FUN FRIDAY: More Spock?

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One of the most beloved characters in the history of television, Leonard Nimoy’s Spock hardly needs introduction or description. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never watched a minute of Star Trek, you know who Spock is. The character excited the psyche of late 20th-century America like no other.

Star Trek has been gone from TV for a decade or so now, a victim of a series of spinoffs that each somehow felt a little less worthy than the ones before. Of course the original stars made a successful jump to the movies forty years ago, and that engine seems to have also run out of steam with the lackluster performance of last year’s Star Trek Beyond.

So will we ever see old Spocko again? Quite possibly.

There’s soon going to be yet another new Star Trek in town, and it will come in the form of a TV series on CBS’ All Access online service. All Access is often called overpriced, with not enough content, but that perhaps is because there is only one network represented, while the service costs as much as Hulu or Netflix. CBS has taken the criticism to heart and is launching a number of new shows for online only, with one of them being a new Star Trek.

Star Trek: Discovery follows a whole new bunch of characters around on a ship that’s flying through a different part of the galaxy at the same time as the old Enterprise from the original TV show. That means that there’s a chance, however slim, that they could run into characters from that old show. After all, the galaxy’s pretty big, but Starfleet is just one big happy family.

With Leonard Nimoy having passed away in 2015, who would play Spock? Would it be Zachary Quinto, who played the character for a decade on film? Perhaps not. In an intriguing interview with TrekMovie, director Adam Nimoy, son of the famed actor, talks about the new documentary he’s making. He’s taking a new look at Trek spinoff Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which aired in the 1990s and was considerably darker than other series that came before. In it, he makes an interesting comment:

Yeah I think […bringing back the Spock character digitally is…] an interesting idea. I loved what they did in Rogue One. I thought it was pretty clever, and I was blown away by it, frankly. All of the stuff that Peter Cushing was doing was mind-boggling to me. I’m a sucker for that stuff. I think it should certainly be explored, but I’m not the final arbiter as to whether it’s going to happen, but I think it’s a great idea, personally. There are more parties involved than just me as to whether it’s going to happen. On a personal level, I think it would be cool.

Now, if the producers of Star Trek: Discovery actually wanted to bring back the Spock character, they’d need the actor’s consent. There aren’t a lot of laws on the books about this but reproducing a character’s appearance is a very risky thing to do in copyright terms and it’s generally agreed that you should get everyone’s permission. It sort of sounds like Mr. Nimoy (the younger) would have no problem with a digital representation of Mr. Nimoy (the older) and it could actually fit in with the universe of the new show.

I don’t know about you, but I’d like to see them try it.

About the Author

Stuart Sweet
Stuart Sweet is the editor-in-chief of The Solid Signal Blog and a "master plumber" at Signal Group, LLC. He is the author of over 10,000 articles and longform tutorials including many posted here. Reach him by clicking on "Contact the Editor" at the bottom of this page.