Requiescat In Pace: Leonard Nimoy

Goodnight, sweet Vulcan.

Today, I was planning on writing my second Flashback Friday post. God knows about what, but at least I would have some new material for the past week. I have been working on my first semi-serious post (in the sense that I attempt actual analysis of something) during that time, but it's taken much longer than expected, so before I knew it, Friday was upon me, and I hadn't settled on an event from my life to write about. I went to bed Thursday night, bouncing topics back and forth and pondering my other post to no end before I finally fell asleep.

Morning came, and as you probably suspect, the first thing I did was turn on my phone (can't us millennials get a break?) I went on Facebook to see if anybody liked the funny pic about that stupid dress I pilfered from OMG Science Is Like Totally Cool (they did, in case you're wondering) when I saw my timeline blown up with the worst news a Trekker could hear: Spock was dead.

Well, he's not really Spock of course. In fact, he wrote a whole book about that (which I still have to read), but the point is, someone from a franchise very close to my and millions of people's hearts' has passed on. As Captain Kirk's famous first officer, Leonard Nimoy was one of the few personalities within science fiction as a whole to venture beyond the boundaries of that highly-niched genre and attain not only recognition, but also veneration in mainstream pop culture, as evidenced by guest appearances of him or his likeness and references to his character in such places as South Park, The Big Bang Theory, an interview with Pharrell Williams, and the music videos for Genesis' "Land of Confusion" and Bruno Mars' "The Lazy Song" (alongside William Shatner, no less). I can't help but scratch my head at some of these selections (*cough cough* The Lazy Song *cough*), but one should appreciate the high esteem Nimoy had to be held in to be included in them.

Not entirely sure what the point of this is, but cool!

So one must ask, why Leonard Nimoy? What about Spock electrified people? Why did J.J. Abrams want him to do a cameo in his Star Trek reboot and it's sequel instead of, say, George Takei (not to say Takei doesn't get recognition nowadays, it's just that it's generally for silly reasons, as a quick perusal of his Facebook feed will show.) How come he cast him as the duplicitous William Bell on Fringe  rather than Walter Koenig? Why was it him who played Dr. Kibner in Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, not DeForest Kelley? The only cast member of The Original Series who managed to achieve this level of success, both in terms of visibility and creativity, outside the franchise is William Shatner, as anybody who has seen Boston Legal will tell you.

Perhaps it was the moral authority Spock exuded. A less skilled actor almost certainly would have turned the Enterprise's elf-eared "logic" devotee into a one-note joke that viewers would laugh at his first few appearances, but soon find grating once they realized he was one of the main players. Nimoy, however, managed to not only make the character credible, but also engaging. In a show that featured dogs with fake horns, an omnipotent Liberace look-alike, green-painted babes, and a half-black, half-white Frank Gorshin as aliens, this was no small feat. Building on the solid base Gene Roddenberry laid, he contributed invaluably to the image and character of Spock and Vulcans, most notably when he drew inspiration from the Priestly Blessing he grew up witnessing in synagogue to create the iconic Vulcan salute. By basing the famous gesture on one used in religious practice, Nimoy imbued it with a significance that even those who didn't understand it's origin or share his beliefs could recognize.

Of course, the philosophy that the salute represented also contributed to Spock's status as the face of Trek. Although Vulcan logic would be relentlessly deconstructed decades later in Voyager and Enterprise,  it would remain the only viable alternative to Kirk and McCoy's hot-headedness and sentimentalism in the original series' run and subsequent movies. Viable, of course, only because Nimoy could make the character advocating it believable. Indeed, many of the quotes people most identify with Star Trek were said by him. Not the infamous "It's life Jim, but not as we know it" (considering that, you know, he never f***ing said it!), but others like "Live long and prosper" and "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few". It is, however, where these quotes are concerned that I dissent from many of my fellow Trekkers. I've never really cared for the implicit totalitarianism of "The needs of the many" (seriously, doesn't that sound like something the Borg would say?), and live long and prosper, while good-natured and inoffensive, has unfortunately been struck by the damnable curse of oversaturation.

"We are The Many. We need to assimilate The Few. That would be you. Resistance is futile."

I was, however, taken with two of Spock's quotes from the much-maligned Star Trek: The Motion Picture (unfairly, I might add, but that's a post for another day). The first he says just after *spoiler alert* Kirk gives the command to initiate the Enterprise's self-destruct function in the hopes that the subsequent explosion will destroy V'Ger. Spock is crying, and Kirk says he knows it's not for the crew's sake (himself included). Holding back tears, Spock replies,

"No, captain, not for us. For V'Ger... I weep for V'Ger as I would for a brother."

 This was the quote I thought of when I got up this morning and saw the news of his passing. No, I did not literally cry, but I genuinely felt the sentiment it conveyed. It is especially moving given the context. At this point in the Star Trek universe (and, when the movie first came out, in real life), we have seen Spock cry only once. And that was because he, along with much of the rest of the crew, was under the influence of what was essentially extraterrestrial alcohol. This time, the tears were made of his own conscious will. For the villain of the film, no less, whom he compared to a brother. Call it naive (his naivety, you should note though, ultimately saved Earth), call it empathy for the devil, but to me it shows that beneath the facade of cold rationality and thinly-veiled smugness, Spock was a passionate humanist (admittedly a strange word to use in the context of Trek), eager to understand and connect with any being he encountered, even ones that had caused untold amounts of destruction and death. After all, if he could connect with V'Ger, why couldn't he possibly connect with Kirk, McCoy, and the rest of the Enterprise regulars?

The other quote is spoken soon after. As he continues crying, Spock observes:

"Each of us, at some time in our lives, turns to someone - a father, a brother, a God - and asks... 'Why am I here? What was I meant to be?'"

Spock humanizes V'Ger further by drawing parallels between the quests for purpose and meaning we all undergo over the course of our lives. In a universe many times wider than the one Trek portrays, we are bound to be lost and humbled at various points by whatever it throws at us, just like the crew of the Enterprise is over the course of it's five-year mission. But Leonard Nimoy showed us that even in the face of incomprehensible adversity, we can manage to overcome and find meaning in our lives. I like to think that he found that sense of purpose before he beamed up that one last time.

Live long and prosper.