There are many obituaries of Leonard Nimoy being written and published in light of his passing today at the age of 83. I will not add to them. I won’t pretend to offer insights into his life or even his career as an actor and director, which spanned six decades. Instead, I will mourn the passing of his most famous character, Mr. Spock from Star Trek.
I watched a whole lotta Star Trek growing up. Way too much, no doubt. When I was in elementary and junior high school, it was running fast and furious in syndication. In New York City that meant every evening before or during dinner on WPIX channel 11.
Probably about 200 nights per year for several years I watched an episode of Star Trek. There were only 88 total episodes, so you can do the math.
The peak of my devotion came in late junior high school. My friend Erik and I took the subway from the Bronx down to the Penta Hotel in Manhattan, across the street from Madison Square Garden on 7th Avenue. They were hosting a Star Trek Convention and Nimoy was the guest speaker.
I didn’t really know what to expect. All I knew was that I loved the show and was curious about delving deeper into it.
After half-a-day traipsing through the convention, I realized there was something else going on. Some kind of fetishism among these hardcore fans that held no appeal for me.
The clichés about “Trekkies” were just beginning to develop. Men who couldn’t get a date, lacked social skills, and lived in their parents’ basement, back when a grown man living with his parents’ was considered a spectacular failure at adulthood.
Today we call them geeks, or maybe nerds (I still have no idea what the difference is) or accuse them of being somewhere on the autism spectrum. Back then they were simply losers. Later on they invented the internet.
I didn’t have any disdain for the Trekkies. They just didn’t seem like much fun. Their affection for the show was different than mine. It was more of an obsession that expressed itself in hyper-attention to mostly uninteresting details.
Nimoy’s talk was nice. He seemed like a regular person. He was graceful in answering a cascade of questions that seemed, even to a 13 year old, phenomenally stupid.
I more or less stopped watching Star Trek after that. No direct causal link. I just got into other things as a teenager.
But the show held up. I’d catch an episode here and there in my 20s, and it was still good. Better than I’d remembered in some ways. It was a curious thing.
The special effects had aged badly. The sets were shoddy. Jokes about cardboard boulders, Captain Kirk’s insatiable libido for green women, and the average life expectancy of a red-shirted security guard were de rigeur. Yet the show was still more than watchable. It was quite good for the most part.
One factor was the undeniable chemistry among the actors. Nimoy’s Spock, William Shatner‘s Kirk, and Deforest Kelley’s Dr. McCoy clicked in a way that was uncanny. Three very different actors, playing three very different parts, created a greater whole.
Centering it all was Nimoy’s Spock. He only had second billing, both in the cast credits and in the USS Enterprise’s chain of command. But you knew that was a ruse, some kind of acquiescence to convention and human ego. After all, Mr. Spock was far and away the smartest, 
strongest, and most talented person on the ship. Yet he was content playing second fiddle to the horny, ham-fisted captain.
There was something profound in that. And the half-alien had moments of humanity as deep as anyone, whether verbally sparring with the cantankerous doctor or confessing his innermost secrets.
The other characters in the cast also synced in a way that seemed effortless. The whole thing hummed, giving me a good appreciation for just how important acting chemistry is to a successful TV show.
But the other thing about Star Trek was that, despite the endless parade of action sequences, it was actually very adult on some levels. It took chances. It strove to be something bigger than just another action show. One friend, who’d also enjoyed it as a kid, later talked about it as a series of morality plays in space.
It didn’t always work, of course. But the effort was there. And when it did work, it could be quite moving as characters grappled with the fuzzy boundaries of morality and life’s meaning.
In one 1st season episode entitled “This Side of Paradise,” Enterprise crew members visiting a planet are overcome by plant spores that make everyone not care about anything anymore. You do some spores and you’re all groovy and carefree. Far out, man. It’s a typical 1967 drug metaphor. But it’s not black and white.
Even Spock falls in love with an old flame (played by Jill Ireland) as the entire crew eventually abandons the Enterprise and beams down to the planet below. Kirk of course fights through it all and regains his senses at the last minute, and he then forces Spock to do the same by stirring up the half-Vulcan’s dreaded emotions and making him angry. A fight ensues, Spock nearly kills Kirk, but snaps out of it before he does, and then returns to his normal, stoic self. Together, Kirk and Spock save the day and soon all is back to normal for the crew.
At the end of the episode, Kirk and Spock are on the deck. They’re talking about what almost happened. Spock stares into the void of space and confesses, quietly and with a sense of mourning:
“For the first time in my life, I was happy.”
And that’s it. Cue the outro music and closing credits.
Watching that episode last year, I found it unexpectedly heart wrenching. The man of logic and reason had one shot at real happiness, at love. But it was taken away from him, against his will. He’s been drawn back to duty and responsibility. And he accepts that, even though he knows he will probably never again be truly happy. It was his one moment of great joy, and now it’s gone. The end.
As a kid, that episode was about the epic fight between Spock and Kirk. As a man in his forties, it was about the kind of human pain that’s difficult to even consider, much less talk about openly.
Goddamn if I won’t miss that green-blooded Vulcan.