The Internet is toxic in a way that old fanzine culture and fandoms — comics fans, science fiction fans — in those days, was not. There were disagreements and feuds, but nothing like the madness that you see on the internet today. George R. R. Martin once remarked on this, highlighting the stark contrast between past and present fan cultures.
When I worked at Paramount, I met with the producers of Star Trek. They were often frustrated with some of the fans. The producers invested lots of talent and money into their shows, and some of the superfans would complain about the shows, being hypercritical, declaring outrage at the slightest (or grossest) imperfections. The superfans saw themselves as The True Defenders of the Canon, and they looked upon the producers as usurpers and traitors.
There are not enough trekkies to justify the production of Star Trek movies and series. The continuation of the mission depends on general audiences watching the shows too. But when they hear the people that the shows were made for complaining that the shows are terrible, they are likely to stay away.
We saw a similar thing happen to George Lucas and the prequels. The films were not perfect, but they were a lot of fun. What George lacked in dialogue and plotting, he more than made up for in world-building. The superfans sat through many screenings of all of the films, carefully chronicling all of the mistakes, real and imagined. Star Wars was popular enough that that toxic behavior didn’t hurt the business, but it did drive George into early retirement.
This has gotten much worse with social media and YouTube. The superfans now have a much louder voice, greater influence, and the illusion of greater numbers. They are parasites, gaining fame and income by attacking the work of more talented people.
They have been especially vicious to the showrunners of Game of Thrones. The superfans held the show to ridiculously high standards and were merciless when the show failed to meet them. For example, they complained about the presence of plot armor, that the key characters could be expected to survive a dangerous situation because the plot demands it. They claimed that the use of plot armor is a sign of very bad writing. They ignored the fact that this show killed off main characters at an unprecedented rate. This standard has not been applied to anything else. Does James Bond have plot armor? Do the Avengers have plot armor?
Game of Thrones is the best series in the history of television, but the superfans have detailed arguments for why the showrunners are the worst writers in history. The superfans are wrong. The writing on the show was brilliant. That is why a twisted epic fantasy became one of the most-watched shows in the world for eight seasons.
I am really enjoying J. K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beast movies. The superfans hate them. But they don’t hate them enough to not see them. They will see the films, possibly multiple times, and then loudly insist that they were somehow (magically) victimized by the experience, warning the muggles to not see the films. But if the muggles don’t go, there will be no more movies.
I never met Leonard Nimoy, yet he was an important part of my life. My mother introduced me to Star Trek through reruns in the 1970s. She had watched the original (and I think may have secretly had a thing for Mr. Spock). As a young boy, I naturally identified first with Captain Kirk, the swashbuckling hero. But there was always something about Spock that kept bringing me back to reality. Spock represented the logic they were trying to teach us in school, the emotional restraint we were expected to demonstrate in life, and the utopian ideal society was striving towards as we firmly raced through our first space age towards the computer era.
In 1982, I watched Spock die, and cried. In 1984, I cried again at his resurrection. I reveled at each appearance of Nimoy’s Spock in subsequent series and films. Star Trek couldn’t lose Spock. Nor could the public. We needed him. We still need him. What began as Gene Roddenberry’s strange alien, a foil to the emotionally driven human characters, quickly became something we all could identify with. Spock was both what we aspired to and what we feared. Spock, himself half human, represented the very real struggle of a world struggling to keep its humanity. As Kirk says in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, “Of all the souls I’ve encountered in my travels, his was the most…human.”
The loss of Mr. Nimoy was of course inevitable. He faced the same fate that confronts all of us. Even Vulcans die. But Nimoy brought something special into the world. Nimoy’s Spock was more than a character, he was an archetype for the late 20th century. He played everything from the wise sage to the split personality. He even was at times the traitor and the very embodiment of logically-justified evil. More often than not though, his logical perspective saved the day, be it the ship, planet, galaxy, or universe.
Oh, how I wish for the fantasy of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. But to launch Leonard Nimoy into the Genesis Planet, to make whole what was lost would indeed be illogical. Perhaps in this loss, we also find the truth in a Spock quote from the original series: “Change is the essential process of all existence.“
Thank you, Leonard Nimoy, for your portrayal. Thank you for your artistry. And thank you for the mirror reflection back to us.
Source: Robert Baldwin, Before the Downbeat
