berry’s original conception of the show,
Number One was the expressionless,
rational, cool-tempered crew member,
“almost glacier-like,” according to the
episode’s teleplay, “in her imperturb-
ability and precision” (glaciers evidently
having become more precise by the
twenty-third century). Spock, by con-
trast, was decidedly warmer, his ani-
mated face and voice freely expressing
such emotions as alarm, concern, relief,
and even an almost childlike delight,
when, having beamed down to the sur-
face of the planet Talos IV, he encoun-
tered that singing flower and broke out,
in a way that never got less disturbing,
no matter how many times one saw it,
in a toothy grin. The pretext for my
script, the hole in the quilt, was the lack
of any “in-universe”—or “Watsonian,”
as opposed to “out-of-universe,” or
“Doylist”—explanation for Spock’s tran-
sition from expressive, even unreserved,
to thoroughly glacial.
The Doylist explanation, by the way,
was sexism. The NBC brass of 1965, in
rejecting “The Cage,” are said to have
been unable to tolerate the idea of a
woman as second-in-command of a
starship in 2266. In reconceiving the
show for the second, successful pilot
(“Where No Man Has Gone Before”),
Roddenberry transferred Number One’s
emotionless, “cerebral” cool to Spock.
Codified as “logical,” it became the
defining characteristic of all Vulcans,
creating the one-species, one-trait tem-
plate—a kind of intergalactic racial pro-
filing—that haunts the worlds of “Star
Trek” to this day. When Barrett returned
to the cast of the regular series, she had
been demoted, and safely confined
within the role of the innocuous, love-
lorn Nurse Chapel, whose only distin-
guishing trait was her unrequited—un-
requitable—desire for the character to
whom Barrett’s husband had fed, as it
were, the soul of Number One.
Many early fans tended to despise
Nurse Chapel, in particular the female
fans who essentially created modern
fandom—arguably the dominant cul-
tural mode of our time—in the pages
of Spockanalia, The Crewman’s Log, and
other pioneering zines. They saw her as
unworthy of the formidable Mr. Spock,
embodied by Nimoy with banked fire
and clean-limbed grace. But, if Chris-
tine Chapel was a relative nullity, there
was nonetheless an insight, canny and
poignant, in the Chapel-Spock dynamic,
the tension between one who longed
for recognition, connection, and a re-
turn of love and one who was, by train-
ing if not by nature, incapable of deliv-
ering those things. That incapacity, and
the hope that it might be cured—the im-
perturbable perturbed, the ice thawed—
was a crucial element of Spock’s attrac-
tiveness, and not only to women, and not
only in a sexual sense.
Spock was unreachable, disengaged,
remote, forever caught up in his research
and his work. He sought relaxation in
solitary intellectual pursuits, and seemed
ill at ease in a crowd. He was loyal, and
steadfast in the face of trouble, but he
was not available. And yet now and then,
in extreme situations, often under alien
influences, Spock would be seized by
transports of rage, or joy, or sorrow, the
emotions disinterred from their burial
site inside him. The feeling was there,
deep and molten—volcanic—held in
check by dint of constant effort.
In “Star Trek”’s imagined future, amid
the rocks and under the red alien skies
of Spock’s home world, Vulcans called
that unflagging effort a “philosophy,”
enshrined its founder, Surak, and looked
with cool condescension on those who
did not submit to its regime. But, as Iwould discover as an undergrad in the
halls of the Philosophy Department at
the University of Pittsburgh, a redoubt
far stauncher than the planet Vulcan of
a logic far fiercer than Surak’s, the Vulcan
way had little to do with philosophy
and even less to do with logic, and there
was certainly nothing alien about it. It
was just good old repression, of the sort
practiced by human fathers, among oth-
ers, for many long and illogical centuries.I
love Mr. Spock because he reminds
me of you, I said.
I put aside the iPad, climbed out of
the sleeper chair, and went over to the
bed. It was past four o’clock in the morn-
ing. My father swallowed. He breathed.
Every so often, his breathing gave way
to the raw but nugatory cough that had
plagued him since—and had perhaps
been triggered by—the Reagan Admin-
istration. Only now each cough ended
in a strange mewl that might have been
pain but sounded more like frustration,
like the whine that entered his voice
when he was tired of your arguments,
tired of your nonsense. He never opened
his eyes, but now and then his features
began to approximate a facial expres-
sion—surprise, annoyance, skepticism—
before slackening, as if in a failed attempt
to mark the meteoric passage across his“Not while they’re making artisanal bread.”