Spock Value

One summer's evening, my friend and I were lounging around his parents' television room. We had both recently graduated from college and our respective employment situations can be summed up in the phrase "lounging around his parents' television room." We were watching a rerun of an old episode of Star Trek, the original series (which, I am told, is now abbreviated as Star Trek: TOS by aficionados of the franchise's subsequent iterations, but they are Trekkies, or Trekkers, and I am not).

Anyway, in this particular episode, called "Arena," an alien craft enters Federation space and blows the Dewey decimals off the library facility on Cestus III. James T. Kirk and the Enterprise show up to even the score. However, a superior alien intelligence is watching the whole affair, and it decides to set up a personal duel between Kirk and the commander of the alien ship, who is called a "Gorn." Now, were I a Trekkie or a Trekker, this is where I would point out that the superior-alien-intelligence-playing-with-the-humans plotline is central to several other episodes. It's how Kirk meets Abraham Lincoln -- don't ask -- in "The Savage Curtain," and how he and "Bones" and Spock wind up shooting it out at the OK Corral -- I mean it, don't ask -- in "Spectre of the Gun."

So Kirk gets thrown in against the Gorn on a deserted planet. The Gorn, a rubbery green lizardy chap wearing a leopard-skin jumper, has eyes like tiny fencing masks. He appears to have evolved from the primordial Wal-Mart of his home planet. He and Kirk tussle awhile, and then Kirk discovers that the planet contains all the minerals he needs to make gunpowder. There are also handy diamonds lying around for projectiles. At the end, Kirk builds a cannon and fires the diamonds into the Gorn, who gets blown across several yards of badly painted scenery. Kirk declines the opportunity for the coup de grace, thereby convincing the superior alien intelligence that humanity is worth going on with for a while. Both of them get returned to their ships.

It was somewhere during the process in which Kirk is manufacturing gunpowder that my friend and I started tossing the lines back and forth. I was the Gorn, or he was. I can't recall. And I don't even know how we got started, but we had every line cold, down to the studied Shatnerisms and the sibilant, raspy voice of the Gorn. We only stopped when we noticed his mother looking at us as though we both were rubbery green lizardy chaps wearing leopard-skin jumpers.

I admit it was a sobering experience. I had watched all 79 episodes of TOS's original three-year run, from September 8, 1966, to June 3, 1969, when the last original episode, "Turnabout Intruder," ran. I had watched them hundreds of times in syndication. One of the campus bars at my college offered drink specials between 4 and 5 p.m. every day, which was when the reruns ran in Milwaukee. One of these drinks was something called a Vulcan Mind Probe, which consisted basically of dumping a little of everything along the bottom rail of the bar into a beer schooner and adding a wedge of lime for flavor.

I hadn't realized until just recently how thoroughly the show had lodged in that fathomless catch basin my mind has reserved for pop-culture ephemera. But I'm thankful it did, because Paramount is releasing a new movie next month in which director J.J. Abrams, a savant behind the hit ABC series Lost, promises to fill us in on the back story of the characters from the original Star Trek series.

Neither alien spores nor blond '60s starlets seem to be involved in this new punch-up. No Gorns were detected in the trailer, either. If I were a Trekkie or a Trekker, this might make me nervous. No Gorns? But, then again, at least I can still rely on the person on whom I've always relied, a kid from Boston's old West End neighborhood, who ended up as the center of an alien universe that seems to go on forever.

In a word, fascinating.

Years ago in the West End, you could look out the window of Max Nimoy's barbershop and see across Leverett Street down Causeway to North Station and the old Boston Garden. It was a thriving place that, one day in 1958, would fall in a brutal outburst of what was then called "urban renewal," in which the city simply bulldozed 46 acres and displaced 2,700 families. The process would not end until 1961, when the last vestiges of the neighborhood were razed and replaced by luxury high-rise apartments. Back in the day, though, businesses like Nimoy's barbershop thrived, and Max and Dora Nimoy's son, Leonard, grew up amid the tight, bustling streets. He listened to the radio, and he was especially fond of The Lone Ranger -- not for the hero, but for the other guy.

"The first one I remember is Tonto, and there's a history of this kind of sidekick character who works loyally to help the central character, hero figure, but who has special talents that are useful," Nimoy explains. "When I was a kid, the Lone Ranger was a big deal on radio, and Tonto -- his 'faithful companion,' as they said -- had special talents. Tonto could read the tracks. He could tell you about the bad guys, whether they were coming or going, and how long ago they'd passed that way. He could put his ear to the railroad tracks and tell you where the train was. Those kinds of characteristics were not unusual in a sidekick character."

Even though his dramatic career began in community theater here when he was 8, Nimoy came to Mr. Spock after more than a decade of woodshedding in the movies and in television. After he was discharged from the Army, he studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, working as a cabdriver and a movie usher to pay his way. His early film career was in smaller roles; if you're looking for a precursor to the part that would make Nimoy famous, it's probably Narab, a sympathetic Martian who appears right at the end of the justifiably obscure 1952 release Zombies of the Stratosphere. However, by the 1960s, he was getting steady work in series television, guest starring on everything from Rawhide to the TV adaptation of President John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. In 1964, he worked on an episode of The Lieutenant with Gene Roddenberry, who later cast him as Mr. Spock.

Spock was anything but a sidekick when Star Trek was conceived. In the original pilot -- which was later cannibalized into a two-part episode called "The Menagerie" -- Spock's spot was held by a female officer called Number One (who, were I a Trekkie or a Trekker, I would point out was played by Majel Barrett, the future Mrs. Gene Roddenberry, who eventually became nurse Christine Chapel, whose love for Spock went largely unrequited). By the time the cast was finalized, Nimoy wound up creating an indelible character. Spock ultimately became the great fulcrum on which the entire Star Trek franchise would pivot. He is far and away the most compelling character in all of the movies, and he even turned up memorably in The Next Generation, as he engaged in secret diplomacy with the Romulans in order to reconcile the schism between the Romulans and the Vulcans. Ultimately, Spock mind-melds with Captain Jean-Luc Picard in order to mourn his father's death properly.

Now 78 and living in Southern California, Nimoy has Spock to thank for a wonderfully varied career. He made a couple of records during the run of the show; "Visit to a Sad Planet" was a single that got some airplay. Since the show went off the air, he has directed a number of movies, including two of the Star Trek films and the hit comedy Three Men and a Baby. He's also published several volumes of his poetry and is an accomplished photographer. Now he's in the unusual position of handing over an iconic character of his own creation to another actor, although rumors persist that the new movie features at least one scene in which the two Spocks appear together. "I guess Sean Connery would be the closest, although 007 has been handed off several times," Nimoy explains. "Zachary Quinto is a very intelligent actor, and he's serious about his work, and he looks enough like me to make the whole thing work.

"He pursued the role. He knew what people told him -- that he looked enough like me to do the job, so he pursued it, and he sought me out for conversation. We met several times and talked before the movie started shooting."

This is how I can prove I am neither a Trekkie nor a Trekker. It is because I am strictly a fan of the first series, the Nimoy series. I thought Star Trek: The Next Generation was perfectly fine, and I think The Borg are probably the greatest Star Trek villains ever. But it never engaged me the way TOS did; there was a little bit too much Patrick O'Brian British Navy stuff to it. And I simply declined to follow the franchise to Deep Space Nine or out to those lame final attempts with Captains Kate Mulgrew and Scott Bakula. Therefore, I stepped out of the universe of the franchise at a very early point in its development, and I am far behind both the academic literature and the limitless flood of trivia that have followed after it. (The Ferengi are those guys with the heads that look like the grille of a '57 Chevy, right?) "I thought the shows were another way of looking at American history," says John Putman, who teaches a course called Star Trek: Culture and History at San Diego State University. "TV is kind of undervalued in that sense, I think. [Series creator Gene] Roddenberry said he saw the show as another way of looking at things that were going on at the time."

Limiting your fandom to the original series means to affix yourself permanently in the time and place in which that series was launched. Roddenberry always claimed that he was just trying for an outer-space version of Wagon Train, the hit Western that ran for eight years starting in 1957. However, when he sent the Enterprise off on its first five-year mission, Roddenberry sent it to a sweet spot in time. Most of the kids who grew up watching Alan Shepard and John Glenn, the children of the space race, were just hitting adolescence in 1966. In fact, Star Trek debuted a few days before the launch of the Gemini 11 mission, and it went off the air a little more than a month before Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder.

Roddenberry hit a nation already space-happy with what seemed to be the logical extension of all that frenzied scientific and technical achievement that Walter Cronkite regularly threw across the television set. In addition, as the turmoil of the '60s began to reach high tide -- a period that dovetails almost perfectly with the three-year run of the original series and a time when more than a few people dreamed silly utopian dreams that inevitably came crashing down around them -- there was a market for a fictional future that seemed chock-full of silly utopian dreams that succeeded. (Although it was not a particularly big market. The show's Nielsen ratings were never high.) It was a good time for serendipity, a fine time for allegory, and Star Trek's instinct for both of them may not have been enough to ensure the survival of the original series, but it plainly was the reason for the success of the subsequent series, and the movies, and even for how the original episodes have resonated so strongly through four decades of syndication.

"One thing about Star Trek always has been its sense of its own history as well," Putman says. "All of those dozens and dozens of writers, down through the years, have developed an in-depth chronology of events. They carried forward the timeline. Now this new movie seems to be some sort of prequel, so you hope that it will hold tightly to the timeline and the chronology and everything else."

As nearly as can be divined from trailers, movie sites, and the odd showbiz interview, the new movie seems to involve some time traveling, but its focus seems to be the origins of the friendship between the young James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock, the half-Vulcan, half-human science officer, as well as a primer on how the crew of the original Enterprise happened to come together. They seem to have pimped out Kirk's bridge pretty nicely, and the rumors are that they've tied a great deal of the script not only to incidents that occurred in the various movies in the franchise but also to incidents that occurred in both TOS and TNG, as I would put it -- were I a Trekkie or a Trekker.

Already, there have been some tremors within the Star Trek universe about the concept of, say, Kirk-without-Shatner. Everything that William Shatner has become -- the jovial self-parody on the Priceline commercials, the hilarious bloviations of his Denny Crane on Boston Legal -- has its roots in his days as Captain James Tiberius Kirk, who, when he wasn't nibbling on the necks of comely, half-dressed alien ladies, was gobbling great gobbets of scenery. (His "KHAAAAAAAAANNNNNNN!" from the second movie, Wrath of Khan, was the apotheosis of the form.) Legal blogger and sci-fi enthusiast Robert Farley has pointed out that, as hard as fresh-faced Chris Pine may try in the new film, Kirk without the Shatnerian bombast is a rather empty vessel. Audiences may not be prepared for a new, non-Shatner Kirk. Still, says Putman, "the same thing happened when The Next Generation came out. People came to love it. What J.J. Abrams seems to be trying to do here is expand the horizons of the show. Anything to keep it alive within reason is OK."

But no matter how successful Pine is at channeling Shatner, it is not Kirk who is the most intriguing thing about this new film, just as it was never Kirk who was the most intriguing character on the old TV show. Zachary Quinto, the evil Sylar on NBC's Heroes, is playing for the highest stakes. He is taking on one of the most iconic characters in the history of television, and one that redefined all our ideas about what an alien is supposed to be. He is putting on the ears. His blood is running green. And, were I a Trekkie or a Trekker, I would be wondering if he could make the eyebrow work yet.

Because that eyebrow is as much a part of television history as Archie Bunker's chair or Jack Bauer's sadism. And it all started with a kid from Boston's old West End, who listened to the radio and thought Tonto was cool and who ended up proving that aliens were, too.

At least in the movies or on TV, up until Mr. Spock appeared, alien beings were either outright monsters or malevolent geniuses come down to euchre us out of our planet. If it wasn't James Arness as an alien super-vegetable in The Thing, it was those clever pod-creatures in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (In 1978, Leonard Nimoy himself played a pod-enabler in the first remake of the 1956 paranoid classic.) Rod Serling once wrote a memorable episode of The Twilight Zone in which an alien self-help book titled How to Serve Man turned out to be a cookbook. On more than one occasion, Serling cast earthlings as the aliens, and they turned out to be either outright monsters or malevolent geniuses. The encounter between Us and Them was generally dystopic, loud, and full of explosions, death rays, and atomic bombs.

Spock changed that. He was caught between two cultures; his human half and his Vulcan half were largely integrated, absent the presence of, for example, alien happy-spores and Jill Ireland. His back story was intriguing, and his friendship with Kirk -- and, ultimately, with his other shipmates as well -- was perfectly of a piece with what was floating around the actual zeitgeist in the mid-1960s. With just Kirk on board, Star Trek might well have been simply an intergalactic Wagon Train. It was Spock who made it more than that.

If the trailer is any indication, the younger Spock apparently has yet to integrate fully the two sides of his persona, which seems to be at the root of a Kirk-Spock smackdown in which they dope-slap each other harder than they did in "This Side of Paradise," the episode in which Kirk has to initiate a hooley with Spock in order to counteract the alien spores that have rendered the Vulcan giddy over Ms. Ireland.

"The character he's playing is Spock before the one you saw me play in the original series," Nimoy explains. "He has not yet come fully to that grounding of himself. He doesn't quite have the psychological design that I had.

"I feel very good about it. I mean, I've come to the point where I'm 78 years old, and I've had a long and wonderful ride. I think the character is being handed off to a very intelligent, very talented actor, so I feel very good about that."

When she was a teenager, Djoymi Baker went with her brother from their home outside Melbourne to Sydney so that he could go to a Star Trek convention. At this point, the Star Trek fan base in Australia was pretty much all blokes. No Sheilas need apply, so Baker wound up spending the whole time playing with the young daughter of Walter Koenig, who was Ensign Pavel Chekhov. That was enough, though, to get her interested.

Now a professor of film and popular culture at the University of Melbourne, Baker likely is her country's leading academic authority on the series and its various iterations. (Her doctoral thesis, a 92,000-word opus titled Broadcast Space: TV Culture, Myth and Star Trek, was one of four selected for the university's Chancellor's Prize for Excellence in 2006.) She is awaiting the new movie eagerly.

"I was born in 1972, so I missed the boat on the original series," she says. "But it seems to me that all the shows have always been about what it means to be human in the cosmos, what it means to be a sentient being in this universe. And there's always conflict, because, out of peace, not much drama comes." She says she's excited about the new movie because it will keep Star Trek alive for a new generation. "You've got the back story of its universe that is getting retold, and that's what mythology and storytelling have always been about -- reinvention. I find something quite exciting about that."

Now, were I a Trekkie or a Trekker, this all might make me nervous. Kirk without Shatner. Spock as a young half-breed handy with his dukes. However, I might also notice that the old show, the original show, is being retooled and shined up at another tough time in history. Think about it. There are two wars. There's an economy lower than the belly of a Denebian slime-devil. Whatever sense of community remains seems torn and frayed and, in many places, beyond repair. Maybe this is the perfect time for the Federation again, for the live-and-let-live of the Prime Directive, and for a sense of mission that crosses barriers of race and culture, and time and space as well. Maybe there is a place for Spock, loyal and emotionless, wrestling with being a logical creature in an illogical universe. Were I a Trekkie or a Trekker, I might even point out that this movie is coming out at another sweet spot in time for itself -- a time when so many of us live long, but so few of us seem to prosper.