"The Naked Time" - Season 1, Episode 4
"We've got no business out here!"
“My Duty . . .”
According to executive in charge of production Herb Solow and associate producer Bob Justman, by episode four the Star Trek crew knew they had a hit. Not with the show, as Star Trek was getting only middling ratings at best. No, the big hit was the character NBC had nearly axed altogether: Mr. Spock.1 As I’ve written about in the Stray Thoughts of prior pieces, Spock was controversial with the network due to his “satanic” appearance. NBC was onto something. They expected a reaction over Spock and they got one. But what they got was one of the first examples of bonafide television fandom rather than a moral panic. Spock was by far the most popular character on Star Trek from day dot. Over the course of the first season, Leonard Nimoy’s daily fan mail deliveries became something of a lightning rod for William Shatner’s temper, who saw his status as lead of the show imperiled or at least undermined.2 At some undefined point during the production of Season One, Life magazine arrived to do a full photoshoot of Nimoy’s makeup application. Shatner was annoyed enough to begin doing his makeup in his trailer rather than on set.3
It’s impressive that fans could see Nimoy’s measured demeanor and intentionality throughout the first three episodes. Even in “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” Spock is a relative background character who chimes in with a peculiar perspective but has no real material to call his own. With “The Naked Time” though, Spock arrives as perhaps the central character of Star Trek, and audiences noted. Discussing the role with The New York Times in 1968, right before Star Trek’s third and final season began airing, Nimoy stated:
Within two weeks after [The Naked Time], my mail jumped from a few hundred letters to 10,000 a week. That scene got to a lot of people, and I knew what I had to play in the scripts that followed: It solidified everything. I knew that we were not playing a man with no emotions, but a man who had great pride, who had learned to control his emotions and who would deny that he knew what emotions were. In a way, he was more human than anyone else on the ship.4
That scene. We’ll get there.
“The Naked Time” is the best episode of Star Trek so far. It balances effective science-fiction themes with clear character dynamics and humor. It’s also so straightforward it’s difficult to write about on a thematic level. On a mission to rescue a scientific research crew on a dying planet and observe the planet's disintegration, the Enterprise finds the crew dead in a frozen bunker. While in the bunker with Spock, Lieutenant Joey Tormolen (played by Stewart Moss) gets a strange liquid on his hand and begins acting strangely upon his return to the ship. He begins worrying about space travel, ethically. “We’ve got no business out here,” he frets, externalizing the dangers of space. Later, proclaiming light colonial guilt in the breakroom, as he declares, “It’s not ours!” Lt. Joey ultimately is restrained in the med bay but falls ill and dies inexplicably. As Bones McCoy says, it seems like he just gave up on life.
Spock and Lieutenant Tormolen investigate the bunker containing the science team they were supposed to rescue. Watching this, with its eerie frozen corpses in unexplainable poses, recalled the Norwegian base in John Carpenter’s The Thing.
However, he found time to infect others. As the Enterprise begins orbiting the dying planet, which requires a complicated flight path in order to avoid being destroyed, more members of the crew begin acting out. Sulu exhibits a zest for life and “swashbuckling personality” that culminates in him chasing other crew members around with a fencing foil. His partner helmsman O’Reilly takes a new pride in his Irish heritage before locking himself in the engine room, declaring himself the captain, singing an old ballad on a loop, and throwing the Enterprise off course. As Spock calculates, the crew has only half an hour to right the ship before it incinerates in the dying planet’s atmosphere.
Kirk rushes to stop O’Reilly while Bones attempts to figure out what has driven everyone mad. As they later learn, the water on the planet mutated somehow, becoming more like alcohol, spreading a dangerous effect through sweat that causes a person’s inhibitions to be lowered. But in the meantime, Spock finds himself infected after Bones’s nurse, Christine Chapel (Majel Barrett), confesses her love for him. So, that scene.
Spock finally loses control of his emotions. Nimoy said this episode is what launched full-fledged “Spockmania”.
The uninhibited Nurse Chapel tells Spock that she sees him. She asks if the rumors are true, if the men from Vulcan “treat their women strangely.” She doesn’t believe he would. Where the crew sees just an unfeeling machine, she sees a deep sadness. Spock denies this and rebuffs her advances. “I’m in control of my emotions,” he says before fleeing to the briefing room. In here, he begins sobbing. His cold exterior melts as he falls across the table. He mutters to himself, “I am an officer. An officer. My duty . . .”, barely regaining composure before collapsing again. He grips a computer in front of him, resorting now to the purest form of logic, reciting numbers and equations. Kirk storms in to retrieve him after stopping O’Reilly, needing Spock’s expertise to save the ship. Spock lets it all out as Kirk hounds him, slapping and begging him to focus:
My mother. I could never tell her I loved her. An Earth woman, living on a planet where love, emotion, is bad taste. I respected my father, our customs. I was ashamed of my Earth blood. Jim, when I feel friendship for you, I’m ashamed.
This shame seems to snap him back. Kirk explains that O’Reilly’s tampering has doomed the ship unless they can get a massive power boost out of the planet’s orbit, which he plans to do by mixing the matter and antimatter kept apart in the ship’s engines. Spock approves of Kirk’s plan but notes that it is a long shot as Kirk, now infected after slapping Spock out of his funk, begins to crack under the burden of command.
Kirk declares his love for the ship but decries how it keeps him from real human connection, namely Yeoman Rand. But Kirk and Spock are able to gather themselves and head to the bridge. Bones gives Kirk a serum he worked up to cure the disease. They mix the matter and antimatter to odd results: they travel three days back in time. Inventing time travel on the fly is important but not pressing. “We may risk it someday, Mister Spock,” Kirk says as relaxes in the captain’s chair of his beloved ship.
“Steady as she goes.”
This sequence’s power rests on two brilliant choices. First, Nimoy’s performance. Spock typically moves without a hint of instinct. Nimoy is so measured and controlled with his body that every twitch feels thought out. It feels like you could shoot a gun next to Spock’s ear and he would not flinch until he figured out if the bullet was real. But here, he lets all that go. It always seemed intentional, yes. But the looseness and emotion in the briefing room adds a new layer to that intentionality, a sadness that comes from constant discomfort, a need to be perceived in the right way. It’s a covering of shame.
Second is the way Spock’s reaction contrasts with Kirk’s. Kirk too is covering up something, a buried regret that his love of the ship and command will deny him simpler happiness. Rather than suppress that feeling, as Spock must, Kirk learns to harness it. He notes his feelings for Yeoman Rand but copes by comparing them to the ship. Rather bluntly, he now “know[s] why it’s called she.” He has not been denied love but found it elsewhere. And with that in mind, he steels himself, walks to the bridge, gets the jab, and reassumes command. Kirk’s feelings put him in control. Spock’s make him lose it.
That’s the central character dynamic of Star Trek in a paragraph. Spock, with his cool logic covering an emptiness born from an inability to fully embrace his traditional cultural norms, and Kirk, with his warm, empathetic, decisive hand born from a deep love for those he commands. This dynamic crystallizes here. “The Naked Time” is the show in microcosm. It’s the key that unlocks why these characters remain cultural shorthand almost 60 years later, much more so than the plots or the science fiction lore you can plug into a wiki. Jim’s love for the ship will make him ask for the impossible. Spock’s confliction over his identity will lead him to state the logical, emotionless truth. And the tension of what they both carry will create a sympathy that makes them the closest friends.5
Plus, the episode has George Takei doing this:
That’s probably got something to do with it too.
Stray Thoughts
“The Naked Time” benefits from a more compressed time scale than the preceding episodes. Fairly early into the episode, we learn that there’s a time-limit on the crew’s survival. It ups the pacing and makes for a quick ride.
I laughed out loud at the crew’s increasing exasperation at O’Reilly’s singing. “Please . . . not again.”
I found O’Reilly funny throughout. “Let the women work too, that’s what I say! Universal suffrage!”
Here's the only real video I could find:
Spock to McCoy: “As for my anatomy being different than yours, I’m delighted.”
This episode was the first written by John D.F. Black, who worked on the show throughout the first season. However, he chaffed against Roddenberry’s extensive re-writing on this episode in particular and quit immediately after the last episode on Season One wrapped.6
Nurse Chapel is played by Majel Barrett. Barrett had been cast in the role of “Number One” in the original pilot (“The Cage”) portraying a Spock-like, unfeeling character.7 The network had not been sold on the performance and asked that she be cut or reduced down from co-lead.8 Roddenberry chose to recast her as Chapel instead and she would appear throughout Star Trek media.9 Not coincidentally, her and Roddenberry had a years-long affair that culminated in his divorce and their marriage, which lasted until his death.
George Takei has repeatedly cited this episode as one of his favorites to film. According to Associate Producer Robert Justman, Takei practiced with the rapier on set throughout the week of filming and had to be told to chill with his chasing after different crew members.
Photo Credits
Frozen bunker: https://per-ineptia-ad-astra.tumblr.com/post/179322574146/star-trek-episode-14-the-naked-time
Spock in the room: https://www.douxreviews.com/2010/05/star-trek-naked-time.html
Sulu with the rapier: https://www.startrek.com/article/the-naked-time-50-years-later
Herbert Solow and Robert Justman, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, p. 238.
Id. at p. 236.
Id.
https://nyti.ms/3lr2yuQ
I am not commenting on other interpretations of their relationship here but will do so in a special post if we ever break 50 subscribers. Onward!
Solow and Justman, p. 139.
Id. at p. 39.
Id. at p. 60.
Id. at p. 157.
i love that they casually invent time travel and it's the most minor thing that happens in the episode. a stoic man CRIED!! it doesn't get bigger than that!!
"i want to trap spock in a jar and feed him worms :)" - me and also my ancestors from the 1960's