1982’s Wrath of Khan, directed by Nicholas Meyer was an homage to Melville’s Moby Dick, reintroducing the character of Khan from the episode” Space Seed”. The film ended with the death of Spock. Although Nimoy was hired to direct the third film, did you think that it was the end of the character?
Image courtesy CBS/Paramount
John Trimble: Nimoy was afraid that he was being hopelessly typecast and he wanted out, so the death of Spock was his means to that end. He later came to understand that Spock would make him rich and changed his mind.
Carol Pinchefsky: Even though I had seen him die onscreen, I couldn’t believe this was the end for my beloved Spock. He wasn’t the beating heart of Star Trek–that would have been McCoy–but he was the cool head. As fans, we recognized that Spock told McCoy to, “Remember.”
Remember what? We knew the question couldn’t possibly go unanswered forever.
Note that this was before the days of spoilers and teaser trailers; this was before the days of announcements in trade websites or on IMDB pages. We had nothing to go on but faith that there are always possibilities.
Jeff Bond: I think with almost all of the original cast Trek films, you looked at them at the time as the last one they were going to do. It always seemed like a miracle when a new Trek film actually got announced, shot and released in theaters. So the impact at least in the first few weeks of seeing The Wrath of Khan in theaters was that they made one more Star Trek film and brought the story to a close. And even though Treks II, III and IV wound up becoming a kind of trilogy, they all end in ways that bring some satisfying closure if you’re a fan of the series. One of the main successes of the first Trek movie was that it gave a satisfying character arc to Spock and Trek II continued that while adding more for Kirk and McCoy, so you could definitely leave that movie feeling like Trek had ended on a satisfying note.
Rich Handley: At the time, yes. As I’d mentioned above, my mother and I shared a love of Star Trek, and so we went to see The Wrath of Khan together in the theater, as we did with Star Trek: The Motion Picture and as we would later do for most of the films since then. And when we left the theater at the end, it was with a numb sadness that the character had died, coupled with our exhilaration at having watched a truly amazing movie. Even though the casket soft-landed, I don’t recall either of us saying “They’ll bring him back next time! He’s alive in the torpedo casing!” He was dead. Once the next film’s title was announced, however, I think it’s safe to say everyone knew he was coming back to life. Can you imagine a movie called The Search For Spock entailing two hours of searching, followed by Kirk throwing his hands in the air and saying “Well… my friends, we… searched. But he’s… really dead. Oh, well.”? No, of course not. 🙂
Peter Briggs: I felt at the time that “Search For Spock” was a cop-out as a piece of filmmaking, after giving us such a great installment in Wrath Of Khan (which is still the best Trek movie, and one of my favourite movies, period.) Sitting in the cinema listening to the opening bars of Horner’s score raise the hairs on my neck, as Wrath Of Khan unfolded in a way I just wasn’t expecting, it blew me away in that amazing 1982 smorgasbord of fantasy movies.
I think it was telegraphed pretty explicitly with the torpedo on Genesis at the end of Wrath Of Khan that Spock would be back, so there were no big surprises when he finally was. I kinda wish we’d never seen those torpedo shots in Wrath Of Khan; I know Nick Meyer didn’t want them in there. Spock is great in Undiscovered Country, so I’m ultimately glad he rose from the ashes. But I feel both Search For Spock and The Voyage Home could have tweaked how Spock returned slightly better. Judith Anderson posing on a mountain with cringy E.T. soundalike music swelling is a pretty cheesy way of achieving it.
Jeff Bond: The Search for Spock has a LOT of problems–the plot itself as far as what is happening to Spock is entirely nonsensical and there’s quite a lot of clumsiness and cheese built into it. But it also has some of the most enjoyable character and action moments of the movie series and some of the finest visual effects and design work. As a fan I absolutely loved that they brought Sarek back (Mark Lenard was always flawless in his performances for the series) and I’m one of the few who found Christopher Lloyd’s Kruge a fantastically watchable villain (and I just read that Kruge is one of Lloyd’s favorite roles). And after The Motion Picture and Wrath of Khan (where Kirk never meets Khan face to face), I also loved climaxing the movie with an old-fashioned fistfight right out of “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” And moments like Kirk and Spock beaming off the disintegrating Genesis planet, the destruction of the Enterprise and the Enterprise being stolen out of Space Dock are some of the most iconic visuals in the series.
Bob Greenberger: I was at Starlog by this time and had inklings he wasn’t dead. It would have been a bold move and it’s one of those could have beens. His resurrection was, ahem, logical, but was it necessary? So much of Star Trek was linked inextricably with Spock that it would have become something different, which might have been good or bad. This was a turning point for the franchise, possibly going in any number of directions as Gene was eased off to the side and Harve Bennett was now in the center seat.
Ian Spelling: Let me set the scene. There was no internet. I wasn’t reading Starlog yet. My friend Jeff and I cut class from high school on opening day and went to see the movie. I was shocked that Spock died. But, I was 18 by then and was avidly going to movies and watching TV shows, and it didn’t take a genius to think that they were planting the seeds for Nimoy’s return with the tube on the Genesis Planet. They did bring Spock back, right?
Larry Young: I was just happy to hear the Alexander Courage theme start it off.
Bill Cunningham: I was in high school when Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out and a bunch of us went on Friday night over to Augusta, GA because it wasn’t showing our tiny town of Aiken, SC. So, after a half-hour trip across the border we pulled into the mall only to discover the line out the door. We parked and waited in line – only to discover we would have to wait until the 10 pm showing instead of the 8pm showing we were hoping for. We waited, but sent one of us over to a pay phone to call one of our parents to let them know we will be home late.
And so we waited… and waited…and waited. Standing in line for two hours is hard when you’re a teenager.
We got into the theater with about 500 of our closest friends while the theater team cleaned up. We all helped them out by tossing trash we found on the floor into their trash cans. We wanted to watch the movie!
Finally, the lights dimmed… and we were off on a new adventure with the crew we had invited into our homes every afternoon. It was amazing, fantastic, and everything we hoped it would be.
Yes, slow in places, but overall an enjoyable experience.
In terms of repeated viewings of the movie, it doesn’t hold up as well, and it doesn’t carry the emotional weight it should. I think that’s because it was a reworking of the “Nomad” story. It would have worked with something fresher.
John Kirk: This is my favourite film in the entire franchise history and it’s precisely because I did believe that Spock was gone. It wasn’t until I realized they were firing Spock’s remains to a planet that was formed out of inert, dead material that I began to formulate the notion of his return. It was a wonderful process of storytelling recovery that gave me such an enjoyable sense of discovery that I was able to re-capture when I watched the film with my daughters and saw the same thing happen to them.
On a side-note, It was also Ricardo Montalban’s best moment, in my opinion. I mean, the man was born to play Khan. His patrician aspect – his Latin, suave nature and physicality – he looked a ruler of men. It would have taken a villain of that caliber to kill someone of Spock’s stature.
But Captain Spock … his promotion at the beginning of the film and his death at the end – it was just too much of a loss to bear. But the way that the audience was led to understand that this was not the end, just the beginning of an incredible resurgence of the franchise that was enhanced by the search for Spock in the next installment. It was such a fantastic story experience.
Image courtesy CBS/Paramount
Jeff Bond: Pauline Kael wrote a great little essay about Montalban’s performance in Khan and even she says that Khan in “Space Seed” was the best role the actor ever got. Coming from one of the toughest mainstream movie critics who ever wrote that was an amazing tribute not only to Montalban but to Star Trek – Montalban wrote her a thank-you letter and was clearly deeply moved by her praise. I love watching him in Khan although I do remember being disappointed by the whole “mad Ahab” approach to the character, which did grow very organically out of Nicholas Meyer’s literary approach, but to me diminished the intelligence and sophistication that Khan showed in “Space Seed.” They almost redeemed that idea in Into Darkness with a more intelligent Khan willing to play both sides of a conflict, but ultimately Cumberbatch’s Khan is just reduced to a manic fistfighting villain. The main downside of Wrath of Khan was that it reduced the Trek movies to a “destroy the villain” format that was rarely deviated from and which never quite fit in with the approach of the more thoughtful TV Treks…
John E. Price: I didn’t experience the movies in real-time, so I always “knew” Spock was alive. But the more I’ve learned and studied narratives and story-telling, man, Spock should have stayed dead. It’s the perfect ending to that movie and Kirk’s journey. And Meyer in his brilliance introduced David Marcus, a character that went nowhere, but had the potential to be so much more: Kirk lost his best friend and brother, but gained a son. It’s a very literary ending and befits Star Trek. Unfortunately, they also like making money, so Spock came back and had sex with Saavik and later the gang went hunting for some whales and a good time was had by all.
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