He was Spock:
A personal tribute to the late Leonard Nimoy, 1931- 2015
The world was shocked and saddened to hear of the death late last month of Leonard Nimoy, world famous as the actor who brought the Vulcan Spock to the screen, and into our hearts, via our favourite programme. Nimoy had been diagnosed with COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), brought about through smoking, though he had quit thirty years prior. He had been hospitalised over the months before his death, on and off, but Friday February 27 was to be his final day on Earth. He passed away in his Bel Air, Los Angeles home early in the morning at the age of eighty-three.
Many tributes have of course been and will probably continue to be offered, and mine is a grain of sand beside the thoughts of those who knew him, worked with him and loved him, but I could hardly allow Star Trek Month to pass without attempting my own poor eulogy to, and retrospective of the man who became famous (incorrectly) for having no emotions, but who was one of the warmest, kindest and loved human beings on this planet. As fellow actor William Shatner would say of his friend at the end of
Star Trek II: The wrath of Khan: “Of all of the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human.”
Whereas some of the tributes have glanced perhaps a little disrespectfully back to less than salubrious aspects of Nimoy’s life --- his woeful albums, his early acting parts --- I don’t wish to pursue that route. Instead, my intention is to speak a little of his early life as I have read about it, and follow his career through the
Star Trek franchise. After all, that’s what we’re interested in this month, yes? So no mention of Bilbo Baggins,
Mission: Impossible or
Three Men and a Baby, which, while all worthy efforts (well, apart from the first) and of which he was surely and justifiably proud, lead us away from the role for which he attained world fame, and for which he will always be remembered. He write two autobiographies, one titled “I am not Spock”, the other admitting “I am Spock”, and he always would, and will be Spock to us.
Born in 1931 to Jewish parents in Boston, he quickly caught the acting bug and had minor roles in many of the big series of the time, including
The Twilight Zone, Bonanza and
Wagon train, but it was in a series called
The Lieutenant that he caught the eye of a young producer of westerns and cop shows, who was looking for actors to take part in his new science-fiction series. Gene Roddenberry had to fight hard to retain Nimoy’s character on
Star Trek, after the main pilot has been turned down by Paramount and the second pilot accepted, but on the advice that he should drop Spock. The only character (although not the only actor) to survive from the original pilot “The Cage”, Spock quickly established himself as a fan favourite and gave the new series a hook. It wasn’t just humans dashing around the galaxy after aliens:
Star Trek had an alien on board, and in a position of command too: Spock was Science Officer and also First Officer on the USS
Enterprise.
Nimoy’s character provided much background and story material, with an early episode, “The Menagerie”, one of only two two-part episodes (including the original pilot) and which harked back to “The Cage”, showing how dedicated he was to his former commanding officer, to the extent of risking court martial to engineer Pike’s return to Talos IV. Spock’s nerve pinch also singled him out as someone special, and tied in to the idea that his race were extremely non-violent. It of course became a favourite game in the playground or schoolyard; just as kids in the UK were dashing around pretending to be daleks, their US counterparts (and soon, over here too) were neck-pinching each other, and telling each other to “Live long and prosper.”
The cold, logical character of Spock was leavened by Leonard Nimoy’s attempts to bring some humour and warmth to the role, from a simple raising of one eyebrow to a well-chosen retort at his eternal debate nemesis, Dr. McCoy, or even on occasion losing control over his emotions completely, as he did at the end of “Amok time” and during “This side of Paradise”. Played as it had been written originally, Spock might have been a dull, even boring character but between Roddenberry and himself they imbued the emotion-avoiding Vulcan with often more humanity than many of his shipmates. They even gave him a love interest: Nurse Christine Chapel, played by Majel Barrett, who had also survived from the pilot albeit in a new role, was in love with the enigmatic and distant Vulcan, and though he rebuffed her advances all through the series, he did once come close to giving in to his feelings.
Spock’s command abilities, as well as his ability to somehow transcend the limits of his Vulcan logic, would be put to the rest in season one’s “The Galileo seven”, where, trapped in a shuttlecraft and running out of fuel, unable to make it back to the
Enterprise he throws the dice, plays a hunch as McCoy later gleefully describes it, and manages to have everyone saved. In “This side of Paradise”, as briefly mentioned above, Spock, along with the rest of the crew, falls victim to alien spores on a planet they visit, which removes all inhibition and allows him to give in to his emotions. It is only cold, Vulcan mathematics and logic that bring him back from the edge and allow him to help Kirk cure the crew. In the celebrated episode “The city on the edge of forever”, he uses his mind-melding powers to allow his captain to forget meeting and falling in love with Edith Keeler, proving there is some humanity in him.
But Spock was never a full Vulcan. His mother was a human from Earth, and so there was scope within the character for him to explore that side of his nature, something others of his people had never, and would never do. It made him somewhat unique, and
Trek would revisit this premise later with a half-human, half-Klingon woman in
Star Trek Voyager. Season two of the series would open with “Amok time”, cataloguing how difficult it was for Vulcans to be away from home when the mating instinct struck, and how helpless they were and how their behaviour and attitudes changed as their ancient instincts surfaced unbidden and had to be dealt with. Soon after we would be introduced to a very different Spock, in the episode “Mirror, mirror”, in which the crew enter an alternate dimension where the Federation --- under the name the Empire --- is a cruel and repressive force, and Spock, sporting a beard, is a man who tries to balance his own distaste for violence with the exigencies of survival in this brutal world. He is eventually given the chance to change things, something which plays out in later “Mirror universe” episodes of
Deep Space 9.
In “Journey to Babel” we meet for the first time Spock’s father, Sarek, Vulcan ambassador, and learn that he opposed his son’s enlisting in Starfleet. This is a thread which will continue throughout Spock, and Sarek’s life, until it is finally resolved in the fourth movie. Sadly, season three would open with one of the worst Trek episodes ever (yeah, even worse than “Fair Haven”!) as we would have to endure “Spock’s brain”, the series hitting its lowest point since previous season two’s “The Omega glory”. However he would quickly be redeemed in the next episode, as he fell in love --- or seemed to --- for the very first time on his own terms with a Romulan sub-commander in “The Enterprise incident”. In this episode we would learn that contrary to belief, Spock had a first name, but as he tells his lover, revealing his deception, “You could not pronounce it.”
In the episode “Is there in truth no beauty” he would sacrifice himself for his shipmates, making direct mental contact with the deadly Medusan ambassador, and being rendered temporarily blind for his pains. Spock certainly believed in the axiom he would later espouse in the movies, that the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few, and would often put this into practice, reasoning that to put one person in danger in order to save many more was always the most logical course. He would be forced to express his emotions against his will, and act as the torture puppet of the Platonians in “Plato’s stepchildren”, one of the episodes banned for many years for both its almost-graphic depictions of torture and its being the first example on television of a multiracial kiss.
We rarely see Spock relax in the series, or have any downtime, but in “The way to Eden” we learn that not only can he play the Vulcan lyre, he is also aware of and versed in the counterculture of the space hippies who are taken onboard
Enterprise and who eventually try to take over the ship. His empathy with, and understanding of their ideals makes him a good go-between when Kirk’s authority is flatly rejected. Spock meets a facsimile of Surak, the father of Vulcan philosophy and the man seen as the saviour of their race in “The savage curtain”, while he again falls in love but has to leave his lover behind when she is unable to come with him back to his own time in “All our yesterdays”, the penultimate episode of the series.
With the cancellation of
Star Trek in 1969, Leonard Nimoy joined the cast of, as mentioned briefly,
Mission: Impossible, but his own mission impossible was to be the attempt to leave behind the character who had, at that time, been his constant companion for nearly four years. He lent his voice to the later, short-lived
Star Trek: The Animated Series and when the natural successor to the original series came along, he was convinced to guest star as Spock --- this time an ambassador, as his father had been --- in the two-part fifth-season episode of
Star Trek: The Next Generation “Unification”. In this, an older, wiser Spock is trying desperately to reunite the ancient cousins the Romulans and the Vulcans, but it all turns out to be for nothing.
With the advent of the first
Star Trek movie, Nimoy reprised his role, but this time as a much sterner, less emotional and almost totally without humour Spock, although he thaws a little towards the end. Poorly received, both by critics and fans, it would be the second movie that would write the next chapter in the Spock story, while attempting to bring it to a complete close. Tired of playing the character and being typecast (leading to his first autobiography being titled “I am not Spock!”) Nimoy agreed that Spock should be killed off, but he had expected it to happen at the beginning of the movie, in a low-key way, and for it to be permanent. In fact, he only agreed to play the part on that basis. When the script was rewritten however, and he saw how much of an impact his death could have on not only the movie but the fans and his own role, he was much more sanguine about it.
Fan uproar over the leaked details of his death though led to his resurrection being pencilled in, and
Star Trek II: the wrath of Khan became the first in a very successful trilogy of movies, spanning one story arc which basically told the story of Spock’s death, rebirth and return over the course of three blockbuster films. For the third movie,
The search for Spock, Nimoy wanted to direct, and as he was not in it very much this was not a problem, and his direction was so inspired that he was to take the chair again for the fourth movie. This would, of course, lead to his directing other movies, outside of the franchise, but as I said at the beginning I’m not going to cover them here. Nimoy starred in two more
Trek movies before the franchise moved on, with the seventh concerning the “new” crew of TNG and all the original actors signing off over the end credits of
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, so that there was no doubt that this was their swansong.
And so it was. Nimoy joined the cast of sci-fi series
Fringe, but when
Star Trek was rebooted in 2009 with a new movie and a whole new cast, he was asked to return as an older, "future" Spock for the movie and did so. He retired from acting the following year, but broke that rule to again play the role of Spock one last time in the second “reboot” movie, the perhaps tragically prophetically titled
Star Trek: Into darkness, in 2013. It would of course be the last time any of us ever saw Spock on the screen again.
For over forty years Leonard Nimoy portrayed a character who came to be so inextricably linked, not only with
Star Trek but with science-fiction and the future in general, that he has now passed into the shared consciousness of this world, and will never be forgotten. The calm, unblinking, coldly logical alien who could sometimes be more human than humans themselves, and always seemed to have that slight spark in his eyes as Leonard Nimoy peeked out from behind them, will always be in our memory. If there are three words that define
Star Trek, even to those who have never seen it, they are Kirk, Enterprise and Spock.
In closing, I would like to quote you the words Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, quoted on the inner sleeve of the Hawkwind album
Church of Hawkwind, and which has recently become part of my signature:
Lives of great men remind us we can make our lives sublime, and so departing leave behind us footsteps on the sands of time.
Thank you, Leonard, for such wonderful memories, and for teaching us things that often school, and even life could not. It’s not true to say that everything I learned I learned from
Star Trek, but a hell of a lot I did, and it was all good. Your long Trek is over, my friend, may you rest in peace.
Live long, and prosper, in our memories and in our hearts.