In Memoriam: Leonard Nimoy
For anyone who knows me well or is just an acquaintance, there is a strong likelihood that you know I am a Trekkie. Star Trek in all its iterations is more than a television show for me. I wrote my college essay on a single episode of DS9. I have started just about every paper I’ve written since my junior year of high school with a quotation from Star Trek. Today, Feb 27, 2015, Mr. Spock died.
For me, Leonard Nimoy has always been more than merely an actor playing a character on a television show. He is a member of my family. My parents were both working during my youth and on Thursday nights growing up, we got take out (a rarity in my house) and sat down as a family and watched reruns of Star Trek. It was the one family activity I could count on each week besides our normal dinners. On Thursday nights, we ventured into the great unknown with Captain Kirk, Hikaru Sulu, my favorite character at the time because he was one of the only Asians I ever saw on TV that wasn’t a nerd or a villain, and of course the person who would become my favorite character, Spock. When I was young, it was the sense of adventure, the aliens they encountered, and the action that caught my attention, but those weren’t the reasons my parents were so devoted to the show.
My parents married during the Civil Rights Era. They faced the hardship of being an interracial couple during a time when that wasn’t accepted in much of the country. For them, Star Trek spoke to the same idealism as Martin Luther King spoke of. The same sense of social justice that Bob Dylan spoke about. The same sense of hope about the human race that the Kingdom of God promises. For them, having us watch Star Trek as a family was teaching me about their ideals.
Spock became my favorite character as I grew up because he was one of the only people of mixed race I saw on a regular basis. He was half Vulcan and half human and when people saw him, they assumed he was Vulcan, but upon returning home, he is never Vulcan enough. Nimoy was known for playing outsiders and loners. He found his most enduring role in Spock, one that I truly identify with.
And then, he grew tired of playing Spock; blamed him for his casting limitations and wrote a very famous book titled I am not Spock. It surprised no one who followed Nimoy’s distaste for the character that he asked to be written out of the series in the second film The Wrath of Khan. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was the first time I ever cried watching a movie. Seeing Spock die and deliver his incredibly immortal words to Captain Kirk, “I have been and always shall be your friend. Live long and prosper,” still haunt me. I think the real surprise came when Leonard Nimoy agreed to return to play Spock again.
Leonard Nimoy’s eventual embrace of Spock (his second autobiography I am Spock) changed his life. He was probably right that he was type casted after Star Trek and who knows the career he would have had had it not been for Star Trek. I am reminded of an interview with another Star Trek actor, Rene Auberjonois, who plays Odo on Deep Space Nine. Rene said that he struggled to accept the part because he worried that he would become like Leonard Nimoy, type cast, and only be remembered for this one role in his career. (Alec Guinness felt the same way about Ben Kenobi) Eventually Rene said he realized isn’t that the dream of every actor? To be remember as someone other than yourself? What greater compliment could be paid to an actor? Leonard Nimoy played Spock, but later in life, he became Spock.
Leonard embraced his role as Spock, appearing in The Next Generation episode “Unification Parts I and II”. What an incredible episode. Spock showing his human side more than ever suffers from the loss of his father and the arguments they will never settle. Leonard playing this with such ease, showed both Spock’s unemotional response and his deep resentment and depression. He says to Captain Picard about his father, “No [it is not important that I win one more fight against my father], but I will miss the fights… they were finally… all we had left.”
When J.J. Abrams decided to restart the series, he called upon Spock to appear in his movies to give them an authenticity that Nimoy was more than happy to provide. Indeed, his brief appearances in both films were highlights of those movies.
And then, there was another seminal TV moment. Watching the end of the first season of Fringe, Olivia Dunham tried for the entire first season to find the scientist William Bell, Walter Bishop’s former partner and current CEO of the most powerful biotech firm in the world, Massive Dynamic. Finally, she is told that she will meet the man she has been searching for all this time. They needed an actor who could carry the weight of those expectations that had been building for an entire season. You hear William Bell before you see him. Upon hearing his first words, I started screaming, because I immediately recognized the voice of Spock, the voice of Leonard Nimoy, and no one else could have played that role as well either.
Star Trek has come to mean so much to me because like the obelisks in 2001: A Space Odyssey Star Trek has marked important events in my life. I watched the original with my family when I was young and still needed the guidance of both of my parents. I began watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my family, but my father decided he didn’t like the show, so it became my mother and my show. I began to grow up, letting go of some of the need for my parents. Then my mother and I started watching Deep Space Nine together and she decided she didn’t like the show. So it became my show as I was indeed growing up. Star Trek Voyager ended my senior year of high school to coincide with the end of a major part of my life. But besides being just markers of major events, Star Trek became for me what my parents hoped it would. Unlike my parents, I am a pessimist. Star Trek is that rare gift that actually cuts through my negative world view and gives me hope that one day mankind can grow out of its infancy and evolve into a people without greed, or selfishness, or war, or disease, or poverty. Leonard Nimoy gave me that dream and I cannot thank him and all the actors, writers, directors, and of course Gene Roddenberry enough. And now… the unthinkable has happened for me. Spock is dead. For Leonard, Spock, who was the character I most identified with, I can merely repeat Captain Kirk’s final words memorializing his friend: “We are assembled here today to pay final respects to our honored dead. And yet it should be noted, in the midst of our sorrow, this death takes place in the shadow of new life, the sunrise of a new world; a world that our beloved comrade gave his life to protect and nourish. He did not feel this sacrifice a vain or empty one, and we will not debate his profound wisdom at these proceedings. Of my friend, I can only say this: Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most.... human.
