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sshbpodcast · 6 months

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Character Spotlight: Christine Chapel

By Ames

We’ve hit upon all the main stars of The Original Series, but no list would be complete without giving a fair mention to the woman who stood beside the show, Majel Barrett. While we still wish in our hearts of hearts that the Number One we met in “The Cage” and “The Menagerie” got a fair shake, we are still glad that Gene’s main squeeze was reborn as the quippy and competent Nurse Chapel.

So join us this week on A Star to Steer Her By as we finish off our TOS character spotlights with a bunch of highlights and only a few lowlights on what’s probably going to be our shortest installment of this series. There just wasn’t enough stretching of the character moments to do as we did for, say, our Scotty or Sulu posts. Pick up your medical tricorders to scan on below and follow along in this week’s podcast discussion (jump to 58:16). Needless to say, Majel probably did more on the show than just Gene. Take that as you will. ;)

[Images © CBS/Paramount]

Best Moments

I know he’s alive down there, Captain Very early in the series in “What Are Little Girls Made of?”, Chapel’s backstory of joining the Enterprise as a way to find her lost fiancé, Roger Korby, is established. And it’s a testament to her character that not only is she right that he was still alive (in some form), but she also gets to convince Ruk the android not to kill Kirk AND make the choice to stay on the Enterprise after everything goes typically sideways.

Plomeek soup for the soul While you’ll see in just a moment that “Amok Time” also features some of the more tired and less positive aspects of Chapel’s character, we’ve got to admit that her dutifulness in trying to get Spock to eat during his pon farr was benevolent of her. She goes so far as to whip up some Vulcan plomeek soup to keep her patient well, little good that it ended up doing.

Sound it out I’m still minorly horrified by Nomad taking Uhura’s memories in “The Changeling,” and we’re left not knowing if or how she gets back to her normal self. But one thing’s for sure: she’s got a caring and patient nurse helping along the way, as we see Chapel reteaching the blank-slated Uhura how to read in English. It’s quite sweet, if you don’t think about how horrifying it is.

It has one word on it: Eat I could take a second to gripe that, between Chapel and Rand, the women of the show are very often seen just bringing the men their dinner like they’re waitresses instead of equal crewmembers. Or I could highlight how Chapel cleverly tricks a moping Garrovick into eating in “Obsession” by telling him McCoy’s prescription was a tape that just said “Eat,” so I’ll do that.

The pain will help me to consciousness We joke on the podcast that it was clear that someone(s) on the show was clearly into some kinky stuff, and it shines through in episodes like “A Private Little War” when Nurse Chapel is compelled to bitchslap a half-conscious Spock around until he wakes up, as is the Vulcan way. Or at least, as is someone on the writing staff’s dirty little fetish.

We shared consciousness together I’m sure now that Strange New Worlds is filling in a lot of the Chapel-Spock relationship, there are a ton more shippers out there for them, but back in the day, the best we got was this moment in “Return to Tomorrow” when Sargon put Spock’s consciousness into Chapel’s body to get Henoch out of the Vulcan. And Chapel was all too glad to be Spock’s vessel in a not entirely creepy way. Only a little bit creepy!

I am a nurse first and a member of the crew of the Enterprise second When Nurse Chapel learns that McCoy is dying of xenopolycythemia in “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky,” her resolve is to help him to live, while he seems to take it in stride that he is destined to die. She encourages him to “Please, give yourself every minute” of his year left in this world, and I’d like to think that that helped him get through it. Natira helped too, wink wink.

The spider catches a fly While we included moments from “The Tholian Web” in almost everyone else’s Worst Moments lists, Chapel actually got a good moment from this otherwise negative episode! When another of McCoy’s assistants has succumbed to the weird space occurrence and attacks him, Nurse Chapel calmly grabs a hypo and tranqs that guy, like a badass!

Now all I want is to crawl away and die While I found Uhura’s reaction to the forced kiss with Kirk in “Plato’s Stepchildren” to be uncomfortable in an entirely different way, the Chapel-Spock kiss is exactly as uncomfortable as it’s supposed to be. Chapel’s pining after Spock is used as a weapon against her in this moment of torture. A worse show would imply that she’s finally getting what she wants, but she makes it clear that without consent, there is no enjoyment and it’s commendable to state that so directly.

I heard Spock’s voice Unlike my reaction to the different women’s scenes in “Plato’s Stepchildren,” I must say that all the women in “The Lorelei Signal” are absolutely on point. While Uhura takes command of the ship, Chapel serves as de facto CMO in the absence of all the men. And what’s more: she uses that weird bond she has with Spock (perhaps lingering from “Return to Tomorrow”?) to save him from the temptresses!

And they've probably redesigned the whole sickbay By The Motion Picture, we see that Chapel found time to learn a new trade, as she’s an MD by the time McCoy arrives. Was it that the writers seem to incorrectly think that nurses are on the same job track as medical doctors, just a lower rung on the career ladder? Probably. But we can read it as her changing jobs because she wanted to do something new, and that’s a more exciting interpretation for this change.

Look for the helpers. You will always find people that are helping. Blink and you can miss it, but Christine Chapel in The Voyage Home is busy coordinating relief efforts at Starfleet Command during the whale probe attack. She gets like one line and you only catch quick glimpses of her, but it’s an excellent touch to show that her character is there and focused on doing the thing that she’s been known for all series long: helping people.

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Worst Moments

You hide it, but you do have feeling Onto some of the lousier things Chapel does in the show, and you’ll find that most are related to her one-sided relationship with Spock. We first see it in “The Naked Time” (before we know that BOTH of them are engaged) when she dumps all her love on him while space-drunk. And it’s a little sad and pathetic knowing she’ll never receive it back [in this series], but also just annoying that it’s the main characteristic the writers ever give her. Sigh.

A mechanical geisha would be no more difficult While we did include some moments from “What Are Little Girls Made of?” above in our Best Moments list, there’s some bad to go around as well! Did you notice just how jealous Chapel immediately got of Andrea the moment she laid eyes on her? Before she knows Andrea is a robot, she’s immediately grouchy when Andrea calls Roger by his first name. And afterwards, Chapel is flat out hostile to the poor, jumpsuited thing!

You never give up hoping, do you? Now for all the times in “Amok Time” Chapel utterly degrades herself because she has a crush on Mr. Spock. Bones jokes about it when she brings him the soup, for one thing. For another, there’s an entirely weird scene in which she goes to tell him they’ve changed course to Vulcan, but he’s still pon farring around and she starts crying. And to top it off, she just had to be present on the bridge (for no reason!) to witness T’Pring on the viewscreen and learn that he’s engaged, just to rub salt in the wound. And then she has no lines the rest of the episode! Poor Christine.

Spock will be yours forever One last time to roll our eyes at how contrived it’s been all series long, and now into The Animated Series, to watch Chapel swooning over Spock so much. So much so that she’s easily swayed by Harry’s Mudd’s offer of some of his love potion in “Mudd’s Passion.” She falls for it, and when it turns out to be the real thing, she barely even gets to enjoy having Spock all to herself!

Since when did we even have ID badges? She makes such an ass of herself that I’ve broken “Mudd’s Passion” into two entries! She is so distracted (and a little drugged) by Mudd that he steals her ID badge. She almost makes up for it by capturing him in the shuttlebay, but instead ends up drugging the whole ship by accident AND gets herself kidnapped and forced into a pretty pathetic damsel in distress role for Spock to heroically save. Oh Chapel, this is all beneath you.

Plenty of fish in the sea One final ditzy moment from Nurse Chapel, and it’s in the clownishly inconsistent “The Terratin Incident.” Sure, everyone in that episode is made to look silly because they’re shrinking down to the size of cockroaches (or smaller depending on the scene), but Chapel nearly drowns in a fish tank after tripping over a sewing needle. Why a sewing needle was next to a fish tank might be the stupidest question yet.

— And that’s it! We couldn’t see stretching the list further than that since you didn’t get to see Chapel do much else in TOS, TAS, or the films. Keep your eyes fixed here because next we’re going to be repeating the same experiment with all the TNG main characters, as well as keeping up with our watchthrough of all of Enterprise over on SoundCloud or wherever you podcast. We also keep all our logs up on Facebook and Twitter. Now eat your plomeek soup! Doctor’s orders!

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ichayalovesyou · 2 years

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(Re)Discovering A Strange New Spock: “Dagger of The Mind” (1x09)

Previous: Miri

Next: The Corbomite Maneuver

A meta anthology where I re-examine TOS, especially Spock, in light of the new information Discovery & Strange New Worlds has revealed about him to us.

Onto the Analysis!

Spock is A Massive Bigot Example 9000

Okay first things first I don’t want to EVER, and I mean EVER hear anything remotely resembling the words “Spock isn’t bigoted like McCoy” or “Vulcans are better than Humans” EVER AGAIN after the utter hypocritical nonsense Spock spews in the beginning of this episode!

“You earth people glorify organized violence for 40 centuries, but you imprison those who employ it privately.” First of all ‘YOU EARTH PEOPLE?!’ that’s really damn derogatory even for you Spock, son of Amanda Grayson the human from Earth.

Spock, my guy, my beloved bitchy lil’ blorbo. Vulcan tried to instigate at war with Andoria barely a century ago, you guys were On Sight with the Klingons for a long time before formal relations were established. Don’t act like Vulcans are above it all!

Also it’s bold of you to pretend that Vulcans are completely incapable of crime. Vulcans put their V’Tosh Ka’tur dissidents and violent offenders in “correctional facilities” different name, same concept.

Spock Has Every Reason to HATE Prisons

I find it incredibly interesting and wonderful that Spock strongly sides with McCoy on this mission. Kirk is in the wrong here and learns the truth by the end of the episode (I’ll get into why I think he believes what he does after I talk about Spock).

Let’s have a look at Spock’s experiences with penal colonies and their kin shall we?

Sybok, his brother, is a high security patient/prisoner for the ambigious crime of “was a revolutionary, who sought experience and knowledge that were forbidden by Vulcan beliefs.”

Michael, his sister, was supposed to spend the rest of her life in a penal colony. She proved to the Federation that not only could she be “rehabilitated/redeemed” given a second chance. But went on to save the Federation she’d once hurt, multiple times. She never would’ve been able to do that locked up and cut off from her family.

He himself was wrongfully imprisoned, falsely accused of murder and considered a violent offender. This was after institutionalizing himself in a place he thought he could trust and learned that he could not.

Sees his commanding officer Una taken and court martialed on the basis of her species. Will risk the Federation’s only death penalty helping a friend, and sees Kirk nearly get his career stripped from him over falsified computer evidence.

His ex-fiancé works at a Vulcan Correctional Facility (perhaps part of why they break up IS ideological differences regarding this topic, especially now that we know Sybok is imprisoned in the same facility where she works).

Spock knows how deeply flawed the Federation’s militaristic judiciary and prison system is. It’s no wonder Spock gives Kirk a “he has a point Captain” look when Bones orders Jim to look into the Tantalus situation. Speaking of Jim…

Why Kirk Believes In Crime & Punishment

I think part of his opinion is privilege and the other part is Tarsus (and maybe Klingon War?) trauma. Kirk is a well-respected Human officer with a squeaky clean record. In fact he was canonically a bit of a Boimler and got a friend demoted for breaking the rules (which is why Court Martial happens at all). He has never once been wrongly accused of anything, or had a lifetime of imprisonment on the horizon. He just doesn’t know.

That, and forgiveness has never, ever been Kirk’s strong suit, not with others, not with himself. I think we can blame Kodos the Executioner for that. Jim’s formative experience with unjust, criminal actions was at the hands of a genocidal egotist convinced he was doing the right thing.

No wonder he’s under the impression that criminal actions are the product of a sick mind and not also a result of lacking resources or help that led them to that action or trauma-born illness. Which we know even in the 21st century to be true.

I also think this informs his behavior towards the Klingons in Errand of Mercy, A Private Little War, & Star Trek VI. The first few times the war is still a fresh wound for Kirk, and Undiscovered Country takes place after a Klingon killed his only child and nearly killed Spock. His hatred and difficulty letting go is no surprise to me.

Spock’s First TOS Mind Meld (Oh Look He Lyin’ Again)

Look, we know Spock’s a liar, but on this occasion he doesn’t really have good reason to lie to Bones… or does he?

He says he’s never melded with a human before, which is just plain untrue. In this timeline, as far as we know, he’s at the very least Mind Melded with La’an Noonien-Singh. What happened? La’an almost found out about one, extremely classified thing, Michael Burnham, his sister. The fact she learned about the events of Zero Point notwithstanding.

My guess is that he melds much much more rarely in SNW than TOS because of this. After all, the only other meld we witness is the one with Pike (who already knows Burnham) in the Balance of Timeline.

Maybe he is fearful that there’s a danger of Dr. Van Gelder finding out about Michael like La’an nearly did. As we well know, Spock is not at all a fan of taking risks.

I would assume that he gets progressively better at shielding his memories of Michael from others during a meld. Considering the increasing frequency he does so over the course of TOS, not just with aliens and machines, but with the riskiest of melds, human Starfleet officers.

I do think it’s worth noting that Bones learns of the mind meld before Jim does. Which feels like foreshadowing to his becoming the holder of Spock’s Katra. Possibly as a result, being the only member of Spock’s new found family that may know about Spock’s vanished sister.

Spock’s Reaction To Dr. Noel Is Uh… Fascinating.

Spock’s reaction to Noel’s open interest in Jim in the transporter room is intriguing. I would say that it’s just Spock’s normal distaste of PDA but, there’s no PDA. Jim basically goes “I’m gonna kill Bones 🙄” and Spock does that classic little “I must not emote” lip purse.

Whether it be amusement, irritation or jealousy. Spock tends to react strongly whenever Jim is around people who’re interested in him and vice versa. Bonus points for the “come on, seriously?” when he starts making out with Noel much later in the episode 😂

Loneliness (Closing Banter)

A morsel of fuel for my running theory that Captain Kirk has very real Autophobia: how haunted he sounds by the prospect of loneliness.

But then, when he makes direct eye contact with Spock, it’s like that that fear, that feeling of being haunted by the prospect of loneliness vanishes. Like knowing Spock is there makes everything a little more okay. He shifts back into confident, command mode as they set out for their next adventure.

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