I've always wanted to be Spock. I wanted to be competent, a scientist, a musician, a leader, good with computers, and most importantly, an officer on a starship. Also super-strong, why not.
And I wanted to be free of emotion. Still do. I have no control over the stupid things and they are nothing but trouble. Spock denies that emotion is necessarily the cornerstone of respect, friendship, kindness, care, even self-sacrifice; in his role as 1960s camp Space Socrates, he insists that the good life can be built on logic alone, indeed must be. And: the scripts bear this out. It's all true. Kirk gets in some one-liners about the value of human emotion, but Spock wins the argument in a landslide. Not by rhetoric. By his life.
Of course... it's all a lie, a lie the Vulcan culture tells itself endlessly in the hope of making it true, to survive and to keep itself sane. But even this on consideration becomes something beautiful, glorious, something to aspire to.
Do I even need to point out the parallel with Star Trek itself? Why are we still telling ourselves this utopian fairy tale? Because it's entertaining, right? Like Transformers.
Or because inspiration could just possibly become action, and the fable, destiny.
RIP Leonard Nimoy
27 Feb 2015