Rounding out the archetypal
Power Trio with
The Spock and
The McCoy,
The Kirk must balance these opposing personalities while being able to take their advice and choose between them (or literally,
"between" them) without being overcome either by emotion or dispassionate logic.
Usually,
The Kirk is
The Captain or a similar leader who needs to be practical rather than emotional or distant. However, it's not impossible for a show to have
The Mc Coy or
The Spock as the leader, albeit they'll have to be far more ideologically flexible than they would otherwise.
They usually share a lot of the traits of the
Reasonable Authority Figure, but depending on the
slant of the series he might lapse into
less than heroic decisions, or end up choosing one of his two friends over the other more often. That said, the
burden of deciding what course of action to take can be heavy, while the task of bringing his friends around to accept said decision is complicated as well. At the least, he's mostly immune to
Death By Pragmatism. With poor characterization, may become the
Standardized Leader.
Examples
Literature
- Alyosha of The Brothers Karamazov, who, oddly enough, was played by William Shatner in the movie version.
- Meg in Little Women often takes this role in The Glorious War Of Sisterly Rivalry between Jo and Amy.
- Tom Corbett, Space Cadet: Tom is a classic Kirk, settling arguments between his two teammates almost every time they have to do anything, and almost always rightly.
- Harry Potter is very much this, with Ron as his Mc Coy and Hermione as The Spock. Initially played straight, but the dynamic is played with in later books.
- Tobias in Animorphs takes this role whenever he's alone with Marco and Ax.
- What do you mean? Out of the Animorphs Marco and Ax are the two most logical. Both are occasionally given to bouts of emotion overwhelming logic (understandable seeing as they're both teenagers) but out of the group they're definitely both closer to the Spock end of the scale than the Mc Coy end.
Live Action TV
- This trope is named for Kirk of Star Trek The Original Series. Notably, the original Kirk took a lot of third options like The Kobayashi Maru, but other times these decisions were likely to make many races angry in the future, leading some to think dick move.
- And like The McCoy, there is a lot of Generation Xerox between the series, giving each their own Kirk.
- TNG had Jean Luc Picard, albeit he was more philosophical and Spock-ish than Kirk at times. Will Riker resembled Kirk much more in personality, at least before he grew the beard.
- DS9 had Sisko.
- Voyager usually had Janeway deliberate this way, with The Doctor and Chakotay advocating the Emotional choice, and Tuvok and Seven the logical (by bad TV writer's standards) or efficient one.
- Enterprise of course had Archer, with T'Pol and Trip filling in the Spock and McCoy roles, respectively.
- Believe it or not, Jack O'Neill of Stargate SG-1 wasn't really his quartet's Kirk; that honor fell to Samantha Carter and occasionally Daniel.
- Which makes Carter a good fit for the new leader in Stargate Atlantis, replacing another Kirk figure, Dr. Weir. The leader of the main team, Sheppard, tends a bit toward the McCoy-ish in his thinking, though he does have the Kirk-ish role in picking the proper course of action out of McKay's stream-of-consciousness TV Genius-ness, Ronon's rashness, and Teyla's more McCoy-ish tendencies.
- Mal in Firefly can be pretty emotional and amoral in his own right, but has the virtue (much as he'd deny it) of listening to his crew before making a decision, but being brave enough to take unpopular decisions regardless.
- Lee Adama in Battlestar Galactica usually brings the moral clarity to situations where other characters' judgement is blinded by prejudice or fear.
- When he isn't blinded by his own prejudice and fear, that is.
Film
- According to co-writer Roberto Orci, the 2009 Star Trek film maintains this trope, but swaps Kirk and McCoy:
"McCoy in a way represents for us, or represented for us, the extremes of Kirk and Spock. If Spock is extreme logic, ... extreme science, and Kirk is extreme emotion and intuition, here you have a very colorful doctor, essentially a very humanistic scientist. So he, in a way, is literally and figuratively a representation of two extremes that often served as the glue that held the trio together."
Western Animation
- Ben has an alien form in Ben 10 Alien Force that takes this concept more than a little too literally...
- Blossom of The Power Puff Girls provided a balance between the Tomboy And Girly Girl duo of Buttercup and Bubbles.
- Of course, much of the time by-the-book Blossom and the equally bull-headed and proud "let's just punch them" Buttercup wound up arguing stubbornly while Bubbles was the one who brought them back together...
Webcomics
