I really hope most people are aware of why Amok Time was made in the first place
I should start off by saying that Star Trek was made with a female audience in mind. It’s why Captain Kirk’s shirt rips and why he’s shirtless a lot, since the makers of the show were expecting to draw in a female audience with the good looks of William Shatner. Star Trek was even considered fake sci fi for girls by most male sci fi fans.
I have to mention that first because the show was banking on the female audience to fawn over Captain Kirk, and many of the women watching did, but they soon realized that even more women were fawning over Spock. When the show got renewed for a second season, they wanted to make sure they could retain the same female audience, most importantly the Spock fangirls, so they decided to treat their female audience with Amok Time.
Every single decision involved in the plot of the episode was made with “how do we give these ladies what they want without hurting his likability?”. Pon Farr was made up so Spock would have a reason to act super horny while still being the same alien everyone knew and love, T’Pring leaving Spock while Spock was planning on being loyal to her to show off how loyal he is to romantic partners, and his Pon Farr being cured without actually having sex was to keep him single.
TL;DR Amok Time was made for straight girl wank bank but instead they created the K/S community
I don’t think it was inadvertent at all – Theodore Sturgeon, the writer of Amok Time, was openly gay and was known for constantly trying to slip gay shit past the censors. He also wrote the backrub scene and lots of other k/s moments. Lgbt people in the 60s wanted to see themselves represented in media just as much as we do, but because of censorship laws it all had to be subtextual.
I’d like to look at this from another angle, because I think there’s more to it than Sturgeon was gay, therefore the gay subtext.
At the time Trek was airing, CBS thought of it as a kids’ show and boys were assumed to be the primary audience of Sci-Fi. In 1967 – 1969 girls were not thought of as being interested in Sci-Fi for its own sake (no matter how wrong media producers were about that). Girls were the half of the demographic that had to be brought in by “girl things”, e.g., fashion and romance and cute (non-threateningly good looking) male characters. An example would be the inclusion of Chekov with his Monkees haircut during the second season.
So yes, when it was discovered that there was actually a female demographic gravitating to the show on its own, for its own reasons (e.g., Spock, the dynamic between Spock & Kirk), then Roddenberry, a very clever man, decided to exploit these things for all they were worth.
One of the best and most time-honored ways of doing this is through the “Are They Or Aren’t They (Lovers)?” question (aka the Bromance), primarily of interest (so it is assumed) to the female audience. What makes the question work is that it’s always hinted at but never, ever answered. If you answer the question, you resolve the undercurrent of sexual tension and you kill the show (or it must become another kind of show).
It is also something that Theodore Sturgeon, a well-established science fiction writer at the time “Amok Time” was written, would have known. He would also have known where to look for a story idea that would really grab the audience, not with fistfights, rubber monsters or planet-devouring robots, but with the question: What do I (and the rest of the audience) most want to see? The answer is always the forbidden, the thing held back, kept under wraps.
“Amok Time” and Pon Farr is one of the best examples of “Are They Or Aren’t They?” because the engine that drives the story is that strong undercurrent of unresolved sexual tension (aka gay subtext). At the time the show aired, few in the audience would have spotted that subtext, which was how they got away with it, but the female and gay contingent would certainly have felt its effects. When a show brushes close to your half-conscious fantasies, it is absolutely electrifying, though you may not be able to explain exactly why.
Sturgeon headed straight for the forbidden: to strip Spock emotionally naked. Pon Farr was the vehicle with which to do it. Show after show (and Nimoy himself, as he developed the character) gave the female audience teasing little hints at the inner Spock, the smouldering interior landscape, the potentially barbaric sexual and emotional inner being he was keeping hold of with an iron fist. “Amok Time” is an emotional striptease that pays off by symbolically answering Are They Or Aren’t They?
In writing, and this includes television writing, when you have written a fight scene, particularly one that is cathartic, you should examine it with the same critical eye as you would a sex scene. This is because in terms of character development, fight scenes and sex scenes do the same thing: they strip the character bare by showing you their “inner animal”, their deepest needs, desires and fears. This is something else Sturgeon would have known. It is the reason Pon Farr is structured to only have two possible resolutions: sex or a fight (or denied either, death). So when Spock finally does explode, how does it happen? A fight to the death not with Stonn, his actual rival for T’Pring, but with Kirk (with the acknowledgment that Spock didn’t choose Kirk for this purpose, but Sturgeon, the writer did).
On an emotional and symbolic level, the answer to Are They Or Aren’t They is a resounding YES, THEY ARE. On a conscious, visual level, the answer remains ambiguous, a hint, subtext, thus keeping the unresolved sexual tension intact. However physical the fight, the consummation remains emotional only, and thus the show, and the chemistry between Kirk & Spock, goes on. It’s an elegant solution to a big problem: How can you give the audience what it wants, without really giving them what they want and destroying the show (as it would have been at that time)?
So IMO, Pon Farr was not quite so deliberately created to give Trek a hefty dose of gay subtext, nor is that subtext just an accidental byproduct. It’s a great writer weaving all of that together to make a very compelling story.
damn….
Just one last thing, Sturgeon won a “Gaylactic Spectrum Award” (given to LGBT+ science fiction/fantasy novels and short stories) for a piece he wrote called The World Well Lost. It’s about humans who discover a pair of male aliens who are deeply, intrinsically in love, kinda like Spock and Jim ☺️
(Also, I don’t believe Sturgeon was gay, I believe he was actually bisexual or sexually fluid, but I’ll have to check because I don’t know for sure.)
If you can hear them through the wall, then they can hear you too! Turn this baby all the way up and ruin their night the way they have ruined so many of yours. Assholes.
🍆 The Lonely Goatherd / The Sound of Music 🍆 Party Rock Anthem / The Chipmunks 🍆 What’s New Pussycat? / Tom Jones 🍆 Cotton Eye Joe / Rednex 🍆 There’s No One Quite Like Grandma / St. Winifred’s School Choir 🍆 Priests of Sodom / Cannibal Corpse 🍆 Popozão (A Cappella) / Kevin Federline 🍆 Gary, Indiana / The Music Man 🍆 The Hampster Dance Song 🍆 Stars and Stripes Forever / John Philip Sousa 🍆 What Does The Fox Say? / Kidz Bop 🍆 Achy Breaky Heart / Billy Ray Cyrus 🍆 The Anvil Chorus from “Il Trovatore” 🍆 Macarena (Bayside Boys Remix) / Los Del Rio 🍆 Prologue (Tradition) / Fiddler on the Roof 🍆 William Tell Overture 🍆 All By Myself / Céline Dion 🍆 It’s a Small World 🍆 I Just Had Sex / Lonely Island
I have a feeling I’d need this list if I lived next door to @sarabeth72
my favorite thing i’ve learned in college is that way back in ancient china there was this poet/philosopher guy who wrote this whole pretentious poem about how enlightened he was that was like “the eight winds cannot move me” blahblahblah and he was really proud of it so he sent it to his friend who lived across the lake and then his friend sends it back and just writes “FART” (or the ancient Chinese equivalent) on it and he was SO MAD he travels across the lake to chew his friend out and when he gets there his friend says “wow. the eight winds cannot move you, but one fart sends you across the lake”
i googled this bc i desperately wanted this to be real, and guess what…it is.
the dude’s name was su dongpo (also known as su shi). his original poem went like this:
稽首天中天，
毫光照大千，
八風吹不動，
端坐紫金蓮
(Humbly bowed my head below all skies Minutest lights shine through my deepest bounds Immovable by strong winds from eight sides Upon purplish gold lotus I seated straightly by the low mound) (x)
on which his friend wrote “放屁” (fart, literally), and you know the rest.
Thank you so very much! This piece was inspired by one of my favorite fics called Fimbulwinter by the most amazing @illwynd! If you haven’t yet check it out!
Loki is the Philosopher King 