The other day on one of my fics, a person commented that they hadn’t realized I was blind, and how impressed they were by my writing because they thought connecting to characters on Star Trek wouldn’t be possible when you couldn’t see them.
And maybe that’s true for some media. I can’t really see gifs or art on tumblr. And Star Trek Discovery is really difficult for me because of all the use of Klingon with subtitles, and the sheer amount of reliance on visual action to move the plot. Same thing with the movie reboots, Star Trek Beyond was a huge pain because of all the action, and the theater I go to doesn’t ahve audio description options so half the time I was completely lost.
But with TOS…
Now, I know that Kirk and Spock share a lot of slow, long, lingering stares, and heart-eyes. But being blind doesn’t mean i’m unaware those things exist, and considering the tension between them, it’s not much of a stretch for my mind to fill in those long silences.
And when it comes to listening to the characters… There are so many subtle voice shifts, and tone changes, and feelings in the way they talk to each other, I’ve been able to fill in all the blanks just by hearing the tones in their voices.
You can hear how Bones isn’t really xenophobic, he’s just over-protective of Jim because he wants Jim to be happy and he’s not sure he can trust anyone in that. You can hear it in his tone every time he thinks Jim is hurt by Spock’s lack of humanity.
And you can hear the understanding in Jim’s voice every time he reminds Spock that being human and being Vulcan doesn’t make him less of one thing, or the other, and he’s in this, with Spock–ride or die.
And years later, not watching, but listening to the soft whisper of Jim’s voice as he says, “Spock,” so gently for the first time in three years, knowing Spock will actually hear him this time. And the sheer emotion on Spock’s voice when he says, “This,” and you don’t have to see him take Jim’s hand to know he’s got it, because what else can he be doing with that much feeling in his tone?
And you can hear that resignation in Bones’ voice that those two are it for each other when they’re sitting around a camp fire eating marshmelons and singing row row row your boat.
So yeah, I really don’t need to see it to understand the deep, fierce, unending love that they–not just Jim and Spock, but the entire crew–mean everything to each other. And I think that’s the beauty of Star Trek. I’ll be the first to say that yes, the old Star Trek could be more accessible, but the lack of it never stopped me from jumping aboard the Starship USS Enterprise for a mission of a lifetime.
One of the things about certain kinds of old television is that screens were very small, so visual communication was limited by technology. Some comedies made use of this by making their visual gags Very Present — I Love Lucy did this a lot. You got a focus on the humorous situation, and the situation itself was set up VERY clearly. Think of Lucy tromping grapes with exaggerated motions, think of the way Lucille Ball used cuts to her face to express things with extreme expressions, then moved back out to the gag. I say ILL made USE of this, not worked around it, because I think what they did was turn a technological limitation into an advantage, letting Ball’s chops as a rubber-faced, physical comedian become the focal point — the reason you might watch the show, to see those great face shapes and motions in play.
So mid-twentieth-century television had these limitations, and Original Flavor Star Trek is working with those limitations, and it’s working with a mix of drama and light comedy, and it has to work with some unusual-looking sets and characters. So it needs to get all this complicated stuff across on a small screen, and like ILL, it turns this necessity and the technological limitations into a strength: it has characters who have complex relationships and who talk about everything with each other. It has a lot of intimate close-ups of faces and discussions, and if you can’t see those you can still kind of hear them in the music and dialogue choices in those moments. These are people stuck on a ship together for a long time, with history, and connection with the characters has to pull viewers through all the weird scifi stuff and aliens, so…the characters have to connect with each other, intensely, and verbally.
Right now I’m thinking about a scene from “The Trouble With Tribbles”, where Kirk and Spock go to get lunch. I’m doing this from memory, so apologies for any mistakes, but if you cannot see it, approximately what you get is:
[replicator noise]
Kirk: My chicken sandwich and coffee! This is supposed to be my chicken sandwich and coffee! [pause] I want these things off the ship! I don’t care how we do it, I want them off the ship.
[door noise]
Scotty: Aye, and they’re in all the other replicators, too.
Kirk: How?
Scotty: Probably through one of the air vents.
Spock: (sharply) Captain, there are vents of that type on the space station.
Kirk: (grimly, alarmed) And in the storage compartments!
So, in that scene, a LOT of the information is conveyed verbally. There are visual gags in it — Kirk’s Tribble-infested lunch, Scotty carrying a pile of Tribbles, everyone in the room petting Tribbles while things play out — but there’s a wealth of communication in just the words: Kirk’s position of authority is there, his frustration, Scotty’s frustration, Spock’s laser focus on the ongoing issues of the current mission, Kirk’s ability to switch gears from “my lunch!” to “major work problem”, etc. That interplay is one of the major strengths of the original Star Trek, and I think a lot of it came about because of the visual limitations of technology at the time.
Which, 50 years later, makes it relatively accessible to people with their own visual limitations. (And that kind of dialogue and character interplay became a hallmark of Star Trek, which I think is pretty evident in TNG and DS9, but which started to fade out in VOY and later series, and is now almost gone. I miss it.)
(via cicerothewriter)
