Leonard Nimoy (1931-2015) a brief reminisce by: GF Willmetts.

In many respects with ‘Star Trek’, Leonard Nimoy as the half-human/half-Vulcan Starfleet officer Mr. Spock became the idiom of friendly aliens. If you look at all the aliens in SF film and television up to 1966, there weren’t many who were. We had a certain Time Lord in ‘Doctor Who’ but even then it wasn’t actually acknowledged he was an alien and then you’d have to dig deep for others like in Roberta Leigh’s ‘Space Patrol’. Even in America, they didn’t want an alien who was totally alien, hence Spock was a human hybrid to make the better connection to human viewers. Even so, Spock’s more demonic appearance wasn’t fully accepted at first but he won over viewers by his more logical restrained approach and became part of history when the odd emotion was allowed to breakthrough.

It became a stepping stone for Nimoy to move into another series as Paris in ‘Mission: Impossible’ and then later into film westerns like ‘Catlow’. When the ‘Star Trek’ films came along, Nimoy wasn’t keen in returning but was persuaded when he proposed dying at the end of the second film. He regretted the choice and ultimately had a resurrection and directed two of the franchise’s most successful films.

Unlike his famous role, human actors can’t live forever and now another of the original Star Trek cast has gone and perhaps the most famous. As shown with the more recent films, the part of Spock will always live on but there will only be one Leonard Nimoy. One can only hope that in the great beyond, he’ll raise his eyebrow and say, ‘Interesting.’

GF Willmetts