THE NEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 18, 2019 25
Wars were over, and Zefram Cochrane
had invented the warp drive, surely hu-
manity would find a way to eliminate
awkwardness, along with war, intoler-
ance, avarice, superstition, and other
pressing social ills. I tried to divert my-
self, with this question, from pondering
what it would be like if my father died
while I was sitting next to his bed, in a
sleeper chair, wearing drawstring pa-
jama bottoms and an “Illmatic” T-shirt,
with my stocking feet up on the extend-
able footrest and my iPad, in its key-
board case, open in my lap, writing a
short film about Mr. Spock’s first day
on the job. I wondered if I would see or
otherwise sense the instant when the
hundred billion neurons in my father’s
brain abandoned the eighty-year feat of
electrochemical legerdemain known as
Robert Chabon, and the father I had
loved so imperfectly, and by whom I
had been so imperfectly loved, pulled
off one last vanishing act.
I can give you the exact date of the
first time I ever saw Mr. Spock on TV,
I said. September 15, 1967.
Hmm, I had just started my fellow-
ship at Albert Einstein. We were liv-
ing in Flushing. So you would have
been...?
Four. I must have sneaked out of bed,
or come to ask for a glass of water. I
didn’t know that it was Mr. Spock, or
that you were watching “Star Trek.”
There was just this scary-looking guy
with the ears and the eyebrows. A
pointy-eared woman, too, with enor-
mous hair. Super-scary music, two guys
fighting in a place made out of rocks.
One of them got his shirt slashed open.
It was just a glimpse, and I completely
forgot it until, I don’t know, maybe six
years later, when I saw “Amok Time” in
reruns. And “Amok Time” first aired on
September 15, 1967. The first episode of
the second season.
I had looked up the date on Mem-
ory Alpha, an indispensable online re-
pository of “Trek” lore, when, as a brief
detour from my work on a new series,
“Star Trek: Picard,” I began planning to
write a short film, “Q&A,” that would
feature a youthful Mr. Spock.
“Amok Time,” my father said. The
second-best episode.
Of the original series.
There’s only one series, for me.
I knew my father felt this way, and
understood why, though I didn’t neces-
sarily share the feeling. There was plenty
more “Star Trek” to love. “The Inner
Light,” from “Star Trek: The Next Gen-
eration,” and “Far Beyond the Stars,”
from “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,”
were two of my favorite episodes of tele-
vision, period. But, when I heard the
words “Star Trek,” I never pictured, say,
the conflicted Klingon Starfleet officer
Worf, or the buttock-headed, avaricious
Ferengi, or the sleek, cetacean U.S.S.
Voyager, from later series. I thought of
the originals: Kirk and Spock and their
Enterprise, the NCC-1701.
The best episode, of course, my father
continued, No. 1, is “The City on the
Edge of Forever.” Then “Amok Time.”
Then, No. 3... Ricardo Montalban.
“Space Seed.”
Fourth, the Horta.
“Devil in the Dark.”
It was my job, always, to bother with
the titles.
And five. Hmm.
Come on, I said. Spock with a goatee.
Of course. “Mirror, Mirror.”
There were no surprises here. I’d
heard my father’s Top Five many times
before; in his view, an opinion gained
authority through repetition. Every once
in a while, a dark horse might slip into
the ranking—“The Doomsday Ma-
chine” (he had a soft spot for William
Windom) or “Balance of Terror” (ditto
for submarine movies, of which this was
a variation with starships).
Tough to argue, I said. But, good as
it is, I always have a hard time putting
“City” at No. 1.
In terms of unchallenged quality,
ambition fulfilled, and enfant-terrible
provenance, “The City on the Edge of
Forever,” originally written by the S.F.
wonder boy Harlan Ellison, was kind
of the “Citizen Kane” of “Star Trek.”
But it was a time-travel story, set mostly
in Depression-era New York, and to me
it always felt wrong, though interest-
ing, to say that the best episode of “Star
Trek” was arguably its most anomalous.
“Amok Time” might not be the best,
but I think it’s the most important,
I said.
How so?
By addressing the question of Spock’s
sexuality, and the nature of desire in a
culture that eschews emotion, it makes
the classic fan-fiction gesture: to find aTURN YOUR
CONCERN
INTO IMPACT.
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