The One With The Whales
A mixed-race evaluation of Spock in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
At the 2024 San Diego Comic Con, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds dropped an “official clip” from the upcoming third season. In it, the crew gets biologically transformed into Vulcans via serum injection and then they repeat comments about how Spock (portrayed by Ethan Peck) is “logically the least” Vulcan among them - since he is both Human and Vulcan. There were mixed reactions to this clip with much of the discourse revolving around bioessentialism and heritage versus culture versus race & ethnicity. Overall, there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about the differences between Spock’s characteristics and what constitutes being biologically Vulcan. For example, things that are considered Spock’s quirks developed by the original series have been co-opted to represent Vulcans as a whole — his repeated use of “fascinating” when presented with a new experience, for one.
In science fiction, aliens are representative of many things but I believe they ultimately represent the unknown — the other. Humanoid aliens, in particular, inhabit that space between human and threat and become allegories for those who live on the fringe of mainstream society. Human enough to be familiar, different enough to be othered — often they are only forgiven or condemned based on their actions.
One such character that has become a beloved representation of this is Spock — particularly the original iteration by Leonard Nimoy. Aside from the physical differences, one of the toughest barriers has to do with communication whether it’s language or cultural customs. It’s a common theme in Star Trek that many of Spock’s crew mates have difficulty communicating with or understanding him.
By examining Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, I want to illustrate that Spock’s differences and his “hybrid” identity as both Human and Vulcan allows him to communicate far more expansively than his Human counterparts and teaches us that we shouldn’t be limited by that which we don’t understand.
Star Trek IV opens with the USS Saratoga being disabled after coming across an alien probe with a devastating signal that baffles those who hear it. It approaches Earth as Starfleet is in the middle of debating the actions and consequences of Kirk and crew over the previous two films, then the probe starts to emit its signal and wreak havoc on the atmosphere. Torrential rain and storms disrupt everything and threaten to destroy the planet. What could this probe want? How can they communicate with it?
Meanwhile, Kirk’s crew is recuperating on Vulcan — Spock’s home planet — which is an arid, desert world whose people rule and live by logic and little else. Spock is busy finding himself again. After all, he died in Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan and went through an expedited rebirth and regrowth on a volatile mayfly of a planet in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Surrounded by multiple computers, he answers rapid fire history and math questions with ease and his beloved cool demeanor, until he is asked one simple question:
“How do you feel?”
On my last day of living in Seoul, after living there for almost two years, I took a taxi to Seoul Station so I wouldn’t miss my train. The taxi driver told me I had a very good speaking accent, so I told him that I was half-Korean.
“Wow, you look like a total foreigner.”
I had these interactions all the time, no matter where I was. In Korea, however, they would dismiss me as a white foreigner until I spoke or appealed to them by telling them my background. One older lady asked if I got plastic surgery, not quite understanding that I was mixed. Another woman at a restaurant took my hand and said my skin looked “expensive”.
In the States or on any of the military bases where I was raised, it was often other children who would ask me one question when they found out I was Korean —
“North or South?”
“How do you feel?”
Spock does not understand the question, since he finds it irrelevant for re-training his mind. Spock’s Human mother, Amanda, tells him that his feelings were inherited through her — so they will surface and therefore are relevant. Spock ultimately concedes that he cannot wait for these “feelings” on Vulcan, since he must go to Earth to offer testimony. She believes it’s to testify for his friends but he refutes that it was simply because he was present for what the crew is on trial for. Before he leaves, she leaves him with something to consider: What was the reason for the crew to rescue him at great cost to themselves?
Thus, we set the stage for Spock’s rediscovery of his own humanity. After all, he cannot wait to discover it on his father’s home planet that rigidly shaped him according to Vulcan standards. To emphasize that he is on a spiritual journey, he is dressed apart from his crew mates who don their uniforms in something akin to a robe. In all white, this is symbolic of death in some cultures and purity in other’s. Or simply, the blank white is simply an uncertain blankness that plagues him since his revival. “Not all there,” as one character points out.
Amanda has brought up her concerns about his demeanor in the past. In the Original Series episode Journey to Babel, she confesses that she believes the logical Vulcan way of living is superior to Earth, but has trouble reconciling that her son seems to completely detach himself from his humanity. In a conversation with Kirk, she implies that his upbringing was difficult because he was “neither Human nor Vulcan, at home nowhere except Starfleet”. He was at home only when he could escape the confines of the society that he was raised in and identifies with. He was at home only among the vastness of space.
Spock is often interrogated by the surrounding characters when it comes to his reactions or lack thereof. The most vocal being Dr. Leonard McCoy (aka “Bones”) who often clashes with Spock and tries to force out, what McCoy believes to be, the proper response. He is often derogatory, but finds genuine delight when he learns about things that seem contrary to Spock’s nature — like finding out he had a pet “teddy bear” when he was a child.
Perhaps McCoy’s struggle has to do with Spock’s ability to pass as fully human, should the need arise — and the need does arise later in The Voyage Home, when they come to the conclusion that Spock should hide his alien qualities so as to blend in with the humans of a 1980s San Francisco. This wasn’t the first time Spock’s been asked to mask his identity or re-define it for “humans of the past”. In the episode The City on the Edge of Forever, Kirk dubiously suggests that Spock is “obviously Chinese” and his pointed ears are the result of getting his head caught “in a mechanical rice picker”. (I suppose this wasn’t too far of a leap for the writer to make when the foundation shade for Spock’s character was an apparent mix of the tones “Flesh” and “Chinese Yellow” to give him an ever-so-different pallor to his fully human crewmates.) However, for The Voyage Home, they opted to just wrap a strip of cloth around his head and call it a day. In these ways, Spock can quite easily pass as human with just a few modifications.
What is also interesting is that Spock passes as fully Vulcan, too. There are not too many differences — cosmetically — between Humans and Vulcans. Their differences lie within the self and within their society. Passing gives Spock the ability to not only observe and reflect on Human versus Vulcan behaviors, but allows the viewer to observe and reflect through Spock as well. While he is otherized, he is still familiar. What then can we learn from a character whose narrative purpose is to reflect on the pitfalls and strengths of humanity?
At the end of the seventh grade when everyone was ready for our summer break to begin, we passed our yearbooks around to be signed and for notes to be written: HAGS, See you next year, and for the closer companions — longer letters, robust sentiments. One acquaintance, a large White football player, walked away after handing me back my yearbook. He had written:
Me ruv you rong time.
I would only find out years later that he was quoting Full Metal Jacket, where a Vietnamese sex worker propositions two American soldiers. When I saw the scene, I remembered his note that baffled me at the time. I did not realize that he was being racist — I had mostly passed as White for much of my life at that point. At that moment, the past was being exposed with a harsh light. I was not immune to racism and prejudice nor was I even eking by without outwardly experiencing it, it just presented itself in different ways. Microaggressions and out-of-touch comments that left me feeling uneasy, but nothing that justified “acting” on:
A middle school teacher telling me I looked “off-white” when she found out I was mixed, kids asking if I’d been to North Korea, a White relative’s recollection of when she ate spicy food and accused my Asian mother of poisoning her, another White relative telling me to use a spoon and not finish my cereal from the bowl directly because “we live in America”, a former friend pulling her eyelids taut with her fingers and asking why I didn’t look like that, and more, and more, and more.
Often, the moments passed by with no pushback. Silence as a response.
All the world treated me as if I were lacking or a little bit alien and it never landed — until I was told of their intent. Clunky and awkward social interactions hit me softly at first and only later did I find any bruises. Treated neither Asian, nor White — at home nowhere except…
As Spock and the Enterprise crew travel back to Earth to stand trial, McCoy attempts to question Spock about dying. Having died in Wrath of Khan, Spock now knows death intimately. Spock rebuffs him by simply saying they have no common frame of reference, so it would be impossible to communicate what happened. An echo of much of their interactions as characters, the idea of not being able to adequately communicate through language alone comes up immediately again —
Earth has sent a distress call since a massive probe with an unknown signal is devastating the planet. Spock deduces that “[o]nly human arrogance would assume the message must be meant for man” and leads the crew to look for other forms of life that would communicate with whatever “language” was being broadcast. They eventually land on the humpback whale — a “hybrid” creature whose lungs are built for the land while its body is built for the sea.
The only problem is that, in the film, the whales have been hunted to extinction. While they would be able to replicate the sound of a humpback whale, they would not know how to use the language to clearly state their intentions or understand the probe at all. They do not share a common frame of reference. It is again Spock who comes to that conclusion and they come to the only conclusion to save Earth - travel through time to find some humpback whales to bring to the future. It could be argued that Spock’s mixed identity encompasses not just “humanoid beings” but Vulcan and Earth lifeforms, therefore he’s able to think outside of a human-centric solution to the problem plaguing Earth and identify with the humpback whales as fellow Earthlings.
As Mya Worrell observes —
“Thanks to his Vulcan abilities, he’s able to forge a connection with a sentient earth species who are and were deeply rooted in the ecology and fabric of Earth.”
When Kirk and Spock find a pair of humpback whales (George and Gracie) at a Cetacean Institute, Spock hops into the water to mind meld with Gracie. Using this bridge of communication, unique to Vulcans, he is able to communicate their intentions while also learning about Gracie. Kirk and Dr. Gillian Taylor, who works at the Institute, confront him. Spock warns Kirk that “assuming” that the Enterprise crew has authority to do whatever they please with the whales is just as bad as “those who caused their extinction”. Similarly, Dr. Gillian Taylor’s concerns for George and Gracie — who out of love — lead her to refer to the endangered humpbacks whales as her whales. This is refuted by Spock who speaks on their behalf — “They like you very much, but they are not the hell your whales”. Succinctly, Spock lays out that they are autonomous creatures who need assistance, but do not exist for the needs of humans.
Despite the intentions of authority figures, even goodwill, elements of infantilization and a general sense that they know best is limited by their conditions and point-of-view. Often, oppressed people or creatures know exactly what they need in order to survive and thrive — it is only an adequate form of communication that they lack and their surrounding peers ability (or inability) to try and understand them. Spock often struggles to understand the motives or speech of his peers, finding solutions via other methods of communication — like the mind meld or just putting into action whatever logical solution he’s come up with.
Lack of understanding and being unwilling to attempt to understand due to communication issues promotes only the status quo and solidifies denial of another way of life.
In The Voyage Home, Spock is in the unique position of relating and successfully communicating to the “hybrid” character while also being the character where the viewer reevaluates their own biases. He is still finding his answer to the “illogical” question he’s been asked about feelings. Until he accepts and does not deny his human side, he will never be fully reborn.
When Kirk feels that they are out of time and options, Spock simply states that their “mission” is likely to fail. In a rare outburst against his friend, Kirk asks if his mixed race Human and Vulcan friend has “any goddamn feelings” about the end of every life on Earth. Leonard Nimoy plays Spock extremely stoic here, remaining still and silent — his thoughts to be interpreted by the viewer.
Another notable instance within the films where Spock moves in silence is when he makes the decision to sacrifice himself in Wrath of Khan. His face, unmoved, is unseen by other characters while the viewer is left to try and discern what Spock has realized for himself.
What can be gleaned by silence as a response? As a character, Spock usually uses silence as a “generative” space. In Wrath of Khan, he has taken in all of the information that the viewer has, too, and the viewer watches as he acts upon his internal conclusions. In The Voyage Home, he has been confronted by one of his closest companions about his humanity — particularly his feelings — which was an important question for the computers on Vulcan to test him on:
“How do you feel?”
Truthfully, I personally have trouble with the idea of “passing as white”. Outside of surviving in a violent world — What is the benefit of saying to the world that I sometimes, depending on the context, pass as white?
Regardless of whether I “pass” or not — my adherence to a hostile world’s standards serves no-one but an oppressor who would rather I didn’t exist as I am. The exoticization, fetishization, and otherization exists and is inflicted regardless of whether I try to blend in. No matter where I go, I am either “more” or “less” depending on who surrounds me. Yet, that is something that was projected onto me.
In a world that is hostile to me and my loved ones, why would I desire to live by its rules? Why would I dream of thriving within its boundaries?
George and Gracie are able to return home simply due to the solidarity of their allies. The Enterprise crew prevents their death by hunters and successfully transport them to the future so that they can save their Earth. By saving them, they save the world.
When George and Gracie make contact with the alien probe, seconds after they are released into the ocean — there is a little over two minutes of uninterrupted conversation between the probe and the whales with the result being that the probe leaves and Earth is saved. There is no real translation or even a hokey attempt to “translate” the alien exchange. Some things are not meant to be understood.
That only means that we cannot be swayed by fear of the unknown and should try, instead, to make this world hospitable and welcoming for all. As Kirk put it, moments before: “You know, it’s ironic, when man was killing these creatures, he was destroying his future.”
Now that his “rebirth” is complete with not only saving his humanity but all of humanity, he has changed out of his “spiritual uniform” of the white robe and dons his Starfleet uniform once more. If what we wear is reflective of our identity, this is one visual indication that he has returned to where he feels most at home.
After a triumphant moment where the Enterprise crew’s actions are forgiven based on saving the Earth, Spock meets with his father who is on his way back to Vulcan. Even still, there is a palpable distance between father and son. They can never fully understand the other, yet it doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other. When asked if he has a message for his mother, he replies:
“Tell her I feel fine.”
Special thanks to Mya Worrell and Hayeon Chun for providing invaluable and thoughtful feedback and insight.