50th Anniversary TOS Episode Discussion Marathon

[evay]

Originally Posted by NAHTMMM

And I love that, when Spock is so vulnerable as to tell Kirk that he considers Kirk a friend and is ashamed of it, Kirk just slaps him again. Kirk is just not a touchy-feely guy.

I don't know if it's that so much as Kirk needs his XO and is in a bit of a panic. If they weren't on duty, or if the Plot Crisis de la Semaine wasn't about to hit its third-act peak, he'd have the luxury of letting him express these emotions (see Amok Time, the scene in Spock's quarters), but right at that moment Kirk can't indulge him.

Looking at it through the hindsight of vast character development, we could speculate that Kirk realizes that Spock would/will be ashamed of this emotional display later, so he's trying to help Spock out of this state as fast as possible, and he knows from McCoy/M'Benga that Vulcans need physical pain to focus on to break out of deep meditative states, so he hopes this will work. But that's a bit of post hoc fanwank.