Every life comes to an end when time demands it. Loss of life is to be mourned but only if the life was wasted.
I’m currently doing a TOS rewatch for the first time in… well, ever, and it’s quite interesting, because I’m making some connections that I would never have thought about in the first time I watched.
The gifset above its from the episode “What Are Little Girls Afraid Of?” - as you probably know, in this episode, Dr. Roger Korby makes an android/clone of Kirk, the one that he is interacting with.
Now, Kirk is doing a very common thing done in several TOS episodes; he’s taunting his mechanical counterpart, saying that eating is a pleasure that he’ll never have. In several episodes he does it with similar creatures; the conflict Man x Machine and the importance of human feelings are elements always present in the narrative of The Original Series.
But what I find really interesting here it’s that when Kirk points out the pleasures of eating, his clone/android immediately replies with a “I will never starve”, and it shuts Kirk up immediately in this argument.
It’s quite interesting, because as we discover a few episodes later, in “The Conscience of The King”, Kirk spent his early teens in a colony called Tarsus IV… that was famous because of the horrific slaughter of governor Kodos, who killed half of the population of that colony because they hadn’t food to feed all the population.
Kirk was in Tarsus IV in this time of crisis. Kirk most certainly know what is to starve, what is like to see someone starve and what hunger can do to people, so he can’t exactly contradict his counterpart’s argument here.
More interesting yet, just after this exchange, he asks Dr. Korby if his counterpart is completely perfect… and more important, if they share memories.
Of course, he then asks the clone/android about Sam to verify this information - I don’t think he would ever gratuitously share this information with a man that was proving himself to be an enemy, or in front of a subordinate (Chapel is in this scene). We saw Kirk’s behavior in The Conscience of The King; he didn’t want to discuss Kodos or Tarsus IV with anyone; he was mad at Spock when he confronted him about it, and not even with his fellow that was in the colony with him in that time he wanted to discuss it (’The authorities closed the book on that case years ago’, ’Kodos is dead. I’m satisfied of that’).
No, Kirk didn’t want to remember that time of his life, but now I can’t help but watch this scene above thinking that he was quite concerned about the possibility of his clone/android counterpart having his Tarsus IV memories.
Charlie: You. I only want to be nice to you. I can give you anything. Just, just tell me.
Janice: I want you to get out.
Enterprise, come in, Enterprise. This is Roger Korby. Repeating, this is Doctor Roger Korby. Do you read me, Enterprise?
H e s h a l l n o t f i n d i t h e r e.
