The Saddest Moments Of Star Trek TOS Belonged To "throwaway" Characters

The saddest moments of Star Trek TOS belonged to "throwaway" characters

They all deserved better.

1. Lieutenant Riley - Conscience of the King

Faced with the chance to kill the man who once ordered the executions of thousands (including his family) in the wake of a famine, Riley's chance is stripped from him and he is ordered to stand down.

The Saddest Moments Of Star Trek TOS Belonged To "throwaway" Characters

This is also a devastating moment for the captain himself as the only other remaining survivor of the colony. Kirk stops Riley's drastic actions, which, although damning, were perhaps his only chance of overcoming the guilt of having once been selected to live while others were sent to death.

Both enter a confrontation regarding their shared past, but neither heal.

2. Janice Rand - The Enemy Within

Although it was an "evil extension" of Kirk who perpetrated the assault on Janice Rand in her own room, at this point she only had reason to believe that the assailant was Kirk himself.

Rand is forced to testify with Kirk (the man she thought she loved, a captain with both power and position over her, an officer flanked by his two closest allies, and a man whose proximity in the same ship could endanger her after the testimony) standing over her. Rand even admits to "not wanting to get him into trouble", highlighting how closely her struggle mirrors the victims of everyday workplace violence against women.

What may even be worse are the blatant intimidation tactics Kirk employs throughout the scene. Although he knows he didn't do it (and perhaps suspects foul play), Kirk makes no attempt to empathize with the testimonies of Rand and Fisher regarding what they saw, and he even hints at the danger of them conspiring against a man of his rank.

Rand endured constant objectification in each of her appearances in the series, and would go on to be entirely forgotten after its first season. (Though she would return in The Motion Picture.)

3. Lieutenant "Joey" - The Naked Time

Joey delivered perhaps the most poignant monologue of the series, just moments before his impending death. Though Joey's inhibitions were altered by the infection that would soon kill him, we see later in the episode that the infection forces people express existing wants and needs. Therefore, real are his pleas begging to understand why humanity should be in space at all when it has merely taken and taken... leaving only destruction in its wake and its own to die.

Not only did he bare his own insecurities, Joey also established a central conflict of the entire series: can a utopian vision of the future include acts like leaving six people to waste away on an empty planet?

Tragically, Joey couldn't bear the burden of this conflict alone (no one else had or would mention this guilt at any point in the series) and though his death was prompted by the infection, it only acted as a catalyst for what was truly a su*c*de.

McCoy ruled in the autopsy that Joey might have survived, but he simply gave up fighting.

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Imagine my shock as a neurodivergent teen when I first realized that using large vocabulary and eloquent speech doesn't make you less likely to be misinterpreted, rather it adds an entirely new layer of misinterpretation I had never even realized existed in the form of people thinking you're being snobbish or condescending when you're just trying to be specific

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obsessed with the girl who says that if you lie on the floor long enough you will start to cry and shake because your body is 'releasing excess cortisol' like i just think you might be going through something girl

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springloadedcoffin

3 years ago

ruthven is so messy he nursed aubrey back to health after the death of his love for weeks and then got shot and acted like he was gonna die to make sure aburey didn’t tell anyone about him for a year and a day and then went to england and started mackin on his sister while everyone thought he was crazy and THEN got marreid to her on the LAST DAY of his oath and immediately fled the country with his new bride. he could have just killed him but instead he was like lemme make a memory out of this

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springloadedcoffin

1 year ago

Hi, i’m a new tumblr user and i’m using the mobile app, and i just came across your “tumblr how to” post and it’s super helpful so thank you so much. I wanted to ask about something, sometimes when people color their words like this they do other stuff like add more than one color to the same word hut not like this, the colors blend together. So i wanted to know if there’s a way to do this on app bc i don’t have a laptop. English isn’t my first language so sorry if my explanation is vague. Thank you, hope you have a good day!!

Tumblr ‘How To’s

Thank you! I’m happy to know that I could help. And don’t worry, you explained it just fine. (English isn’t my first language either btw)

I didn’t know how to do this so I searched about it. The unfortunate thing is that in order to do this, the ‘text editor’ of post needs to be changed from ‘Rich Text’ to ‘HTML’. And while this change can easily be done on a laptop, there’s no way to do it neither on the mobile Tumblr app nor on Chrome browser on mobile. And it sucks!

Apparently this option to change the text editor used to be available on mobile, but the recent Tumblr updates have discarded that feature for some reason. So now while posting/editing posts through mobile (whether on app or browser), the only text editor available is ‘Rich Text’, which can change colours of letters like you did in your ask but it CANNOT make them blend in together like in a gradient.

Just putting this out there:

I found this amazing and super easy tutorial by @kylos . It’s made for laptop users but it’s easy to follow on mobile too. I tried it myself and it worked more than fine for most of the steps. But as I said, since we can’t access ‘HTML’ text editor on mobile, we can’t implement this to the last step.

I tried finding more ways to do it, but since Rich Text doesn’t offer gradients and HTML just isn’t available on mobile, there’s really no way about it. I’m sorry I couldn’t help this time :(

In case I stumble upon a solution for this -which I think is highly unlikely but still, I’ll add the new link in my masterlist)

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springloadedcoffin

2 months ago