The Good Men Do

[Alelou]

Ah, well, okay. But English majors love to argue from the text, you know.

I went to find that book in my son's room (ye Gods, now I know what HE can do this summer!) until he reminded me I'd gotten it out of the library. Sigh.

[Asso]

[CX]

Just watch The Seventh and Azati Prime, those are two of the biggest examples of T'Pol cracking under pressure. Pretty much all of seasons 3 & 4 show her to be self-destructive, especially her Trell addiction and the way she sabotaged her relationship with Trip, who was the one person who cared the most about her. I don't really need to "argue" anything, it pretty much speaks for itself.

[Asso]

I don't understand what you want to mean.

[KKGlinka]

Glad to know that I'm not the only one who find TGTMD pretty much as bad as *the_abomination* was to begin with. Usually we get shouted down in these parts because most everyone is just so happy about the idea that Trip isn't dead.

I genuinely wanted to like it. There's not exactly a glut of pro-fic about T'Pol, so I read it for that and got... trout. I can understand liking the book purely on the merit of semi-canonical not-dead, especially when the pro-fic so ironically mirrors fanfic in premise. Unfortunately, trek fans tend to regard the books as being largely non-canonical, so the retcons in the book don't really count. It always comes back to viewer/reader defined continuity. For me, I don't need this pro fix-it fic for two reasons.

a) Self-admitted fuzzy history holodeck episode. It's like ending a story with, "And then they woke up." The plot device neutralizes the potential impact of the story.

b) *the_abomination* is probably one of the few, legitimate examples where the creators of a show did, in fact, take a piss on the fandom, like a child breaking his toys rather than share. I simply can't respect that juvenile, malicious spirit enough to respect the result.

[KKGlinka]

I'd rather Trip get weepy, to be honest with you. He's the HUMAN, for pete's sake! If you've got to have a badly written overly emotional tear-fest at least keep it in canon!!!

Oh, he was plenty weepy. Aside from that, he was largely in character through-out the book, so if you're more of a Trip fan than, like me, a T'Pol fan, you might want to give the book a try.

Vulcans don't either. Duh.

Sure they do. What I love about Vulcans is that they are a deeply emotional, passionate people. They are so over the top, they must restrain themselves or they'll just lose it in an unproductive, violent, distracted frenzy of non-stop emotion. I don't have a problem with T'Pol crying because she's high or her neural processes are impaired. I don't have a problem with her crying when someone she has loved her entire life dies in her arms because, as the saying goes, her provocation was great. Heck, I even agreed with the scene in the book when she cried at her daughter's funeral. It was shown to be an unconscious, involuntary response, in private, possibly influenced by Trip's own grief.

I just don't understand why she laid on his bunk and cried after smelling his shirt, well after his funeral. Even after Elizabeth died, she just balled up, fetally. I don't get why she cried after Trip manfully kissed her, telling her he had to go be secret agent man all alone oh emo! She hadn't experienced a sudden shock, a neural impairment or any other excuse other than allowing herself to cry. Because apparently, self-control really isn't all that paramount to Vulcans. Oh, wait, I'm forgetting that convenient plot device for why it's okay to characterize her as nothing more than a silly pointy-eared human: self-induced massive amounts of brain damage, not counting that time she was mind-raped and caught Vulcan parkinsons. And it's not like she's an ex-spook who could waltz on after him, if she wanted. *sob sob sob*

I'm sorry, my sarcasm just kicked in full force about halfway through that last paragraph. Seriously, I find the book far more palatable if I substitute a trout for T'Pol. Then I can imagine the scene where Trip manfully kisses a weepy, clinging trout and it's funny instead of OOC.

[Asso]

Eh Eh, KKGlinka. I think you and I have a lot of similar ideas.

[Alelou]

Well, at least it's very vibrantly put sarcasm.

I think T'Pol's relationship with Trip could be seen as self-sabotage, more than her attempts to sabotage it are. In fact I think her attempts to sabotage it are all about T'Pol realizing she's Vulcan and this is just nuts.

But that's why I'm also rooting for her to just give it up already and accept that she's now irredeemably nuts and all she can do is make the best of it.

[blacknblue]

Frankly, I just don't care for the guy's writing that much. I don't want to put down anyone's writing, and it is entirely possible that Mangel's may have written many excellent stories. but this one is not exemplary, IMO. If they were going to go with a cloak and dagger, action adventure type finale fix, i wish they had gotten CX or Rigil to write it.

[Linda]

b) *the_abomination* is probably one of the few, legitimate examples where the creators of a show did, in fact, take a piss on the fandom, like a child breaking his toys rather than share. I simply can't respect that juvenile, malicious spirit enough to respect the result.

Well put! And most people who post here agree with you.

In hindsight, I was thinking that killing Trip off in the E2 episode was giving us a hint of what the killer Bs were heading towards. But that is reaching quite a bit.

[Linda]

Uh, how did I get the above quote wrong? It was from KKGlinka.

[Asso]

Eh Eh!
True, but that's also my thought.

[KKGlinka]

I think T'Pol's relationship with Trip could be seen as self-sabotage, more than her attempts to sabotage it are. In fact I think her attempts to sabotage it are all about T'Pol realizing she's Vulcan and this is just nuts.

I agree. I think, just plugging in more gaps for myself, that T'Pol is not only one of the more emotional ones, but a hopelessly curious individual. In the future, we hear Spock say "fascinating" all the time, but in T'Pol's time, curiousity for its own sake and probably considered a few steps above worthless. Why are you curious? Um, I just am. That's not good enough; she was required to have a reason. Just as her society didn't provide her enough outlet for her curiosity and desire to experience more, the adultered and fragmented techniques of self-control didn't work for her. Suppressing emotions by ignoring and denying them probably works for a lot of Vulcans, but we see throughout the first three seasons that denying them doesn't work for T'Pol.

She keeps slipping. Then, after a while, you can see she starts to give up to a certain extent, allowing herself to indulge in emotional experiences such as melding, drugs, sexual behavior, despite knowing it was a downward spiral. From Trip's perspective, she was jerking him around. She would demonstrate interest in him, respond to his overtures, and then shut down, rinse and repeat. Yeah, she cared for him, she was attracted to him but she believed she wasn't supposed to be feeling those things, let alone acting on them. It became a constant cycle of slipping and scrabbling for self-restraint.

Then along comes the Kir'Shara, which probably revealed that there were multiple techniques for mastering one's emotions. There are extreme methods in which emotions are excised completely and, at the opposite end, is acknowledgment and restraint. It's noteworthy that after she starts reading into Surak's direct teachings, we see her really get a grip and simmer down. What's even more interesting is that, even though she's become less overtly emotional, she's become more overtly demonstrative in a very deliberate, though restrained, fashion. Which, unfortunately, Trip kept shooting down.

He was too busy sulking to notice that she had stopped flailing (not that he didn't have legitimate reason to be frustrated with her insecure, confused behavior). All he seemed to notice was that she had quit being so emotionally expressive and when a Human being does that, evinces little or no reaction, it usually means they hate you. It was ironic that he perceived her increased stability as a rejection. She had finally cottoned on that it was safe and normal to feel because "control" meant using logic to dictate your outward behavior, rather than denying emotion might be valid. When it looked like he no longer reciprocated, she backed off. It was illogical to pursue a person who didn't want her, no matter how she felt about it.

I think Season 5: The Reverse Pursuit, Serious Vulcan Style would have been fabo.

[justTripn]

Cool . . . where have you been all this time KKGlinka!

[Distracted]

OMG. This is SO much the way I see T'Pol. You must be reading my mind.

In one of my Virtual Season 5 fics I had T'Pol borrowing a negligee from Hoshi... for quite logical purposes, of course. One must have the proper wardrobe for the task at hand.