The 50th anniversary of Star Trek has come and gone, and with that our Star Trek Crew Battle Bracket Tournament has officially ended! There have been a lot of brutal takedowns in the final rounds. The Semi-Finals saw Worf and Jim Kirk both get knocked out by Picard and Spock respectively. I’ll be honest, I’m surprised. I was really expecting it to come down to Kirk vs. Picard. The fans have spoken though. It wasn’t even close. Spock annihilated Kirk by like a 20% lead. To be fair, it probably helps that Spock was usually more concerned with completing the mission than seducing a sexy octopus babe. Picard knocking out Worf is less surprising, considering anyone can beat Worf as long as they do so in the first five minutes of the episode.
This final battle was close, but the fans have spoken. I think it already says a lot that the battle came down to Spock and Picard instead of Kirk and Picard… it speaks a lot to the attitude that fans feel is the heart of the series. Captain Kirk is a great character, but he’s always been a little bit more of a cowboy action hero than the traditional Starfleet officer. This is a lot of what makes him compelling, especially in contrast to Spock and Bones with the emotional conflicts often presented in TOS. Picard is a little closer though to Roddenberry’s ultimate vision of humanity, one where we’ve transcended our problems. He’s more of a thoughtful intellectual than a brawler… still masculine and flawed, but a little less rugged and a little more philosophical. He’s still an explorer like Kirk, but he approaches new societies more like a researcher and less like a frontiersman in the old west. Spock was always maybe the strictest voice of Starfleet’s logic on TOS. He was the voice of the show’s philosophical view, except when he needed input from the human characters who had more emotional intelligence and relied less on cold logic. Picard was perfect for TNG because he gave us a natural evolution of these viewpoints, and showed us what a man would be like once he learned to internalize both.
Thanks to everyone who voted!