“Original Trek's treatment of male love is fairly extraordinary: deeply felt, enduring, and profound. The intense love between principals Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, their depth of feelings for one another, remains an extraordinary statement of the capacities of love. The tender male-male love of the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triumvirate remains one of the most moving and unusual achievements of sixties television, especially noteworthy given Original Trek's associations with masculine power and sexism. Most of the episodes end with the three bantering on the bridge, usually trying to get a rise out of Spock, whose ironic responses to them border on camp; suggestive of the ménage à trois, this is a kind of collective male marriage. What transcends camp is the knowingness of these exchanges - Spock is in on the joke, most of the time readably mock-offended, which only leads to more laughter on Kirk and McCoy's part - and the depth of feeling the three men palpably share for one another. The depth of the friendship among Kirk-Spock-McCoy reimagines white male homosocial power as tenderness, humor, good-natured affectionate teasing, and lasting authentic bonds. The image of the homosocial in Original Trek is a world apart from the grim, inexorably despairing male world of the Wall Street law firm in Melville's great, harrowing story "Bartleby, the Scrivener." In Melville, the all-male world cannot take care of its own, leaving (despite the narrator's clumsy but also well-meaning efforts) Bartleby alone to die in the Tombs. In Original Trek, the one who "prefers not to,", the potential Bartleby, Spock, has his conflicts with the crew, with McCoy, but the alien, exotic, cryptic, mysterious, non-joiner, intransigent, vulnerable Spock is not - is never - left out to die. Original Trek rewrites the homosocial as the homoaffectional, and in doing so resists one of the most problematic aspects of the patriarchal American social order. Spock's tender "Forget" is really an even tenderer "Remember," as he tells McCoy before he sacrifices himself for his crew and his friends in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). Ultimately reborn and restored, Spock, the alien Bartleby, gives his life for his friends, never leaving them out in the cold.”