January Meme: Thoughts about Saavik
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 This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1427852.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
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 This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1427852.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.