This special Vulcan issue spotlighted a dozen Vulcan characters across the franchise, featuring various fan favorites from TV and film. I covered Saavik, who was unique in having been portrayed by two different people—and in two different ways—in back-to-back movies. My working title for the piece was “Three Faces of Saavik,” playing off the classic film Three Faces of Eve (about a woman with dissociative identity disorder). The three faces of Saavik are Kirstie Alley, Robin Curtis, and the synthesis of those two portrayals featured in the tie-in novels, particularly Unspoken Truth by Margaret Wander Bonanno. The excerpt below is the opening of the article.
Saavik
In her debut scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Saavik sits in the captain’s chair and mutters “Damn” with a subtle lift of her arched eyebrow. Shortly after that, she snaps at Sulu, “I know my responsibilities, mister.” Even with pointed ears, she was not your father’s Vulcan. The explanation was in the script if not the movie: Saavik was half Romulan. In a deleted scene, Spock notes dryly to Kirk that her mixed heritage “makes her more volatile than me, for example.” (The scene remains in the novelization.) This informed the performance of Kirstie Alley, and her Vulcan calm was punctuated by flashes of emotion, most notably a moving display of tears at Spock’s funeral. . . .
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