One of the many news items coming out of Comic-Con yesterday was that Leonard Nimoy will reprise the role of Spock in the upcoming Star Trek XI. The part will probably be just a cameo, as it was also announced that Zachary Quinto, of the TV show Heroes, will star as the young Spock. And while the young Captain Kirk has not yet been cast, director J.J. Abrams said he also had not ruled out bringing back William Shatner as the older Kirk.
This raises a couple of questions for Star Trek buffs like me.
First, Spock. My understanding is that Spock and Doctor McCoy were both supposed to witness the “death” of Kirk in Generations (1994; my comments), but both Nimoy and the late DeForest Kelley declined to appear in that film, on the basis that they had already said goodbye to those characters in The Undiscovered Country (1991; my comments); the characters were then replaced with Chekov and Scotty, which was odd, because neither of those characters had ever been particularly close to Kirk, and in Scotty’s case, we already knew that he would one day be rescued from a 75-year transporter loop by Captain Picard and would be under the impression that Kirk was still alive. (I believe the fans have since excused this on the basis that Scotty’s memory was affected by the matter loss he endured while he was stuck in the loop.)
Anyway. Has Nimoy since changed his mind? Has the passage of time softened his resistance to such things, a la the switch he made between I Am Not Spock (1977) and I Am Spock (1995)? Or does his endorsement of the current movie suggest that he may have turned down the part in Generations for other reasons — such as, perhaps, a screenplay that wasn’t quite up to snuff?
Second, Kirk. If the older Kirk were to appear in this movie, when would his part of the story take place? According to the official continuity, the events depicted in The Undiscovered Country and the prologue of Generations took place within months of each other, in the same year. And the latter film ended with Kirk dead. So the Kirk scenes would have to take place no later than then. But by the time Star Trek XI comes out in 2008, Shatner will have gotten 14 to 17 years older, depending on which film you use as your reference point. Could Shatner, who is now 76, conceivably pass himself off as someone still in his late 50s or early 60s?
This takes me back to Spock. Given that Nimoy is also 76, and will also have aged 17 years since the last time he played his character — and given that Vulcans usually live twice as long as humans — when will the older Spock’s appearance take place? After the events of The Undiscovered Country? Or perhaps about a century later, after Nimoy’s guest appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation (which aired in November 1991, mere weeks before the theatrical release of The Undiscovered Country)?
Of course, the writers have said the new movie will be a reboot of the franchise, not a prequel, so perhaps none of these questions matter. Perhaps there will be no connections to official continuity at all, and perhaps the film will consist of two old guys looking back across a series of life experiences that we have never seen, and feeling nostalgic for a shared youth that they could never have had in any of the other episodes and movies in which we saw these actors playing these roles. But that would be kind of weird.
BTW, regarding the pictures above, each triptych shows the actor in question as he appeared in The Undiscovered Country (1991), as he appeared in his one subsequent performance — Spock in an episode of The Next Generation (also 1991) that took place 76 years later, Kirk in the movie Generations (1994) which took place less than one year later — and as he appears more-or-less today.
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