Wait, why would Kirk reprogramming Kobayashi Maru not be canon?

I'm pretty sure you fail the Kobayashi Maru if you disregard the distress beacon.

that is a profoundly unsatisfactory explanation.

It's a call-back to an earlier great line, when Spock explains that it was a mistake for Kirk to accept promotion.

Wait, why would Kirk reprogramming Kobayashi Maru not be canon?

please to be explaining how TOS Kirk is not known for his cocksure swagger.

As captain of a starship, the first duty is to the safety of his or her crew and ship and follow Starfleet guidelines to the standards at which the captain is held. While risk is always part of the job…

The great irony is that even as an admiral who taught the Kobayashi Maru, Kirk still didn't get what was being tested. It's not about life and death and being able to accept the consequences of your choices of a given scenario (especially since it doesn't matter what the captain's course of action is since his ship is…

Thanks for remembering all of that.

you can still be moved by it. city on the Edge of Forever, The DS9 where Jake tries the rest of his life to get his dad back, Inner Light, Darmok.

no small part of the reason TWOK is as resonant as it is, is that it's the first instance we really have of Kirk being confronted with the limits of his own cunning, in addition to their consequences.

I think we'd have to go episode to episode is see which times he was strictly ethical, and which times Kirk is using his cunning in some way that influences power and reinforces his own power as Captain and a Starfleet rep that is a borderline colonizer. He never seems happy that an ethical solution was handed out. He…

The writer is missing the point of Kirk as a character. Kirk is in the tradition Odysseus. His primary characteristic is cunning. Like him, Kirk does not employ ethics, he employs instrumental reasoning: whatever works to accomplish your self-preservation, even to the death of everyone else. He is not an insightful…

I've been feeding her a steady diet of TNG, but ONLY the good ones

I thought the "true ethical lesson" was that Kirk was a cheating bastard.

more polished than most fanfic

the cocksure swagger that we know from TOS is Kirk's MO

revisit Julia Ecklar's Kobayashi Maru novel

100% what Roger A. Sneed said. And also when Kirk's brother died in "Operation Annihilate" (first season finale), and when Kirk had to kill his best friend from the academy in the friggin PILOT episode(!).

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