Word: spock
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...down was like a phaser to the heart. Trekkies (or Trekkers, as many prefer to be called these days) have always existed in something of a parallel universe of TV viewing. They're the ones who can debate for hours the merits of the episode in which Mr. Spock mind-melded with a bloblike alien called the Horta, or the one where Captain Kirk time-traveled back to the Great Depression and fell in love with Joan Collins. They know the scientific properties of dilithium crystals, they have memorized the floor plan of the Starship Enterprise, and they...
...People have not gotten a real sense of what Star Trek fandom is really all about," says Leonard Nimoy, who played Mr. Spock, the superrational, pointy- eared Vulcan on the original series. "I talk to people in various professions all the time who say, 'I went to college to study this or that because of Star Trek."' Jonathan Frakes, Commander Riker on The Next Generation, concurs: "If you go in looking for geeks and nerds, then yeah, you'll find some. But this is a show that doesn't insult the audience. It is intelligent, literate and filled with messages...
...about the nature and meaning of being human. The endless parade of evil aliens and perverted civilizations -- from the bellicose Klingons to the pernicious Borg, with their hivelike collective consciousness -- was always contrasted to the civilized humans on board the Enterprise. The most popular characters were the nonhuman ones -- Spock, the "logical" Vulcan, and Data, the soulless android -- precisely because they were constantly being confronted with the human qualities they lacked: the emotions they either scorned (in Spock's case) or craved (in Data...
...pilot for the series had pleased NBC. The show, which Roddenberry produced in 1964, starred Jeffrey Hunter as the captain. But NBC wanted changes, and by the time a new pilot was done, Hunter had dropped out. One actor who remained from the first pilot was Nimoy as Mr. Spock -- though only after Roddenberry persuaded NBC not to drop the character. The network had other alarming suggestions: at one point, Roddenberry recalled, NBC executives suggested that Spock smoke a space cigarette, to please a tobacco-company sponsor...
...from the effort to combine the two TV casts for a passing of the torch in the new movie. Nimoy declined a role after he saw how small his part would be. "I told them," he says, "'The lines that you've written to be spoken by somebody named Spock can be easily distributed to any of the other characters on the screen."' Which is what happened: Captain Kirk appears with two lesser members of the old crew: chief engineer "Scotty" (James Doohan) and Ensign Chekov (Walter Koenig). Several members of the Next Generation cast, meanwhile, were less than thrilled...