But as midnight passes and I can't find anything to watch on my 400 or so channels before I go to bed, I find myself reconsidering and beginning an entry. I am not sure how it will form itself.
Much of my sensibility no doubt will accord with that of many an erstwhile child of the sixties. Mr. Spock was an alien within and without, to himself and to those who tried to understand him, even to become close to him. But I am getting ahead of myself, though I have no idea where I am going.
So, let me begin with my discovery of the show, and the character. A number of the 30 little girls of my seventh grade class had adopted as their alter egos as many of the characters of the Bridge crew of the Enterprise as were available. So, for example, though I don't remember most of who adopted whom, I do remember that Janice Mitchell was Spock. I hadn't seen the show, but this Spock seemed interesting. He was, as I understood it, a half human, half alien member of the crew. The honor of being one of the lesser appearing crewmen, Lieutenant DeSalle, a navigator, was bestowed upon me.
Well, now that I was a crewmember of sorts, one 1967 night I must have convinced my parents to watch it with me on our small-ish black and white television. We had not yet ventured into color having experienced the all too bright orange that seemed to merge into every other color on the screen of the one we sampled in my cousin's apartment, just over the roof from us (our buildings were connected). We came in half-way to the episode.
Here was my first view of Mr. Spock.
I was a bit confused because though he clearly had the face of the logical alien I had heard about, he was acting more like a human being, telling his commander that he should join this throwback 19th century like community on Omicron Ceti III that had been infected by spores that made everyone feel love and belonging and safety--and protected them from lethal radiation that was bombarding the planet. Mr. Spock had been able to express his feeling of love, ("I love you; I can love you.") long suppressed along with all other feelings forbidden to him despite his half human side, for a young woman, named Leila, he had known six years before on earth. In this episode, he had been freed from the rigidity that usually defined his existence and he, along with the whole crew, were resisting their duties. They had no needs under the influence of the spores. The captain, up to here, had not been exposed to the spores and he was fighting to keep his ship. And he wasn't having any truck with this paradise manufactured by the spores. He went so far as to say that man wasn't made for paradise., but was meant to fight and claw for everything. I was coming into the show seeing a Spock that usually didn't appear on screen..
The Captain was ever so briefly under the influence of the spores--which sprayed on him as he quietly lamented his fate on the bridge. They had been beamed up by the affected crew thus infecting the rest of the crew and leaving the ship with no one to man it. But, being the primary star of the show, the Captain had to throw off the effects without any outside aid, and becoming angry suddenly about giving up the ship he loved, he came back to himself. Strong negative emotion--that's what would defeat these benevolent marauders. Every time I watch the show, and I did today, a day after I began this entry to remind myself of what I first saw when I was just a little girl of 13, on the edge of puberty and already in the great struggles that transformation engenders, I feel a pang of deep sadness at what Captain Kirk does to his comrade and friend so he can get the help he needs to restore the Enterprise crew and to relocate the colonists. He lies to the Vulcan who waits with Leila on the planet surface. He says he needs help to bring a few things they might need on the planet. And when the peaceful Vulcan who has embraced his human side courtesy of a symbiotic relationship created by the spores beams to the ship, he says horrible things to him to goad him into an anger that will cause the spores to flee. He calls him a traitor from a race of traitors. He goes after the Vulcan's parents, a human mother, who was a teacher and an Ambassador whom we have not yet met born of the planet Vulcan. And then he pushes harder, calling him an overgrown elf with a hyperactive thyroid who has a nerve to make love to Leila. Spock is stronger than most humans because of his Vulcan side and he attacks in an anger he rarely ever expresses any more than love. And with the spores gone, he begins to help the Captain rig something that will cause the crew on the planet to come to their senses and leave a peaceful, calm, but ultimately, unproductive (in the larger sense) life aside.
Leila senses something wrong and Spock knows he cannot protect her from reality, that they will never be together. She comes off the transporter platform and puts her arms around him, and as many years before, he does not respond. He explains how the spores are defeated.
"And this is for my good?" she says rhetorically. She begs him to come back. They couldn't be happy on earth, they couldn't be happy anywhere except here. What he says to her in what I have always felt was among the best underplayed but intense depth is this, "I am what I am Leila, and if there are any self made purgatories, mine can be no worse than someone else's.". She asks if it is all right that she still loves him. She asks for a first name that he has never given her. He wipes a tear from her eye, with a slight smile he allows without the influence of the spores, and notes, "You couldn't pronounce it.".
The status quo is restored. The Enterprise is out there again exploring the universe. Whatever brokenness within any of the crew, within Mr. Spock himself, is also restored. Asked by the Captain why he has said so little about the adventure, he admits something we all regret he has lost, ", , ,for the first time in my life, I was happy.".
And so introduced to Mr. Spock, I was hooked. There had also been a peek at the good old country doctor, McCoy, that I would come to love as only second to Spock. The cowboy Captain Kirk played by the now single surviving major star of the series, William Shatner, was a necessary bridge (no pun intended) between the two characters I loved most, Spock and McCoy, although as the series and the movies developed what has been called the "bromance" between Spock and Kirk tended to be the focus (those of you who are Trekkers or Trekkers, or whatever you are as fans will remember the line quoted all this week, "I have been and always will be, your friend." )
And yes, they were my friends too. I was entranced and even a little motivated by their integrity, their passions, their sense of mission. I felt connected to them when the kids at school "pretended" to be part of the crew. I felt a sense of belonging that I did not feel at home. There was a time that I looked to others to explain that feeling. These days it no longer matters. It is only a fact that I felt, probably as many kids feel at that age, as I had always felt that some part of me was forbidden to be expressed to the world. Those of you who know me well know that for years I believed that my mother did not much like me, let alone love me. I always had the sense that, after nine years of marriage, my sudden arrival after my parents took a rare trip--to Montreal--was an accident, and for my mother, not a happy one. My dad, always the master of ambiguity once said to the only direct questioning I ever offered on the subject said, "You weren't not wanted in that sense." I came to understand that she was a deeply disappointed soul, who probably married too young and wanted an entirely different life than the one she had. I also realized she did love me, but like Spock himself, she could not express it, except by providing for me and demanding of me. Oh, there were lots of psychological tides and eddies and I spent a lot of time in my room escaping--again not unlike many other kids--but a little too wrapped up with my "friends" of television.
As Spock wanted to be without the mask, largely of his own creation, but couldn't do it, so did I want to be without my mask, ultimately largely of my own creation and I couldn't do it. Where closeness and intimacy were problems for him, they were problems for me. My very name refers to a creature that is not human, that is often a changeling, left in place of a human child. I hated the name as a child, and yet it was entirely apt. When I got into my teens I wasn't part of the thrills of the Woodstock generation, though I was nominally one of them. I wasn't making love which I was told was de rigueur now that we had thrown off the fifties and were in the enlightened sixties and seventies. I wasn't even managing dates.
Leonard Nimoy's Spock would appear from time to time, either reminiscing about his days on the too quickly cancelled series, or as the late seventies arrived, reprising the role that in the recesses of my being I probably felt sustained me at some level. Let's say, stabilized me. I would find some very real people who did that for me, and I would engage in a lengthy period of therapy that allowed me to accept myself, but Mr. Spock and Leonard Nimoy's understanding of him and portrayal of him, development of him--to moments of his own self acceptance--were pivotal to this baby boomer.
My guess is many baby boomers have their versions of Spock's influence on their lives as developing adults. This is a bit of mine.
The actor and the character he created had an indelible effect on the culture, on the planet. Look at all the NASA tweets, all the men and women who wanted to become astronauts, or engineers, because of Star Trek, because of Mister Spock, the outsider with whom they identified.
The phrase "Live Long and Prosper" is a perfect greeting and perfect farewell. For after all that is the thing we try to do, and in the guise of our better selves, wish for others.
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