beyond the final frontier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series_episodes
Chapters
Chapter 01: The Cage [2022-07-01]
Chapter 02: The Man Trap [2022-07-01]
Chapter 03: Charlie X [2022-07-01]
Chapter 04: Where No Man Has Gone Before [2022-07-02]
Chapter 05: The Naked Time [2022-07-03]
Chapter 06: The Enemy Within [2022-07-05]
Chapter 07: Mudd's Women [2022-07-05]
Chapter 08: What Are Little Girls Made Of? [2022-07-05]
Chapter 09: Miri [2022-07-06]
Chapter 10: Dagger of the Mind [2022-07-07]
Chapter 11: The Corbomite Maneuver [2022-07-07]
Chapter 12: The Menagerie I [2022-07-09]
Chapter 13: The Menagerie II [2022-07-09]
Chapter 14: The Conscience of the King [2022-07-11]
Chapter 15: Balance of Terror [2022-07-11]
Chapter 16: Shore Leave [2022-07-12]
Chapter 17: The Galileo Seven [2022-07-12]
Chapter 18: The Squire of Gothos [2022-07-13]
Chapter 19: Arena [2022-07-14]
Chapter 20: Tomorrow Is Yesterday [2022-07-16]
Chapter 21: Court Martial [2022-07-23]
Chapter 22: The Return of the Archons [2022-07-23]
Chapter 23: Space Seed [2022-07-24]
Chapter 24: A Taste of Armageddon [2022-07-25]
Chapter 25: This Side of Paradise [2022-07-25]
Chapter 26: The Devil in the Dark [2022-07-31]
Chapter 27: Errand of Mercy [2022-08-03]
Chapter 28: The Alternative Factor [2022-08-05]
Chapter 29: The City on the Edge of Forever [2022-08-10]
Chapter 30: Operation - Annihilate! [2022-08-11]
Chapter 31: Amok Time [2022-08-13]
Chapter 32: Who Mourns for Adonais? [2022-08-18]
Chapter 33: The Changeling [2022-08-19]
Chapter 34: Mirror, Mirror [2022-08-20]
Chapter 35: The Apple [2022-08-25]
Chapter 36: The Doomsday Machine [2022-09-02]
Chapter 37: Catspaw [2022-09-12]
Chapter 38: I, Mudd [2022-12-07]
Chapter 39: Metamorphosis [2022-12-08]
Chapter 40: Journey to Babel [2023-01-12]
Chapter 41: Friday's Child [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 42: The Deadly Years [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 43: Obsession [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 44: Wolf in the Fold [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 45: The Trouble with Tribbles [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 46: The Gamesters of Triskelion [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 47: A Piece of the Action [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 48: The Immunity Syndrome [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 49: A Private Little War [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 50: Return to Tomorrow [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 51: Patterns of Force [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 52: By Any Other Name [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 53: The Omega Glory [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 54: The Ultimate Computer [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 55: Bread and Circuses [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 56: Assignment: Earth [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 57: Spock's Brain [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 58: The Enterprise Incident [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 59: The Paradise Syndrome [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 60: And the Children Shall Lead [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 61: Is There in Truth No Beauty? [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 62: Spectre of the Gun [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 63: Day of the Dove [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 64: For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 65: The Tholian Web [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 66: Plato's Stepchildren [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 67: Wink of an Eye [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 68: The Empath [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 69: Elaan of Troyius [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 70: Whom Gods Destroy [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 71: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 72: The Mark of Gideon [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 73: That Which Survives [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 74: The Lights of Zetar [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 75: Requiem for Methuselah [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 76: The Way to Eden [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 77: The Cloud Minders [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 78: The Savage Curtain [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 79: All Our Yesterdays [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 80: Turnabout Intruder [YYYY-MM-DD]
"We aren't going to go, to be certain?"
Christopher Pike was an excellent Starfleet captain: judicious, patient but not submissive, strong and determined. He was exactly what a crew like that of the Enterprise needed, but not suited to the needs of the Enterprise herself.
Pike did not boldly go; he boldly turned aside, dignified. He almost appeared to be performing the missions simply to get through them, to see what there was to see on a surface level and then move on.
Mr. Spock did not disparage, merely observe. Soon, he would not compliment, but observe all the same.
"You know what I found very interesting, Mr. Spock?"
"Could be any of a number of things, Captain."
Pursing his lips, Kirk tossed a salt tablet from hand to hand. "This...creature - the...buffalo - was doing all of its shapeshifting, all of its assuming of these various forms, but when we had first beamed down, before we'd met Crater himself, I only saw the 'real' Nancy."
"Real, Captain?"
"Yes, she appeared young to Bones and apparently completely ravishing to Darnell."
"But not to you?"
Seeing it coming? Only logical.
"I guess she must have figured on my eyes being elsewhere."
"You said Charlie needed a father figure."
"That's right, Jim."
"You said he needed strong guidance, someone he respected. But what was I, in the end?"
Spock and McCoy fell silent, sensing the monologue rhetorical.
"Just the last bastion of despicable humanity that he couldn't rebel against. Until it was too much, and he had to."
McCoy opened his mouth as if to speak, but soon enough thought better of it.
"It's not such a great contrast as we might like to think. Fathers" - speaking both scientifically and emotionally - "are all too often like that. Even out here, it seems."
When Dr. Piper's pill brought him to, Spock did not feel betrayal. In fact, the pure logic of Jim's strategy impressed him: he knew that his first officer would approve of his impromptu manoevre, even if he (correctly) suspected that Spock's claim not to feel had not been a whole truth.
He did feel. If it had been him marooned on Delta Vega, with infinite years, powers, memories, half-human frailties...
Would meditation be enough to keep him sane?
Alone? Friendless?
Jim favored the sacrifice of Mitchell over the sacrifice of Spock.
When did the blessing of time become a curse?
"Mr. Spock...you're allowed."
"Captain, it is my recollection that you said that the captain is not 'permitted', in these affairs. Regardless of whether or not I am, as you say, 'allowed', since it is my superior officer we are speaking of-"
"Not like that, Spock. What use would that be, if you still weren't allowed to be unashamed of your friendship for me?"
As matter and antimatter, as all equivalent exchange.
"You presume that if I am allowed my vice, you are allowed yours? Jim?"
Kirk nodded, biting at the raw, bare place at the corner of his mouth.
"You're right, Captain. I never would have expected you to act like that, I-I...I should have known-"
"No, Yeoman. Janice. I'm glad your expectations for me are high, but what this experience should've taught you is that it will never-" Kirk stopped himself, feeling the need to equivocate "-very, very rarely be your fault, in such situations. Don't regard me as higher than that. I'm not."
"Captain...!" Her response came peppered with shock, moreover laced with confusion, fear.
"Not deep within. That's why it's my responsibility to be that better man."
Janice nodded. Kirk pursed his lips, and left.
"Mr. Spock, I believe I saw you smile more over the course of this...episode than during any in recent memory."
If the impulse was there for the Vulcan to do so again, he made no sign.
"Might you have any theories as to why that was?"
Now Spock bowed his head, hands clasped behind his waist and heels rising slightly. Nonverbally: simple, Captain, but I shall explain anyway.
"I found myself quite pleased to be immune to the false confidence of Mudd's women."
"But you didn't know it was false," Kirk prodded.
"Ah, yes. Another thing: I prefer men."
"They spoke of logic, Spock. Of not feeling emotions, of obeying programming and ignoring sentiment."
"Do you mean to imply, Captain, that Korby's androids are, or rather were, more Vulcan than me - your so-called 'half-breed'?"
"Not at all, Spock." Still orbiting uncomfortably far from his intended point, Kirk steepled his fingers before his chin. A useless action. A tic.
"You could tell the android apart from me, but only because I employed that fail-safe maneuver. Korby's couldn't, but it was because responses, signatures, confused their programming."
"In other words, my detection was approaching that of a human."
"Precisely, Mr. Spock."
"You said she really loved me."
Rand, hands knit neatly over the natural pleat in her skirt, nodded, as all crew members were wont to do. "And you said you knew, Captain."
Kirk rubbed a pensive finger over his lips. "I hate the idea that it was only a crush, that her caring for me was just as unavoidable as the singular progression of that artificial disease."
"But isn't it better that she cared at all? Trusted? Especially in that horrible place, where they only trusted each other because they weren't grups."
"I hope she knows...experiencing love isn't death."
"So, while we were apart, a psychologist from Dr. McCoy's sector continually and wantonly threw herself at you, all the while doubting your words and hampering our work. I was in orbit above you, melding my mind to that of a violent inmate whose thoughts were entirely empty."
"You make it sound so clinical, Spock. It was agony, and when they did it to me I couldn't even think how much I'd wished it was you."
Spock offered his cheekbone, again.
"Too much honesty, Mr. Spock?"
"Not at all, Captain. I felt the same."
Aha. "Especially with the...hyperpower circuits."
"A fascinating result, Doctor. Despite all your comparisons-" ("complaints" was McCoy's gruffly self-aware mutter) "-to the captain about unfairly reducing Bailey to a high-performance computer, it is Bailey himself who will serve as a deception-free incarnation of the memory banks Balok had searched."
Finally finished filing the results of the captain's half-finished physical examination, Bones returned his focus to the topic at hand.
"Well, we couldn't very well have sent a hobgoblin like you to tell Balok about Earth culture, now could we? And you need me here to make sure Jim doesn't start trying to teach you strip poker."
The Spock of thirteen years ago...he was louder. Harsher. More confident and yet infinitely more reserved. Almost more purely Vulcan.
He was almost an entirely different man than the one Kirk knew, but for the fact of his singular focus, always, on his goal.
Had Spock not been on Talos IV then, he would never have taken them to it now. The place had changed him too much.
Had Spock not been with the Enterprise after Pike had left it, he would never have had the heart for these new, startling actions.
He was acting on trust, not logic.
The frightening compassion of it was what gripped Jim. That Spock, a man who eschewed the part of his own mind that could itself eschew logic, would see his way clear to threaten an intelligent, capable Starfleet officer with capital penalty of death in order to preserve the emotional, and in some ways physical, quality of life of a man whose every faculty had long since been nearly eliminated...
His trust had not been broken. On the contrary, it was stronger than it had ever been.
If necessary, next time he would die for Spock.
The best of them all.
"You're my conscience, Mr. Spock."
It was an easy thing to say, but not solely poetic.
"Have you not your own, Captain?"
"I do...and, it's very important to me. But sometimes it's not enough for one man alone to ride on his convictions."
Kodos had done that, and even though he had not been so firm in his ideals as to continue the bloodshed, year by year as twenty lives over seven...
"Sometimes having another who stands at your heels is its own impediment."
"You swear not to kill me, then, Spock?"
"Not without a reason."
Not without logic.
"Captain's Log, Stardate 1710.2. Following our skirmish, one that cannot be described as successful nor failed, with the Romulan Bird of Prey on the Earth side of the neutral zone, I wish to record my good fortune that my crew, unlike so many other elements of this encounter, does not present themselves as an echo chamber.
"Our course, the debris jettisoned in charade, the Romulan commander himself considering me his like...I cannot say which of us was the echo, there.
"But we continue on. Our crew subsists upon diversity, of origin and of thought. It saves us, time and again."
"You know, Spock, I still don't get why you thought it was so illogical for us to enjoy our shore leave. Why didn't you stay? Are you telling me there's absolutely nothing you could possibly have gotten there that you can't get aboard the ship?"
Yet another illogical, premature inquiry from the good doctor. Spock sighed.
"Dr. McCoy, your question is not entirely without merit, but unfortunately I did find that the amusement park could do nothing for me. If the Caretaker was so determined to present me with the reality of Jim running off with that woman..."
"...I see."
"I've often told you, Jim, that Vulcans do not lie."
"I can't argue with that, Spock."
The Vulcan's name felt oddly naked, though Kirk couldn't quite tell why.
"However," Spock continued, unaware of the disturbance (most illogical, it was), "I did tell a lie to Dr. McCoy, on the surface of Taurus II."
"Oh?" Suddenly, Kirk had forgotten all his confusion. This...this was rare.
"I said to him that I am not frightened of command, while I also do not enjoy it. However..."
"Oh, Spock..." There it was. There he was. "You could just say that you missed me."
It happened almost too often.
A strange planet. A lifeform beyond our comprehension that sought only to please itself, creating unbelievable illusions that in the end were little more than a game, a study, a curiosity to them.
And me. The human captain, interfacing with them despite all sense. Telling the crew to leave me behind, no questions asked.
I'd almost grown to enjoy it. The responsibility, the selflessness, the idea that maybe I was doing something right, for once...
But each time I returned to the Enterprise, seeing Spock's wise old face...
I couldn't imagine never doing it again.
"Jim, that is not possible from this distance."
"But you are being held, Spock."
"Captain."
"Mr. Spock."
"I find your illogical persistence..."
"Cute, Spock?"
Irritating, was the word he would have chosen. That hopeful grin--
No, not even hopeful. Triumphant.
Classically human. Even as countless supposedly superior intelligences would identify the crew of the Enterprise as bellicose, base, not worth the mercy they continually found themselves capable of...
It was the winning spirit that Jim Kirk had. The ingenuity, of course, and the peerless capitalization upon centuries of that same successful spirit.
And a reluctant Vulcan, whom he was holding.
Flopped across his bed at a half-angle, Jim glanced with searching eyes up in Spock's direction - his first officer stood at his usual parade rest, ever formal.
"Do you know how proud I was that when Captain Christopher arrived on the bridge, there really was a funny little green man there? That he came to the future and I was able to show him...you?"
"Eventually I found myself thinking, what if it was me we had to send back? The thought of leaving after seeing you...it would have been like a black hole opened up in my chest."
"She's a very good lawyer, he says. Sits proudly in the captain's chair with her gift, like she did a damn thing to help him out. All she did was ignore our testimonies to his character!"
"Doctor, I must point out that in doing so, Lieutenant Shaw directly established herself. The sentimentality of Mr. Cogley did allow us to present to the court the evidence of the ship, but it is more than likely that you or I could have achieved the same effect."
"You or I?"
"...I alone."
"And I hope he knows that! Ungrateful son of a gun..."
"You rolled your eyes at me, Mr. Spock."
"I did not, Captain. I was merely covertly ascertaining the position and disposition of our displaced Dr. McCoy."
"Well." Kirk shrugged. "I don't think having an emptiness behind my eyes befits me either, necessarily, but tell me...doesn't- didn't the greeting of Landru's children resemble a certain Vulcan phrase?"
Spock paused, seeming to take inauspicious inventory of his thoughts.
"Many greetings between civilized peoples express hope for peace and tranquility, as an evolutionary grant."
Not a question of Vulcan versus Human, nor controlled versus free.
"Spock...just be glad you're a natural."
"You seem troubled, Mr. Spock."
In any ordinary circumstance, Spock might not have bothered to take issue with the conferral of human emotional frailties (he recalled, with some discomfort, the sound of "emotional Earth weaknesses") upon him by another crew member.
In any ordinary circumstance, were it the captain and not Mr. Scott, he certainly would have.
But here he only admitted to it.
"Indeed, Mr. Scott. My captain played directly into the hands of a dictator, and professed admiration for his kind all the while."
"Well, but ya can't blame 'im-"
"I can. And I do. It is logical."
I'm quite proud of you, Scotty, said the captain. We couldn't have done it without you, Scotty, said the captain. So much of what we did revolved entirely around your quick thinking and clever decisions, said the captain.
Alright, thought Scotty, I was only doin' it for the ship, if I'm bein' honest. He said as much, even. That she was what drove him.
And the captain said, Mr. Scott, they didn't want the ship. They didn't care about her in the least.
Aye sir, Scotty thought, and I woulda done it anyway. But she helps me think straight, yanno?
"Captain-"
Kirk put up a hand, feeling lingering impatience from the surface of the planet. "I don't need to know what you told Leila, Spock. That's not my business. It wasn't our kind of first contact - come to think of it, it wasn't a first contact at all."
The structure of the humor was not lost on Spock. Born of a more logical formulation, he might term it irony.
"But I do want to tell you, Captain. Jim."
"That a real Jim or a spores Jim?"
Purgatories are, by definition, not hells.
"A real Jim. The only one I know."
"You know, Mr. Spock, I find it very interesting that you consider the Horta's preference for your ears so sublimely logical."
"Very interesting, Captain?"
"Well, sure! Because if I told you I sat on the bridge day in and day out admiring your ears, from lobe to tip, especially when they flush that adorable pale green..."
"Most illogical, Captain. Your duties on the bridge require much more of your attention than fruitless admiration of my physiology."
Kirk bit back a grin. "Yes, Mr. Spock. Exactly."
It was as pat a conversation as they'd ever had, but it was...fascinating, nonetheless.
Over and over, the Organians told us - far beyond simple, sneering intimation - that we did not understand them. They told us that we were below them without ever uttering the words, without ever making us feel, as they perhaps wanted us to, that we were unwelcome.
It was no violence of the mind that they withheld us from our wars versus forcible ejection, not in the sense that Kor's mind ripper was a violent abstraction of Vulcan techniques.
Your violence...understandable, to me. Permissible, in tandem with my practice pacifism.
Essential, even. Our temperance.
We are the creatures we are.
"What do you make of it, Mr. Spock?"
"I am a scientist, Lieutenant Uhura. It is not my place to do so for anything but that which has statistical basis upon which to form conclusions."
"But don't you feel anything? I mean, don't you- you must have some opinion. Do you think it was logical?"
"As far as logic is concerned, the needs of the many naturally outweigh the needs of the one, in all cases. Since Lazarus could not be separated from himself, it was only logical to leave them together."
"Imagine if it was you, warring with yourself..."
"Another horrible decision."
"In this case, I would find myself inclined to agree with you, Lieutenant."
"And I you, Mr. Spock. It was logical, I'll say that much. But oh, the poor captain..."
"There was no reason for doubt that he would do the right thing, once properly availed of Dr. McCoy's circumstances."
"Weeks there, with no sign...were you lonely?"
"I was with Jim."
"That's almost frighteningly direct, for you. And did anything happen?"
"I cannot be sure, but I suspect he may have...kissed the tip of one of my ears."
"You suspect?"
"Indeed. A perenially horrible decision."
He'd never tell them what his blindness, however temporary, had begotten.
How could one ever logically explain the mindless search for golden eyes, round nose and ears, hands firm yet soft enough to hold him through every trial and tribulation their adventures faced him with?
Perhaps one might explain it as a plant which instinctively turns towards the sun - indeed, looking for a light more powerful than any ultraviolet, blinding white, superoptic ray.
Human poets might call this light love. A painless search for answers. But Vulcans, always superhumanly inmitable, need not be caught terming it in such a way.
Minding the store, they said, and meant playing mental footsie across the bridge (somehow, or failing that casting lingering glances at each other's turned backs and backsides, never minding strictly medical incredulation).
Commanding a starship, they said, and meant exploring the galaxies together whether in primary performance of decorated asset and assent or not (but officer came first).
Vulcan biology, they said, and meant all the incongruous science that made up his beautiful body, his beautiful mind.
His history; his past, present, and future.
Wrestling with each other, reforming and rediscovering the fundamental, axiomatic illogics of their interrelation. Grappling, indeed.
Most humans would turn away from Spock - or any Vulcan, if they so chose - due to the congruence of his pointed ears vis-à-vis typical judeochristian models of satanic deities; they would think him devilish, in other words. Certainly not boring, even if cruel.
And as for Pan, if Kirk knew his classics properly (and he most always did, particularly when it came to topics markered by their missions), it was inestimable in any capacity why Apollo would regard a wild satyr of nature and sexuality as boring.
Spock? Pastoral?
Well. He certainly wasn't Lieutenant Palamas's bacteria, nor her fundamental humanity.
"If I may, Ms. Uhura?"
"You may, Mr. Spock."
He paused for the briefest second to acknowledge his title; to share with the memoryless new iteration of his friend his version of a smile.
"After NOMAD wiped your memory banks," she knew that it was a joke and that it was a directly-admitted horrible one, "it commented on the 'chaos' of your thinking. In response, I reminded it that the unit it spoke of was a woman."
Uhura's waiting anticipation...lacked.
"I regret that at this time you must first be a unit, reducated, instead of the woman I knew."
It was with a tremendous purpose that Kirk found himself walking the corridors of the USS Enterprise after the return from the mirror universe.
The beard gave Spock character, Bones said. If that was true, then was Kirk's own uncharacteristic mercy (for the crew of the reflected world) not of any distinguishable merit?
Did it not make him who he was, possessing grace and understanding? Could the mirror really be called a mirror at all if it didn't show some hidden depth, inversion, anything that was not merely an amendment?
And of course, Spock could always just neglect to shave.
"Our wanton destruction of the core of this planet's culture only serves to underscore why we should not harbor your expectation of standard humanoid progression."
"I don't think I follow, Mr. Spock."
"Colonialism, Dr. McCoy. We did not even explain to them why we considered Vaal a threat. We acted as if they were not intelligent enough even to be granted an attempt at that courtesy."
"I get the distinct impression you really hate having to say 'we' here."
"Your impression is correct. But anyone who lets this brand of brutality proceed, regardless of any federated Prime Directive, is complicit."
When Jim miraculously emerged from the turbolift with all atoms properly arranged, every curve of his command wrap shirt aligned just as they always best suited him, Spock did not smile.
He approached quite closely to it, of course. Just as closely as he had approached a frown when Commodore Decker had enforced his willful, wanton intentions of taking out the planet killer by his own hand with the weight of four hundred bodies behind it.
He yet grieved...something.
The Constellation had survived nigh-destruction. The Enterprise, without Jim, would be - had been - just as dead and empty a hulk.
"You know, Spock..."
In his proto-meditation state, fingers steepled together and back laid straight along the plane of the bed, Spock said nothing. Kirk continued.
"You really were transfixed by that cat, at first. All that theory you were giving me about racial subconscious, and how it wouldn't apply to you..."
He gave an appraising wave to and fro with his right hand, the left idly occupied propping itself on the bed next to Spock, two fingers stiff.
"Yes, Captain?"
"I thought it was cute."
Though Spock didn't give purr or otherwise vocalize, he did seem to conjure a smirk.
"Flowers that smell bad, pretty birds tweeting in the meadow...most imaginative of you, Mr. Spock. Very colorful."
"Indeed. My assumption is that you will expect I patterned my 'colorful' analogies after your own command strategy, which you employed throughout our encounter with Harry Mudd. Am I correct, Captain?"
"Rarely are you not, Mr. Spock."
"Neither you, Captain. But, I took as inspiration Ms. Uhura. Since she had so little opportunity to speak, in your design of this particular predicament's solution, it became prudent at least to provide her with some reason to smile."
And there she was, grinning away.
"She gave herself up so willingly..."
The ship was quiet, and static.
"I have found that people will do anything quite willingly, to cure themselves of such desperate ails."
"Even you, Spock?"
"Captain?"
"You said people. Not humans. There's a lot to be said, there, for sentience and other things - things that would make the Companion a person, one people really would insist on calling a she - but I don't quite think we need to say all that now."
Spock shifted, thinking of his unguarded offer of hand to Cochrane, just as his far-departed ancestor had made.
"Change is...essential."
"There's nothing I can say. Anything I say about it is ridiculous, because the whole thing is ridiculous."
"Captain, are you...cross with me?" On any other day, Spock would have said "irritated", but...well.
"No, Spock, I'm amused. Because anything ridiculous is at least a little bit amusing."
"And is your interest in ridicule or amusement?"
"No, Spock. No, I'm interested in the fantastical amounts of medical malpractice and family dysfunction that went on while the ship was under attack from an alien vessel while we'd hundreds of delegates aboard."
"Merely logical actions."
"And marrying me...?"