarek — opened up informal diplomatic talks with Chancellor Gorkon. Spock,
not a diplomat but a mere Starfleet officer, took it upon himself to begin negotiating with
the leader of an empire that had been the Federation’s sworn enemy for generations.
He had the best of intentions, of course, but it doesn’t seem to have crossed Spock’s mind
that he was getting in over his head, or placing his sometimes imprudent and
notoriously Klingon-hating captain in an extremely vulnerable position, until it was too late.
And then, in that scene in his quarters with Kirk, Spock does something that
is just as brave in its way as Kirk’s admission of his own prejudice:
he confronts the possibility that he can’t change, and is therefore no longer useful.
Now, to us in the audience this probably seems a little silly. I mean, he’s Spock — of course he’s
not, as he says to Kirk, so inflexible that he has outlived his usefulness. Kirk is right when he
tells Spock it's not his fault. Spock's worldview has always been defined by logic, but it’s never
been rigid. His flexibility and willingness to embrace change is what leads to the peace talks
with the Klingons in the first place. But, after seeing Kirk and McCoy nearly killed to stop peace
talks he started, and after being blindsided by the betrayal of Valeris, Spock is shaken, humbled.
That reaction is to Spock’s great credit. If he didn’t have that capacity for reflection,
for self-doubt — if he wasn’t capable of considering the possibility that he might
be at fault — then he wouldn’t be the person we know him to be.
He shows himself to Kirk, and to us, in that scene, and I think when he does, we’re seeing
Spock at his most admirable. I think the same of Kirk. Together, in this brief, beautiful scene,
we see the two foremost heroes of Star Trek demonstrating the importance of humility,
the importance of acknowledging and fighting to overcome your own prejudice,
your own arrogance, and the importance of being willing to change, even when that change is scary,
even when that change requires you to admit that you were wrong.
They’ve saved the galaxy who knows how many times, but the most heroic thing
Kirk and Spock ever do might be just talking to each other in that scene,
and showing the rest of us how to be humble, how to be vulnerable, how to take responsibility,
and how to embrace change. Because when are any of us gonna have the chance to save the galaxy?
But the rest of it? Trust me, that stuff is gonna come up at some point.