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The Original Series
Captain James T. Kirk
"Now look at me. Now look at my hair. Now look at me. I'm on a horse."
The greatest there was, the greatest there is, and the greatest there ever will be. — and inspiration behind Ben Sisko's management style. Single-handedly saved Earth several times under less-than-optimal situations. Known as something of a taskmaster aboard the NCC-1701, chasing tail and ruthlessly drilling any scrubs who don't measure up. His 'promotion' to desk jockey coincided with Starfleet's last gasp of competency for well over 100 years.
- 20% More Awesome: Bruce Lee squared + Jack Bauer cubed + Chuck Norris to the awesometh power. (The Motion Picture)
- The Ace: Jokes that if Generations is taken as the sole evidence in the Kirk vs Picard debate... Kirk wins. Kirk is also the only person thus far to be directly compared with The Sisko and come out ahead (in "Trials and Tribble-ations").
- Broken Ace: His character arc throughout the films featuring The Original Series crew (barring The Final Frontier) tends to feature this.
- Awesome Ego: It doesn't take long for Kirk to get fed up with the original beige uniforms and demand a cool color for himself... like green! He continues to mull over this during "Where No Man Has Gone Before", demanding that Starfleet throw in a couple miniskirts in the bargain.
- Exact Words: The audience's demand that "Kirk should die on The Bridge!" was met with a hearty "No problem!"
- Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Threatens a badly traumatized Cdre. Decker:Kirk: My god, man, is that a uniform or a little pink dress? Grow a dick and make your report already.
Bones: Captain, he's undergone severe trauma—
Kirk: Severe trauma is what I'm going to do to him with this pipe unless he stops hiding under his blanket and talks! - Manly Man: If Chuck considers an unparalleled badass such as The Sisko to be a man's man, then the guy The Sisko defers to is a man's man's man.Chuck: Well, Kirk is the only man in history to win the Olympic Gold Medal and Nobel Prize in cunnilingus.
- Testosterone Poisoning: Only seconds (from his perspective) after arriving in the Nexus, Kirk's ultimate fantasy starts with him immediately grabbing a double-headed axe and begin chopping firewood.
- A prime motivator for him becoming Captain was to invoke Droit du seigneur with newlywed women. ("Balance of Terror")
- Simply passing Kirk in a corridor may be grounds for an impromptu wrestling match. Loser buys the shots. ("Journey to Babel")
- For Kirk, a perfect vacation and an average workday are indistinguishable. Each involves lots of womanizing, and lots of fistfights. ("Shore Leave")
- Really Gets Around: Apparently has an 11-1 record in paternity suits. ("The Changeling")
- Too Kinky to Torture: In "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", Kirk helpfully monologues, "Arousal Level set to 7," when he eyeballs an android girl. Then she slaps him. "Make that 8."
Commander Spock
- Bizarre Alien Biology: In "Amok Time" there is the famous scene of Spock chasing Nurse Chapel out of his quarters and hurling the bowl of Vulcan Plomeek soup she had thoughtfully made for him at the corridor wall. Chuck expands on how the scene could be improved if Scotty were to come walking down the corridor and see the big purple mess oozing down the wall. Asking what the hell that is, he gets a reply from Kirk that Spock is "having some trouble with pent-up sexual urges". Scotty looks at the purple slime, takes a big swig from the flask he always carries and moves on...
- Passive-Aggressive Kombat: He has an ongoing spat with the Guardian of Forever. Really. ("City on the Edge of Forever", "Yesteryear")Guardian: I hear all, except those who aren't really here anymore.
Spock: Yes, I'm not here, which means that 'nobody' will be beating your know-it-all ass with a sledgehammer if you don't shut up and help me.
Doctor Leonard "Bones" McCoy
"We only get into this job to pump ourselves full of drugs you people have never even heard of!"
The ships' resident pusher, a drunkard (and a creeping heroin addict to boot) in the midst of a slow motion breakdown. His favorite 'patient' seems to be himself.
- The Alcoholic: While McCoy showed some signs of this in canon, Chuck likes to turn it up to eleven for laughs. ("The Conscience of the King")"I'm off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Booze!"
- It's not helped with his first scene in "The Conscience of the King". McCoy is shown drinking from a large bottle of Saurian brandy in Sickbay...while on duty. Bones even notes to Spock that it's been a quiet day for him thus giving him an opportunity to relax a bit. Even though a medical emergency could happen anytime on the Enterprise. And when Spock declines a drink, Bones asks him not to judge him...
- The Casanova: Dr. McCoy is quietly one of the biggest players on the ship. ("The Time Trap," "For the World is Hollow, and I Have Touched the Sky")
- Dr. Feelgood: Bones' remedies for problems seems to revolve around giving his patients a prescription of heavy drugs, booze, or taking them to strip clubs. He is either insane, a drug addict, or the best damn Doctor in Starfleet!Come with me and you'll be
In a world of pure intoxication!
Take a hit and you'll see
That your mind has taken a vacation!- Tends to be his own biggest patient. To the point that he immediately, and without question, swallows pills handed to him by a twitchy, raving old man.
- Drowning My Sorrows: Bones is self-destructive to the point of being suicidal. This contributes to his rampant alcoholism, which the rest of the crew is completely indifferent to.Dr. McCoy: Jim, I drink because I'm afraid to kill myself quickly.
Kirk: Get back to work, Bones. - No-Sell: A poison that kills the entire adult population of a colony doesn't do squat to Bones, what with everything else in his system already. ("And The Children Shall Lead")
- Worst Aid: The nickname "Bones" is definitely apt. In "Spock's Brain", he can't seem to decide if Spock's body will survive on life-support or not. Feeling he has to do something to justify his paycheck, he improvises a novel treatment:Dr. McCoy: Wasn't really sure how to treat having no brain, so I put a damp rag on his head. That's how you treat nosebleeds, but I figured what the hell, it couldn't hurt.
Kirk: Has it helped?
McCoy: Uh, no.- Well, Bones does tend to say, "He's dead Jim" or variations of the phrase an awful lot.
Lt. Commander Montgomery "Scotty" Scott
Perennially-hungover engineer who believes strongly in the hair of the dog.
- The Alcoholic: Both Scotty and Bones are horrified when they realize that their secret stashes of booze don't exist in the mirror universe.
- Commander Contrarian: Scotty's immediate reaction to being asked or told to do anything by Captain Kirk is to immediately insist it cannot be done... even if it's something like changing a lightbulb. He then goes and does it anyway.Scotty: But Captain! It'll take fourteen good men twelve hours just to find the right screwdriver head to get the panel off!
- Drunken Master:
- Scotty is frequently either drunk or high during most TOS and the later films. (WoK)
- The Khitomer Conspiracy is thwarted by Scotty detecting the sound of blood-stained clothes rattling inside of an air vent. Because when it comes to oversensitive ears, even Ferengi can't top a hungover Scotsman. (Star Trek VI)
- The crew of Voyager once tried to recreate the transporter suspension trick that kept him alive for 70+ years, only to nearly kill everyone they were trying to save after only a few minutes. Had Scotty been there, he would have just shook his head, taken a belt of Scotch, and fixed the whole thing with a coat hanger.
- While a sober Scotty can't fight off two Brainwashed and Crazy Red Shirts, Chuck is quite convinced that if he was in his element — that is, if he was down at the pub with a pint glass in one hand and pool cue in the other — he could easily beat up at least half-a-dozen of them. ("And The Children Shall Lead")
- I Need a Freaking Drink: Scotty drinks mostly to deal with the mind-bending strangeness that comes with working on the Enterprise; or, occasionally, to deal with the general incompetence of his fellow Starfleet officers.Chuck: ...I can see him coming up the hallway, spotting this huge, purple stain all over the wall; demanding to know what the hell happened. And when he's told that, well, Spock's just had serious repressed sexual drives, but don't worry, he's found release, now, he's going to be fine. Then, Scotty looks at that stain again, shakes his head, pulls out his flask, and tries to drink the memory away. ("Amok Time")
- Military Moonshiner: Chuck jokes that he has stills hidden all over Engineering. ("Once Upon a Planet")
- So, that's why J.J. Abrams' first reboot had the Engineering scenes filmed in a brewery!
- Significant Name Overlap: Sort of. Chuck posits that Lt. Montgomery, a Red Shirt in The Doomsday Machine, has the full name of "Scott Montgomery", leading to lots of confusion aboard the Enterprise.
- Violent Glaswegian: How Scotty was able to shrug off Sybok's feel-good rays. That Tony Robbins crap isn't gonna work on a Scotsman. ( Star Trek V)
Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu
- Ambiguously Gay: While George Takei wouldn't come out until nearly forty years later, the signs are definitely there.(on being propositioned by one of the female hippies in "The Way to Eden"):
Sulu: How do you know what I want?
Chuck: It's the grin that sells it.- Chuck later commented that he tries to avoid making these kinds of jokes unless they are really Hilarious in Hindsight, such as the above one, or in another example, when Sulu and Kirk talks about being "inscrutable" in a way that makes it sound suspiciously much like "inscrutable" is 23rd Century slang for "homosexual" (The Infinite Vulcan).Kirk: And by the way Mr. Sulu; any way of teaching me that body throw? Could come in handy some time.
Sulu: I don't know, sir. It isn't just physical, you know, you have to be... inscrutable.
Kirk: "Inscrutable"? Sulu... You're the most scrutable man I know!
Sulu: (winks)
- Chuck later commented that he tries to avoid making these kinds of jokes unless they are really Hilarious in Hindsight, such as the above one, or in another example, when Sulu and Kirk talks about being "inscrutable" in a way that makes it sound suspiciously much like "inscrutable" is 23rd Century slang for "homosexual" (The Infinite Vulcan).
- Gun Nut: Emphasis on nut. Seeing nothing strange about finding a loaded antique revolver in perfect working order on an uninhabited planet, Sulu immediately begins firing it wildly into the air.
Nurse Christine Chapel
- Lethal Chef: Chapel is the worst cook in the entire fleet — her attempts at even the simplest dishes resulting in culinary monstrosities that utterly defy logic. One of Spock's outbursts in "Amok Time" was, in reality, a perfectly reasonable reaction to being served bright purple "cream of mushroom" soup. She's also well-known for her green steak, and cobalt-blue spaghetti.
Thrust Barcode (Security Guards from TOS Films)
- Genre Refugee: A classic Raygun Gothic sci-fi hero in the world of Star Trek.
- Memetic Badass: Donned a thruster suit and set off to single-handedly rescue Kirk and McCoy in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
- Arch-Enemy: His efforts were foiled by an attack from Broken Umbrella Pimp and Wicker Supersize.
Gary Seven from "Assignment: Earth"
- Failure Hero: In trying to save humanity, Gary's only success comes from preventing the disaster that he caused.
- Interspecies Romance: After the reveal that Isis can shapeshift into a woman, Chuck lampshades the creepy subtext of Gary stroking her cat form in various scenes throughout the episode.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: At the height of the Cold War, Gary gives a tactical advantage to the Russians by sabotaging the Americans attempt to launch their own orbital nuclear platform, causing the launch to veer off course and head straight to the heart of Asia, putting all countries on alert and preparing possible retaliatory strikes. As a result of this string of incompetence, Gary nearly kicks off World War III a century early.
Kelvin Timeline
Captain James T. Kirk
- Boldly Coming: With the Original Series character's tenancy toward this taken up to eleven. Points out that there's less than 30 seconds of movie time between his having sex with two Caitians, and his shamelessly ogling two other female Starfleet officers.Chuck: I know Kirk's a lady's man, but I was kind of hoping he wouldn't seem like he's about to shout "Vegas, baby! Vegas!"
- Casanova Wannabe: To say this guy lacks tact around women would be putting it mildly; on top of sending dick picks to Carol Marcus, the guy goes out of his way to openly stare at her half-naked body with all the charm and subtlety of a date rapist without the rohypnol — and after being told very pointedly not to look at her.
- Character Development: In Star Trek Beyond, he's leaps and bounds more competent, clever, and noble, to the point where you can actually believe he's the captain of Starfleet's top ship by merit rather than accident.
- Designated Hero: Not exactly brimful of redeeming qualities, to put it mildly. On top of behaving like a drunken fratboy, having his ass kicked by just about everyone with a working pair of fists, and treating his comrades like shit, he also goes out of the way to punch the bejesus out of a surrendering Harrison... managing to make himself look simultaneously thuggish and utterly pathetic in the process.
- Entitled Bastard: This Kirk expects all of the deference and respect given to his Original Series counterpart, despite having earned absolutely none of it.
- Failure Hero: Observes that most of the first two films is spent watching Kirk screw up virtually everything he touches. Among other things, he makes a mess of relatively simple missions, manages to get his ass handed to him in almost every other fight scene, gets manipulated by Admiral Marcus, and has to be bailed out by just about every other member of his crew - most prominently Scotty, who'd ended up having to commit treason just to save the Enterprise from one of Kirk's boneheaded decisions that he'd actually resigned in protest over earlier in the film.
- The Friend Nobody Likes: Everyone hates Kirk, even if they're technically friends and comrades. A simple conversation with Spock Prime results in the normally sedate Vulcan losing his shit and threatening to fire him back at the Enterprise in an escape pod. Taken up to eleven in Into Darkness, which actually seems to agree with this perception: Kirk has literally no other friends or allies on Earth except for Scotty... who resigned in disgust over Kirk's boneheaded decisions, and actually angrily hangs up on Kirk in the middle of a conversation with him. Chuck quickly declares that Kirk is so pathetic his canonical portrayal is often even more ineffectual than the comedic interpretation.
- Idiot Hero: After witnessing the snowballing consequences of Kirk's cataclysmic stupidity over the course of Into Darkness, Chuck declares that he'd feel more comfortable with the Red Dwarf crew assigned to the mission.
- I Hate Past Me: Beyond Kirk, being a better person by leaps and bounds, seems ashamed of how much of a tool he once was.
- I Reject Your Reality: Seems to think he can just insist that reality is fiction and the universe will accommodate his lunacy.
- Jerk Jock: Remarks that Starfleet put a "dipshit" in charge of a starship, and hoped he'd act like a grownup.Chuck: I thought Stifler was great in the American Pie movies, but it would never occur to me to put him in charge of a fucking spaceship!
- Pretender Diss: Original Kirk is not happy when Reboot Kirk tries to steal his thunder during a meeting of the Captains.
