All About Chapel
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| Title: | All About Chapel |
| Creator: | Teresa Morris |
| Date(s): | 1985 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Star Trek: TOS |
| Topic: | |
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All About Chapel is a 1985 essay by fan Teresa Morris.
It was published in The Best of Trek #9.
The subject of the essay was the character Christine Chapel, the treatment of her on screen, and how she is not appreciated enough.
"It is to be hoped that she will return in future Star Trek productions. While her character is often relegated to the background, her humanity helps fill in and make real the Star Trek world. So, cheers to the Star Trek universe and the people who fill it and prop it up, and to Nurse Chapel who shows that love does not have to be selfish, nor courage only for heroes."
Excerpts
I have long had a liking for the Chapel character. Rather than being the typical blonde of fiction, she had the good grace not to gush, sigh in syrupy tones, or sprain her ankle at conve nient moments so as to provide an extra problem for the hero to overcome. Or perhaps that's her problem. In "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" she and Kirk walk by a pit and the edge of it crumbles and falls toward bottomlessness, but instead of clinging to Kirk and flutteringly admiring his muscles, she puts a hand on a nearby rock and steadies herself. It is a sensible, if not very Hollywood, thing to do. Perhaps that is why Kirk, who is used to women who do cling, doesn't seem to know quite how to relate to her.
So, thinking more of her love life than anything else. Chapel seems to have stepped almost casually into a career aboard a starship. Kirk, on the other hand, sometimes makes allusions to his academy days, to how he was "a stack of books on legs" and "positively grim"; in short, how hard he had to work for his career. Chapel easily gained a position on a starship, and not just any starship, but the one going out on the five-year mission, the one going just her way. True, she seems to have had to accept a demotion to nurse in order to do it, but she has been given the rank of lieutenant. There is no telling what she might have become had she been more ambitious. No wonder she doesn't seem to be one of Kirk's favorite people.
Then there is, of course, Spock. Vulcans love their women strangely, or so we've been told, but in "The Naked Time" Chapel is willing to take a chance with Mr. Spock. She says she knows he would not hurt her, and of course she says she loves him, and forever after she is thought of as the woman vainly loving the Vulcan and having little else to do. Loving someone who does not believe in emotions and who will never love her in return may seem unproductive and not too bright, but then, it is just possible that Chapel is one of those generous people who loves where she sees love is needed and not because it is "sensible" or profitable for her to do so. The words she chooses on this occasion are interesting, too. When she is moved by the Psi 2000 virus to murmur words of love and seduction, it is Spock's secret that she speaks of, her perceptiveness that is revealed, for she says she loves both his Human and Vulcan halves. Although the inner conflict Spock suffers is something that Star Trek audiences can all see and understand, within the Star Trek universe it is something he reveals only to a very few friends on a few, very rare occasions. It is Chapel's tragedy that she is never regarded as one of those friends. Yet, curiously, she knows. While others are struggling to understand the Vulcan, she knows and under stands the conflict within him, and it casts a shadow over her, making her love something far more than the rather pathetic infatuation she is generally accused of.
In "The Naked Time" there is little doubt about what she wants from Spock, and yet in two other episodes we see her rejecting him while seeking his happiness. In "Amok Time" she knows that Spock must take a mate or die, but we don't see her taking some champagne to his cabin and trying her chances. Instead we see her smile when she hears that the ship is diverting to take him to Vulcan, where he must go, and she takes the news to him straight away. Standing over him as he lies on his bed, she will not wake him but turns way after all. Then he rises and calls her back, for it seems to him that she was trying to tell him something, but he never does quite hear her. It is not such a strange dream for a Vulcan to have, for they are telepathic, and perhaps it was an interpretation of an emotional projection he couldn't quite block out, a message from Chapel, who is only human and so could not have meant to send it. He tells her that it would be illogical of them to deny their natures, but she cuts his advance off by telling him that he is being taken to Vulcan after all. She does not let him continue on with something there is no longer any need for.
In "Plato's Stepchildren" the aliens take her from the Enterprise and put her in Spock's arms and (and this must have been flattering for him) she tells him she'd rather crawl away and die. Chapel seems to want Spock on certain terms, through a freedom of choice that could only be produced by the spirit in his human half. She just doesn't seem to have that driving selfishness that could get her what she wants. Or perhaps she knows the adage "If you love something, set it free."
We see Chapel always at work on something in the background, studying something. Perhaps she has technical manuals, too, although they are probably not on engineering. In "Return to Tomorrow" we see her helping the aliens who have transferred their minds into Enterprise officers' bodies, and in "The Deadly Years" helping to find the antidote to the ageing virus. Often we see her helping with operations, even w hen the surgery involves Spock's life. She remains professional, and if in "Operation Annihilate" she would have preferred to remove all the threads from Spock's spine, she can hardly be blamed for that. After Dr. McCoy's reprimand, she remains to do what she can.
Dr. McCoy often snaps at her for telling him what he already knows, although it must be her duty to give him a running report on what the diagnostic charts are saying while he concentrates on the actual surgery. That she manages t o put up with Dr. McCoy is greatly to her credit, and, indeed, she seems quite fond of him; trying to help him in "For the World Is Hollow" by telling him a lot can happen in a year, and also in "Turnabout Intruder," where it seems that she would disobey an order from the captain rather than one from Dr. McCoy. The captain wants to keep Janice Lester's body sedated, and Chapel and McCoy know this is wrong. The captain and McCoy argue about it, and although the captain wins, it seems that Chapel could not quite bring herself to comply unless Dr. McCoy ordered her to.
We see some of her warmth in that episode, and in others such as "And the Children Shall Lead" (although in that episode we don't know where she went while the children were trying to take over the ship—perhaps they locked her up in a cupboard). In "The Changeling" she helps Uhura relearn her lost knowledge, and in "Obsession" we see her concern for a young crewman troubled by a guilt the captain has imposed on him. She persuaded him to eat by using psychology.
If I had to say in one word why it is that I like Chapel, I would say "courage." The fact that she stays on the Enterprise, the scene of her grief, is one example of that courage; the fact that she stays onboard when the heroes are too tired to hang on there anymore (Spock meditating on Vulcan, Dr. McCoy living in Georgia, Kirk behind a desk) is an extension of the same thing. She has frailties—which I call her "goofy" moments—as in "Return to Tomorrow" when she tells Spock, who, scoolboy-like, does not wish to discuss the sharing of their minds, "It was beautiful." Her courage is best summed up in those moments when Spock is brought into sickbay, and there is no time for her emotions, so she gets on with the work of caring for him. It is the courage of humanity that doesn't have to be perfectly brave or perfectly strong, but has to consider the best thing to do and then go ahead and do it. And if she takes a break for a softer moment sometimes, she can't be blamed for that.
Christine Chapel is a character whose time has come; I would guess that her popularity is increasing. People are recognizing her positive qualities, and no longer just thinking of her as a woman who is silent and dutiful, her world bound up in Spock, nor do they any longer dismiss her altogether as not worth thinking about. Perhaps her intelligence and loyalty gives people something to think about, and per haps her courage is something they can identify with. It is to be hoped that she will return in future Star Trek productions. While her character is often relegated to the background, her humanity helps fill in and make real the Star Trek world. So, cheers to the Star Trek universe and the people who fill it and prop it up, and to Nurse Chapel who shows that love does not have to be selfish, nor courage only for heroes.