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Character Spotlight: Spock

By Ames

Last week we highlighted (and lowlighted) James T. Kirk here in our new blog collection, going character by character where no one has gone before. It’s going to be a bit of a trek in and of itself, so join us here on A Star the Steer Her By to learn what we think of all your Starfleet favorites: when are they at their most naughty and most nice. This week, we’re moving on to the best first officer in the fleet and one of our favorite Vulcans, the ever logical Mister Spock!

For the franchise’s first major alien character, he succeeded in teaching humanity to audiences throughout his far-reaching tenure, and that wasn’t always his human half! Credit to Leonard Nimoy for giving us such a well-rounded character even though he couldn’t display emotions in the same fashion as the others (but boy did he find a way!). Follow along below for our thoughts on Spock’s best and worst scenes, and listen to some bonus chatter over on this week’s podcast episode (discussion at 1:05:00). Fascinating.

[Images © CBS/Paramount

Best Moments

Checkmate, Finney It’s been a minute since I released my blogpost about how bad I am at 3D chess (and all chess for that matter), but Spock’s so great at it that he uses his logic and big Vulcan brain to figure out the chess program is busted in “Court Martial” and save the day, which might be the Spockiest thing I’ve ever heard.

Pain! Pain! Spock mind melds a lot of critters throughout the shows and movies, but one of our favorites is when he connects with the Horta in “The Devil in the Dark.” Like in our Kirk spotlight when the captain defended the old girl, we’ve gotta credit Spock with communicating with her and treating her like a sentient being. And Nimoy’s acting in this scene! Mwah!

A man of integrity in both universes The Spock in “Mirror, Mirror” isn’t exactly our normal Spock, as his circumstances in the mirror universe have made him a different person in a lot of ways (mostly in the facial hair region). But in even more ways, he’s just like our Spock: someone who sees the illogical nature of the Terran Empire and who will take steps to make it better.

I love you but I hate you I don’t know why, but I’m just thoroughly tickled when Spock outwits the androids in “I, Mudd” with a logical paradox that breaks their computer brains. Sure, he tries a neck pinch first (he is Spock, after all!), but it’s telling the Alice robots, identical in every way, that he loves one but hates the other that causes them to malfunction all over the place.

Trademark Vulcan sass If Vulcans are allowed to express one emotion throughout all of Star Trek, it’s sass, and Leonard Nimoy can deadpan with the best of straightmen. In “The Trouble with Tribbles,” McCoy remarks that tribbles are “nice, they're soft, they're furry, and they make a pleasant sound,” to which Spock quips, “So would an ermine violin, Doctor, yet I see no advantage to having one.” Grade-A Vulcan sass right there.

Gladiatorial mind games “Bread and Circuses” may not be a good episode, but it gets the Spock-McCoy dynamic right. Not only does Spock save McCoy in battle, but that scene in the prison cell… I could write essays about that scene as they’re both so vulnerable and desperate to connect, but Spock, ever the Vulcan, represses that emotion… just barely. And when Spock tells McCoy that they share concern over Kirk’s safety without actually telling him, it’s perfect.

Vulcans are incapable of lying, he lied While we found Kirk’s behavior in “The Enterprise Incident” utterly baffling, Spock’s is thoroughly intriguing. He spends most of the episode seamlessly deceiving the Romulan Commander who’s thirsting after him so hard, and she plays right into his Vulcan-saluting hands because she didn’t anticipate so many loopholes allowing Vulcans to be duplicitous!

The wonders of the universe Am I mostly bringing up Spock mind melding a giant cloud in “One of Our Planets Is Missing” so that I can bring up my TOS fanfiction “Sentient Life”? A little bit.

I have been and always shall be your friend This list would not be complete without the beautiful sacrifice scene in The Wrath of Khan. The needs of the many do indeed outweigh the needs of the few in this perfectly poignant and amazingly acted character death. I can’t think of a better main character death in all of Star Trek and Nimoy crushed it.

Rock out with your Spock out We’ve also got to give credit to Leonard Nimoy for the Vulcan neck pinch, a nonviolent, nonfatal deescalation tactic that is perfectly in character. It is a great inclusion for such a logical people to manage violent conflict in a mostly harmless way, and one of our favorites is neck pinching the punk on the bus since it’s also one of many great comedic moments in The Voyage Home.

They are not the hell your whales Speaking of The Voyage Home, we’ve got more good Spock moments to choose from in that movie! It is such a smorgasbord of quippy, fun moments for our resident Vulcan because so much of the movie is that fish-out-of-water kind of humor, but everything Spock has to do with the whales, George and Gracie, is especially excellent.

Cowboy diplomacy We even get to see a little Spock action in The Next Generation when his plan to reunite Vulcan and Romulus gets revealed in “Unification.” It is such a noble goal from our logical friend (perhaps spurred by his encounter with the Romulan Commander in “The Enterprise Incident”? Nudge nudge!) and we loved seeing his resolve and commitment to helping his square-shouldered cousins.

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Worst Moments

Beep twice for “NO!” I get that the studio wanted to save time and money by using the footage from “The Cage” in “The Menagerie,” but they had Spock acting fully out of character to make it happen. He kidnaps his disabled old captain against his will, he conspires to steal the ship, he puts the lives of everyone on the Enterprise in danger, he nearly gets Kirk killed in a shuttle, he creates an illusion of a flag officer! It’s a full-on mutiny that sees no consequences!

Life-or-death decisions, but mostly death “Strange. Step by step, I've made the correct and logical decisions – and yet two men have died,” says Spock in “The Galileo Seven.” Somehow, every time we see Spock in charge, everyone has a really bad day. The show would make you believe it’s because Vulcans only act on logic with no emotion or intuition, but they really need to stop leaving the ship in his hands!

Not even a grandfather paradox – just a father paradox Temporal shenanigans abound in “Tomorrow is Yesterday” when the Enterprise is forced to beam up Captain Christopher. Spock assures everyone that the displaced pilot will have no bearing on history, until he is forced to eat those words because this science officer neglected to check if Christopher’s son would be influential. Since when is Spock so careless?

A need-to-know basis We joked throughout The Original Series that Vulcans seemed to attain a new superpower each week. And since Spock just doesn’t seem to tell people things they need to know until they really need to know it, we don’t learn about his inner eyelids until “Operation: Annihilate!”, his parents being onboard until “Journey to Babel,” or his having a half brother until Star Trek V!

This has pon farr enough I’m frankly sick of everything about pon farr, and am dreading revisiting it in Enterprise. It’s yet another one of those Vulcan aspects they won’t tell you about until too late, and in “Amok Time,” it’s way too late. The whole biological circumstance is weird enough, but if Vulcans has told us any of their rituals ahead of time, Spock wouldn’t have had to kill his best friend in the kal-if-fee like a chump.

Heil Spock While it’s mostly a gag on the podcast that Spock loves Nazis, there’s definitely a reason why we think that. In “Patterns of Force,” Spock agrees with Gill when he calls Nazi Germany the most efficient state Earth ever knew, saying: “Quite true, Captain. That tiny country, beaten, bankrupt, defeated, rose in a few years to stand only one step away from global domination.” Does that make Spock a Nazi? Not entirely, but it would explain some things, like how quick to wanting to kill Mitchell he was in “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”

What a tangled web he weaves Like in “The Galileo Seven,” Spock ends up in command again when Kirk is presumed dead in “The Tholian Web,” and he borks it. The whole episode is about him and McCoy snipping at each other because of the effects of the area of space, but they’re both extremely out of character even without it, with Spock ignoring Doc’s warning about getting stuck in the web, making awful decisions, and generally being terrible at leading a crew.

If only I could forget We found it weirdly nonconsensual when Spock decides to make Kirk forget about his romance with Rayna (and who knows what else?) in “Requiem for Methuselah.” McCoy jabs at Spock that he’ll never understand, and then Spock seems to act just naively when he takes Kirk’s memory in his sleep, as if Spock were taking him literally when Kirk said he’d rather forget.

Behind every good woman… is Spock taking credit We’ll surely bring up “The Lorelei Signal” when we talk about Uhura’s best moments because it’s a rare moment for the women to get the spotlight, but there’s a moment in this episode in which, despite the lady crewmembers having already figured out the ploy themselves, they’ve hatched their plan “in accordance with Mister Spock’s request” and I vomit in my mouth a little.

You have not achieved kolinahr It’s pretty clear that the production team didn’t know they’d have Leonard Nimoy back for The Motion Picture until late in the writing process because his motivation is spotty at best. Since he has not achieved kolinahr, he rather makes his presence in the movie about himself, and to make matters worse, he yeets off to mind meld with V’ger without telling anyone!

I hear he's nutty as a fruitcake As beautiful as the death scene in The Wrath of Khan is, it’s also pretty messed up for Spock to cram his katra into McCoy with no warning and with dire effects. Think about it: none of the humans knew before The Search for Spock that katras were even a thing, and Bones could have gone insane just for the sake of bringing the character back to life, negating that great sacrifice!

They flung their wooden shoes called sabots into the machines We love a good mind meld on Star Trek, but Spock just plain crosses a line in The Undiscovered Country when he mind rapes Valeris to expose her as the saboteur. Considering the mind meld was first created in order to give Spock an alternative to violent action to combat assailants, using it in a way that’s so violating is the most uncomfortable moment we could think of.

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Keep your medical tricorders scanning here as we continue along through all the main characters from The Original Series! Next week, we’re scanning for Dr. Bones McCoy here on the blog, as well as continuing our watchthrough of Enterprise over on the podcast. You can also send a message over subspace on Facebook and Twitter, and keep your damn katra to yourself. Live long and prosper!

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