It's a week late (Damn you E3!!!!) but happy 30th Anniversary Star Trek II
So I was just rewatching Wrath of Khan, and I had a couple of thoughts/questions.
1: Saavik's hair.
For the bulk of the movie, she's wearing her hair tied up tight, in a very stoic and formal way.
Then she catches Kirk in the lift, and she's off duty (out of uniform), and her hair is tied back in a more relaxed manner. Kirk asks if she's done something different with her hair. She says it's still within regulations. McCoy passes her as she's leaving/he's entering, and he asks Kirk if she did something with her hair, and Kirk says he didn't notice.
My thinking here is that one of the major themes in the movie is that Kirk is getting old. He has no game. He tried to compliment a young woman on her hair, and she became worried that a Captain was
upset with her hair. Kirk struck out so hard that he would prefer to pretend the incident didn't even remotely happen.
Buuuutt... at the very end of the movie, during Spock's service and on the bridge after, while Saavik was in uniform, her hair was completely untied. And it's not like her hair was a mess because she was distraught or anything, it was perfectly styled, it's just that she was letting it all hang out.
I'm just wondering if there's another layer of depth or meaning that I'm missing here. Saavik's hair being down mid-movie seems fully explained with one of the major themes of the movie. But does her hair being down at the end of the movie connect somehow? I know there's "It's a funeral. People sometimes wear their hair different", but that seems too easy, like saying that Saavik's hair was down earlier simply because she was off duty. Also, is there any meaning to her hair having three stages, fully-up, partially-relaxed, fully-relaxed?
The only thing I can guess is that at the end of the movie, Kirk feels young again, so he's officially (and retroactively) gotten his game back. Kirk's compliment to Saavik unsettled and puzzled her more than she let on, so she eventually tried to re-create the situation, wearing her hair down to see if she can provoke Kirk into saying something more. And as we all know, Vulcans... like making out during funerals? I have no idea.
2: So human.
When Admiral Kirk is doing his inspection of the Enterprise, Saavik tells Spock that Kirk is nothing like she expected, he's so... human. Saavik has apparently heard legends about The Great Captain Kirk, and she expected him to fill her own ideals, and be practically Vulcan. Spock says "Nobody's perfect." I'm not sure Spock was saying that Kirk's humanity was a negative (it kind of almost seemed like he was making a joke), but I'm pretty sure that's what Saavik would have taken away from the exchange, that Kirk = Human = flawed.
But then at the end of the movie, Kirk famously says that of all the souls he's encountered, Spock's was the most human. And Saavik, already on the edge of emotional breakdown, loses control for a moment and looks away, before regaining her composure. Buuutt... she doesn't look like she's been offended or insulted, she just looks sad.
I'm just wondering what the heck was going on inside her mind at that point. I'm guessing it had something to do with her earlier words with Spock. I don't think this movie is just doing the usual "Human = insult" thing which Star Trek likes to do with Vulcans.
Wow... someone was less popular with those people than Robert Beltran? What'd he do, steal food from the fridge?
IIRC, according to rumor, he came off as arrogant and was occasionally tardy/didn't show up for work early.
