The End of the Beginning (Star Trek: TOS story)

Fanfiction
Title:	The End of the Beginning
Author(s):	Maggie Hart
Date(s):	1982 or 1983 though most likely 1984, see zine for notes
Length:
Genre(s):	slash
Fandom(s):	Star Trek: TOS
Relationship(s):	Kirk/Spock
External Links:
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The End of the Beginning is a Kirk/Spock story by Maggie S. Hart. It was one of the first Gol stories.

It was published in the print zine Naked Times #4/5.

Original art used in Naked Times #4/5 for the story "The End of the Beginning" -- The artist, Vel Jaeger, says: "This is one of my favorite creations, which became the design for a 9-piece project (portraits of the Kirk/Spock/McCoy triad, based on images from ST:TOS, TMP, and TWOK) during my 4th semester of Printmaking at Mira Costa College in California. I took one semester of Watercolor, during which I labored like Hercules to produce something I didn't want to shred on completion. I'm not a very patient person, and learned why that medium is rightfully considered among the hardest of all."

Summary

"This is a very poignant and touching story concerning Spock's trek to Gol -- and how it affected those he left behind. Told through the eyes of Leonard McCoy, it traces the lingering effects Spock's departure has had on Kirk."

Reactions and Reviews

There are some things I like and some things I don’t like about this story. I’ll get the list of “don’t-likes” over with first.

The accident that is the catalyst for the events in this story is more than a little contrived. While exploring a planet that is being surveyed as a potentially important archaeological site, Kirk and Spock end up falling into a deep, steep-sided pit in which (conveniently) their communicators do not work. McCoy, who was with Kirk and Spock until just a short time before the accident, has beamed up, leaving Kirk and Spock conveniently alone. What’s more, once they’re in the pit, Kirk, who has sustained only minor injuries in the fall, seems uncharacteristically passive, and, despite his lack of serious injury, lapses into shock and “loses” several hours during which he might otherwise have done more to try to escape from the pit or at least to help the injured Spock. On top of all of that, the Enterprise gets a distress call and leaves orbit, stranding our heroes alone together in the pit with no hope of immediate rescue.

The other big problem is that the reactions of the characters are over the top. While they’re stranded in the pit, Kirk discovers that Spock loves him and wants to hold him, and touch him, and, well, you get the idea. This is a surprise to Spock, too, who has not been consciously aware of this particular desire, which surfaces when he is in a semi-conscious state, rambling on (aloud) about how he feels about Kirk. Kirk reacts badly. Spock reacts badly to Kirk’s reacting badly. Even McCoy reacts badly, practically ignoring Spock and handing out some spectacularly bad advice to Kirk. There is just an awful lot of reacting really, really badly. Admittedly, this is a difficult situation. But these three guys have dealt with a lot of difficult situations, personal and otherwise. They’re used to it. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be upset--maybe even very upset by what has happened--but enough is enough. I suppose we might be able to excuse Spock for acting the way he does, because in avoiding emotional situations he’s also avoided learning how to deal with them. Kirk and McCoy on the other hand, don’t even have that excuse.

Still...“The End of the Beginning” does have some very interesting things going for it. I liked the basic premise of the story--that Kirk’s initial reaction to Spock’s advances would not be a good one: this seems quite plausible to me, given the Kirk we saw in TOS. The idea hat Spock would not be consciously aware of his feelings for Kirk is also plausible: submerging strong feelings is, after all, a part of being Vulcan. In some ways, this is a much more realistic scenario than those we see in rosier K/S stories in which K & S fall happily into one another’s arms the instant their love for one another is revealed.

Another interesting aspect of “The End of the Beginning” is the structure of the story, which starts with a look at Spock’s thoughts after the life-altering events of the plot, then goes to an entry in McCoy’s personal log, then flashes back to give us Kirk’s point of view of the situation in the pit. This jumping around continues throughout the story--an approach that is a little risky, since there is a chance that the whole thing will turn into a big, incoherent mess. But it doesn’t. Maggie Hart pulls it all off quite nicely, giving us not only the basic plot, but also Kirk’s version of what has happened, as well as Spock’s version and McCoy’s “outsider-looking-in” perspective. Unfortunately, in the last few paragraphs of the story we suddenly switch to a quick summary of subsequent events told in a sort of “omniscient author” way that really doesn’t work at all. It would have been better, I think, to just expand McCoy’s last log entry a bit and let the story finish up in his voice. Still, the overall structure is handled quite skillfully, and gives us, I believe, a much fuller, more complete picture than we ever could have gotten if the author had told the story chronologically and from one point of view.

But the best and most daring part of this story is not its structure, but the insight it provides into Kirk and Spock’s characters. Both of these men are idealists. While they each possess an impressive set of the sort of practical, “down-to-earth” traits that help one to run a starship or to make great scientific discoveries, beneath it all both Kirk and Spock believe that it is their duty-- perhaps even their purpose in life--to do whatever they can to make the universe a better place. That is, of course, a wholly admirable goal. But I think that in order to sustain a goal like that, one requires a certain naiveté- -an almost childlike faith in the underlying order of things. It’s the sort of faith that might make an idealistic human believe that he could explore the universe and change it to suit his own beliefs without being forced, in turn, to explore his own inner landscape and to be changed by what he finds there. And it’s the sort of faith that might make a young, half-Vulcan scientist believe that he could work alongside his human mother’s passionate people in all sorts of exciting and dangerous situations, day after day, year after year, all the while remaining a mere observer, immune to the longings of his own half-human heart. Both men are wrong, of course, and the resulting inner conflict is one of the things that makes them interesting characters to read and write about.