January Meme: Thoughts about Saavik

[selenak]

Requested by thalia_seawood. I am just the right age to have watched both Star Trek: Wrath of Khan and Star Trek: The Search for Spock in the cinema, to have read the respective tie-in novels (in those days before the internet, younglings, when fanzines were hard to come by). All of of which helped making me love Saavik, who was the first new, movies only character to have that effect on me. (By contrast, Captain Decker in Star Trek: The Slow Motion Picture and Ilya had felt dull, though I appreciated Decker go to be actually correct in his initial argument with Kirk.) Here was Saavik, a female Vulcan (Vulcan-Romulan, if you took the tie-ins into account, to which I'll get in a moment) not in love with either Kirk or Spock, but who was Spock's protegé instead and set on a Starfleet career. She got to be sceptical about Kirk without being punished for it (though some of her assumptions turned out to be wrong, but not in a way that made her look stupid). She wasn't condemned, like Uhura, to "hailing frequencies open, Captain" in the movies. (The tv show had given Uhura somewhat more, though still not as much as the male characters did, but the first and second movies? Not so much.) This all might sound as not so impressive when compared to later tv and films, but back then, it had not been precedented in Star Trek.



And then there were the novels. Unlike, I take it, most of today's novelizations, Vonda McIntyre actually had the liberty to do more than provide a prose version of the script. She gave Saavik a very interesting background - not just that she was in fact a Vulcan/Romulan hybrid, but that she'd spent her early childhood under terrible conditions in a camp on a planet named, unsurprisingly, Hellguard, that she'd been found by Spock there and that she had, unsurprisingly, issues about the Romulan part of her heritage. A later writer, Carolyn Cowles, in her novel The Pandora Principle took this background and and fleshed it out some more. It's probably the one novel that emotionally feels like as much canon to me as on screen canon does. (This includes even McIntyre's noveliizations, because alas, she also invented a romance between Saavik and David Marcus, and neither younger me nor older me is on board with that. I just don't like him, okay?) I loved everything about this novel - Saavik continuing to deal with the after effects of that early childhood, the fact Spock took a year long vacation to live with her and help her adjust after he'd found, that she also gave him something he hadn't had before. (As Cowles put it, if Vulcans expected Spock to be more Vulcan, Humans kept trying to get him to be more human. Saavik, who as a child knows nothing of either Vulcans or Humans, has no such expectations. He's just Spock to her.) I also loved the present day adventure plot the novel offers, which includes a sympathetic trickster Romulan character (thus preventing the Romulans of being presented as uniformely bad and making it clear that adolescent Saavik now trying to be more Vulcan than Vulcan isn't good for her, either), has a growing up arc that includes Saavik getting to confront her past (literally) and manages to give two characters with a stoic code of conduct - Spock and Saavik - still an incredibly emotional climax without this feeling ooc for either.

(Now, in this novel, the type of relationship Spock has with Saavik is strictly a father/daughter one. So you can imagine that I wasn't happy when hearing years later, at a point when I had already mostly stopped reading the novels because now fanfiction was where the internet came in, that the two actually got married in one of them. Boo. Hiss. Thankfully, no more canon than the rest of the novels except for The Pandora Principle and the non-David Marcus related parts of Vonda McIntyre's novels.)

All of which is why basically the only thing I didn't like about Star Trek: The Voyage Home was that Saavik got left behind on Vulcan without as much as a by your leave, and we never heard of her on screen again thereafter. I know Nicholas Meyer planned to include her in The Undiscovered Country and when that got nixed by Gene Roddenberry's protest (which pissed off Meyer because he, Meyer, had after all been the one who created Saavik, not Roddenberry) invented the character Valeris to take her place. With all due respect to Meyer, I'm actually glad and think Roddenberry made the right call there. Because while Saavik getting Valeris' story would have had far more emotional impact - since not just yours truly knew her and cared for her -, I would have felt doubly betrayed: on a "Saavik would never!" level re: murder, and also I would have hated the forced mind meld scene being played out with Saavik even more.

So what's my headcanon for Saavik post Voyage Home? Flexible, though with the new Star Trek: Picard canon I like to think it includes a stint with the sisters of the Order of Perfect Candor. She'd get a kick out of that.

The other days

Comments

[jack]

I remember that novel! I remember being quite gripped by it, but at the time I don't think I considered how much was or wasn't canon outside one book.

[selenak]

Oh, I didn't think of the canonicity or lack of same during my first reading, either.:) That happened only years later...

[jesuswasbatman]

I read elsewhere that Saavik not being in Undiscovered Country because of Roddenberry is a fannish legend - apparently it was because Meyer wanted Kirstie Alley to come back to play her and Alley didn't want to.

[selenak]

Hm, also plausible, but I think I've seen a direct quote from Meyer (back in the day) to "who created Saavik anyway?" effect - in the age of tumblr I'd believe it to be faked first thing, but perhaps naively, I tend to credit print media with a bit more credibility. Then again: it's been so many years that I really can't be sure I'm remembering correctly.

[trobadora]

Yeah, I feel about Saavik pretty much exactly like you do, even though I saw the movies on TV first, not in the cinema. I used to have a huge number of Star Trek tie-ins, but The Pandora Principle is one of the few I kept when I eventually got rid of most of them. (They really filled the spot that easily-accessible fanfic filled later.)

[selenak]

At a guess, the reason why these eaerly novels feel so much like fanfiction is because the guidelines back then were far less strict in what the writers could do...

[trobadora]

True, though even then, they weren't on board with the original version of Killing Time. (But luckily the German translation, which I read at the time, was based on the uncensored version!)

[beatrice_otter]

That's part of it, but the other part of it is that many of the early novels were written by actual fanfiction writers.

[yhlee]

The Pandora Principle was my introduction to Saavik, and I really liked her in it, as well as the book in general. Nostalgia!

[selenak]

Those were the days. :)

[cahn]

Saavik!! <3 I watched II and III and read McIntyre's novelization and Pandora Principle all at around the same time, so everything I feel about Saavik is sort of all mixed up with all of it. And mostly by the last, as I love Pandora Principle SO MUCH that it has sort of taken over my Saavik feels (to the extent that I'd actually forgotten that Hellguard was originally in McIntyre's novelization).

Saavik continuing to deal with the after effects of that early childhood, the fact Spock took a year long vacation to live with her and help her adjust after he'd found, that she also gave him something he hadn't had before... and manages to give two characters with a stoic code of conduct - Spock and Saavik - still an incredibly emotional climax without this feeling ooc for either.

ALL OF THIS. I especially loved the parental relationship between Spock and Saavik, which was both hilarious (the scene where she kidnaps a baby and instructs it in how to be a Vulcan will never be not funny to me) and extremely moving. (In general I loved that about the book, that it managed to be both funny and heartbreaking, which is kind of a feat. If Clowes ever wrote anything else I'd buy it in a heartbeat, but every so often I look and she doesn't seem to ever have.)

So you can imagine that I wasn't happy when hearing years later, at a point when I had already mostly stopped reading the novels because now fanfiction was where the internet came in, that the two actually got married in one of them. Boo. Hiss.

????
WHAT

...Although you know, I had forgotten about the bit where Saavik helps him through pon farr in Search for Spock, which is also kind of... really weird and hurting my brain now (and which I never really thought about while reading the book, because my first read was young enough that I didn't really fully grasp the potential implications of pon farr), so idk.

[selenak]

Oh, I didn't get the pon farr implication in the cinema, either, but in my defense: Amok Time the episode which explains pon farr is one of two cases where German censorship struck when it was first broadcast. (ST was shown in the afternoon as a series for children.) In this case via a completely changed dialogue. So Spock doesn't have pon farr, and he doesn't go back to Vulcan. He has space flu, falls int a delirium during which he has a long and extended hallucination, and then wakes up again to find himself cured. So when I started to get into contact with English speaking fandom, you can imagine I was a tad confused at first about what on earth so many of them were talking about when bringing up this pon farr thing.

Anyway, what I thought was happenening when watching in the cinema was that she calmed him down via Vulcan touch telepathy. It wasn't until later when someone said the explanation why she remained on Vulcan at the start of IV was supposedly because she was pregnant (this never became canon, though, it was apparently just an early script idea) that I belatedly realised the idea had been she helped him through his pon farr via sex. Which isn't great but it does make world building sense in that it's an established thing for Vulcans, and I could see her regard it as something logical and life saving, aided by the fact that Spock-on-Genesis was barely coherent and nothing like "her" Spock.

...which is a very different thing from starting a relationship once Spock is compos mentis again, for both of them. Ah well, like I said: with the above named exceptions, only screen canon is canon. :)

Incidentally, all this talk about Saavik makes me realise the next time I enter a ST ficathon, I'm definitely going to request Saavik meeting Michael Burnham. Somehow. (Canon and the timeline makes it a bit tricky.)

[beatrice_otter]

I love the Pandora Principle book, but the Spock/Saavik Pon Farr thing was canon and the "she's like a daughter to him" was a retcon for the book. In the original script for Episode IV, the reason that Saavik stays on Vulcan is because she's pregnant. So, much as I love Pandora Principle, I can't fault later writers for going with the on-screen relationship as their cue rather than the book (excellent as it is). And I like some of those other books, so. 🤷‍♀️

[lilacsigil]

I read the novelisations long before I saw the movies, and I loved them! Vonda McIntyre does such a great job with subplots and fleshing out the main characters, so of course I adored Saavik. And The Pandora Principle was one of my favourite novels.

I did get the pon farr implication in the movie (and can see it as a logical thing), but I'm glad I didn't know until this post that she was meant to be pregnant from it, because I very much went with the book relationship!