Life Without Spock

You will have heard by now that Leonard Nimoy is dead.

I’ve been struggling with what to write, knowing that I wanted to write about him and Spock but not sure how.

I discovered Star Trek (both TNG and TOS) at age 12, right around the time I entered school after homeschooling up to that point. Junior high school (middle school to you Americans) was…not an easy transition. I didn’t know pop culture or slang or teen humour. I was bookish, awkward, nerdy. Of course I thought I was the only one who felt unsure and out of place.

Is it any wonder I fell hard for both Data and Spock?

I identified most with Data. Like me, he was awkward, he didn’t get jokes, he struggled to understand humans. He was cerebral and science-minded and insatiably interested in the world. He also didn’t have emotions (until later), which held a certain appeal. I remember cocking my head to one side and saying “Intriguing.” In retrospect, it was probably a good thing that most of my classmates didn’t watch Star Trek.

But while Data was me at 12, Spock was who I aspired to be. He didn’t exactly fit in either, and he struggled to find his place at times. But he was also a central member of the bridge crew–he, Kirk, and McCoy between them solved most of the problems that the Enterprise faced, while teasing and bantering back and forth. He was dignified and intellectual without being completely emotionless like Data; his feelings were locked down tight, but they still existed. (And with the right person and in the right circumstances, they might be unlocked — a fact that wasn’t lost on me either. Of course I was in love with him, just as much as I wanted to be him.) If Data was the innocent, Spock was the adult, fully-realized version–the one to learn from.

That was the Spock of the TOS years. Then came the movies, and that devastating scene in The Wrath of Khan when Spock saves the ship and Kirk can’t pull off one more miracle for his friend, can’t even touch him at the end. (I watched it again this weekend, of course.) And then Spock’s friends steal a starship and risk their careers to get him back, and he comes back but he’s not the same anymore and has to work to integrate his two halves….

Now that’s storytelling. But I digress.

By the time I was watching that story arc, all the TOS movies had been made and maybe he’d even had his wonderful cameo on TNG, working towards peace with the Romulans. (Spock, like Leonard Nimoy, was a mensch.)

So I already knew Spock lived.

I guess I thought he always would.