“Tal Shaya Shaya? Hush, Hush”
or “It’s Good to Have Been Bad”
When people mention Trek’s most formidable warriors,
certain species immediately come to mind: Klingons,
of course; Romulans, if you’re into them; Cardassians, since Deep
Space Nine; maybe even Andorians, if
you’re old school. But I’ve got a little news for you: Vulcans
are much more bad-ass than many fans realize.
Think about it: They’re not only faster
than humans, and packin’ three times their strength,
all they have to do is get a good grip on the juncture between neck and
shoulder, and that’s all she wrote. And let’s be honest, here: Would you brawl
unnecessarily with your boorish and illogical opponent—and he has to be
illogical if he’s gettin’ into it with you, right?—when you can instead
use the futuristic equivalent of a fast-acting sleeper hold?
Man, I’d love this ability. I can think of a few times it would have come in
handy—though I’d probably have been tempted to keep squeezing until I’d made
certain my target was out for, say, seven or eight months. Even the everyday
applications are thought-provoking! No more having to put your kids to bed
fifteen times, parents, because you’re now putting them to sleep, as well.
And it seems entirely appropriate that Vulcans can do this, doesn’t it?
According to some sources, early in The Original Series’ run,
Leonard Nimoy approached the producers with his
belief that Spock would not normally resort to fisticuffs—that he would instead
have at his disposal a more refined method of dealing with such unpleasantness
… and thus was born the legendary “Vulcan neck pinch.”
Its origin within Star Trek canon is probably a
little less stylish.
According to Spock in “Journey to
It’s pretty hard to believe that the
two are not related in some fashion.
The non-lethal variant might well be
called something like tal shana,
or "hand of sleep," its usage having evolved into the rule rather
than the exception as knowledge of the first application became something of an
oddity, or (for Vulcans now refined by the discipline
of logic) even an embarrassment.
On the other hand (no pun intended),
the Romulans loved
the good ol' days, so much so that they left Vulcan
to relive them forever; their preeminent intelligence organization is,
interestingly enough, called the Tal
Shiar. One doesn't have to be a
philologist of Tolkien’s stature to note the
similarity between those two canonical phrases. Perhaps they took Spock more
seriously than we did when, during “The Enterprise
Incident,” he spoke of the "Vulcan death grip" because they felt an
almost instinctual reverence for the ancient powers of hand and mind—which they
themselves had clearly lost over the intervening millennia. When McCoy, in the
same episode, asserted "There's no such thing as a Vulcan death
grip," and Kirk chimed in with, “But the Romulans
don’t know that,” well ... they were [foolishly? intentionally?] not
associating tal shaya,
about which they'd been told almost a year before, with this 'new'
ability—which could well be a third variant.
Romulans talk a lot of
shit about retaking Vulcan … but that’s all it is: talk. It’ll never happen,
because, frankly, Vulcans are cooler and badder. Despite their intelligence, the Romulans
are still just clever hoodlums disguised as an interstellar empire … whereas
the Vulcans have all the gang-banging in their past,
but added a layer of icy self-control to keep that fire in check. They don’t
have to run their mouths; they just pull out the ol’
leather bombardier jacket when it’s necessary, drop some whupass
on you, and then tuck it back away in the elegantly-carved bureau again once
it’s served its purpose.
Basically, Vulcans
are Romulans who’ve made something of themselves, and as far as the Romulans
returning home for a little Tal
Shiar vs. tal shaya
…
... trust me,
they don’t , in either
sense of the phrase, want to go there.