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'For the Love of Spock' clip highlights Leonard Nimoy's 'Star Trek' legacy

By Stephanie Topacio Long August 25, 2016

The 50th anniversary of Star Trek: The Original Series is fast-approaching, and there are numerous ways to celebrate the Enterprise and its crew. Spock fans, in particular, will appreciate the upcoming documentary For the Love of Spock, which explores the lives of both the iconic character and the actor who played him, Leonard Nimoy.

Gravitas Ventures released a clip from the documentary today, and it shares the touching story behind the documentary. First conceived of by Nimoy’s son, Adam, it was a project both father and son were working on prior to Leonard’s death in February 2015. Planned as a look at Spock, the documentary then shifted gears and expanded its focus to include Nimoy himself.

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Nimoy and Spock’s legacies are evident right off the bat. The clip opens with a scene from an episode of CBS’ The Big Bang Theory in which Sheldon (played by Jim Parsons) tells the gang about For the Love of Spock and explains its premise: “It’s about Mr. Spock and his impact on our culture,” says Sheldon.

The very fact that characters on a hit sitcom, now 50 years later, are known to be fans of Star Trek shows just how big of a cultural phenomenon the series — and subsequent franchise — has become. Parsons speaks to its influence in the documentary, so it is not just his fictional character who loves Spock. Fittingly, The Big Bang Theory honored Nimoy after his death, and later, got Adam to make a cameo on the show.

Footage from interviews with Adam also appear in the For the Love of Spock clip. He discusses his father’s excitement about the project and how his death influenced the project.

“It became clear that the film needed to include his life as well as the life of Mr. Spock, and that in turn led me on a journey of self-discovery about my relationship with my father,” he says.

In addition to Adam’s insight, the documentary includes contributions from big names in the Star Trek franchise, such as William Shatner, George Takei, J.J. Abrams, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, and Simon Pegg. For the Love of Spock hits theaters and on demand on September 9.

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Stephanie Topacio Long

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Stephanie Topacio Long is a writer and editor whose writing interests range from business to books. She also contributes to…

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The 10 most underrated Star Trek episodes ever, ranked

Captain Benjamin Sisko holds a smiling baby in the DS9 episode "Children of Time."

In the Futurama episode Where No Fan Has Gone Before, the wisecracking robot Bender describes Star Trek as having “79 episodes — about 30 good ones.” And, if we're being honest, Bender's not wrong. Across the franchise, there are now roughly 900 canonical installments, and out of a field that large, there are naturally dozens, even hundreds of entries that you can simply disregard. Of course, like any fanbase, Trekkies contain multitudes, and we don’t all agree on which episodes deserve the scrap heap.
One fan’s space junk is another fan’s latinum, and there’s no accounting for taste. We’ve selected ten episodes from across the history of the franchise that some fans might tell you to skip, but that we think deserve your attention. Is one of your dark horse faves on our list? Have we gone to bat for an episode you wish would be erased from the space-time continuum? Follow us to the salvage yard and find out…

10. The Time Trap (TAS season 1, episode 12)

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The 10 best Star Trek: Voyager episodes, ranked

Captain Janeway gives a speech on the bridge of the Starship Voyager

As much as fans love to praise Star Trek as groundbreaking science fiction, it’s important to remember that, for most of the franchise’s history, Trek was weekly procedural television. Until the streaming era, each series was churning out roughly 26 episodes a year, and by the later seasons of Star Trek: Voyager, some of the creative crew had been in the business of making Star Trek for over a decade. The franchise was a crossover commercial success, the kind of success that the money men like to leave exactly as it is for as long as it’s doing steady numbers.
The operation was essentially on rails, and there was a lot of pressure from the studio and the network to keep it that way, which accounts for the general blandness of Voyager and the early years of its successor, Enterprise. The waning years of Trek’s golden era were plagued by creative exhaustion and, consequently, laziness. Concepts from previous series were revisited, often with diminishing returns, and potentially groundbreaking ideas were nixed from on high in order to avoid upsetting the apple cart.
That’s not to say that Star Trek: Voyager isn’t still a solid television show, and even many Trekkies’ favorite. The saga of Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) and her gallant crew finding their way home from the farthest reaches of the galaxy may not be as ambitious as it could have been, but it is steadily entertaining, which is why new and nostalgic fans alike enjoy it as cozy “comfort viewing.” For our part, however, we tend to enjoy the episodes that have a certain emotional intensity or creative spark, that feel like conceptual or stylistic risks. As such, you might find that our list of the 10 best Voyager episodes differs greatly from some of the others out there. We like when Voyager dared to get heavy, or silly, or sappy, or mean. So, without further ado, let’s raise a glass to the journey ...
Like Star Trek? Then check out how do I get into Star Trek?
10. Counterpoint (season 5, episode 10)

Counterpoint drops the audience into the middle of an ongoing story,in which Voyager is boarded and inspected by agents of a fascist government, the Devore. The Devore treat all travelers through their space with suspicion, but are particularly concerned with capturing and detaining all telepaths, who they view as dangerous. Despite the risks, Captain Janeway is attempting to smuggle a group of telepathic refugees to safety, all while putting on a show of cooperation for smiling Devore Inspector Kashyk (Mark Harelik). Much of the plot takes place in the background, obscured from the audience in order to build suspense. The real focus is on the evolving dynamic between Janeway and Kashyk, a rivalry that simmers into one of the Voyager captain’s rare romances. Kashyk works in the service of what are, transparently, space Nazis, but when he offers to defect to Voyager, can his intentions be trusted?
Beyond its intriguing premise, Counterpoint is a particularly strong production with a lot of subtle hints of creative flair. Director Les Landau and director of photography Marvin Rush, who had been both working on Star Trek since the 1980s, shoot the hell out of this story, breaking from Voyager’s even lighting and predictable camera moves to make some very deliberate choices that build a great deal of tension around what is essentially a bottle episode. The makeup team, supervised by equally seasoned Trek veteran Michael Westmore, supplies a memorable and imaginative makeup design for an alien astrophysicist who appears in all of two scenes in this episode and is never utilized again. Most of all, Kate Mulgrew provides what may be her most subtle, human performance in the entire series, embodying Janeway’s famous conviction and strength of will while also granting a rare glimpse at her more vulnerable side without ever straying into melodrama.

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The 10 best Star Trek: The Original Series episodes, ranked

Captain Kirk, upset, buried waist-deep in Tribbles.

It’s hard to imagine today, but back in the late 1960s, the original Star Trek was not considered a hit. The ambitious science fiction series was constantly on the brink of cancellation and was cut short only three years into its planned five-season run.
However, it’s important to put Trek’s apparent failure into historical context as, given that most markets in the U.S. had only three television channels to choose from, even a low-rated show like Star Trek was being watched by about 20% of everyone watching television on a Thursday night, or roughly 10 million households. This year’s season of HBO’s Succession was viewed by roughly 8 million households a week, which makes it a hit by today's standards. Star Trek’s audience only grew once it went into reruns in the early 1970s, and by the time Star Trek: The Motion Picture hit theaters in 1979, it was a genuine cultural phenomenon. Today, the Star Trek franchise is considered one of the crown jewels of the Paramount library.
Though arguably outshined by its most prosperous spinoff, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: The Original Series holds up remarkably well for a vision of our future imagined nearly 60 years in our past. It’s a space adventure series that tackles social or political issues from what was, at the time, a daring and progressive perspective informed by the contemporary civil rights movement, sexual revolution, and backlash against the Vietnam War. Conveying these values through fanciful science fiction didn’t only allow its writers to get away with a lot of subversive messages, it also delivered them in a way that remains fun to watch decades later — fun enough that fans are willing to forgive when its ideas, or its special effects, crumble under modern scrutiny.
These 10 episodes, however, unquestionably stand the test of time, and thanks to the continuity-light nature of mid-20th century television, any one of them could be your first Star Trek episode. (Be aware, however, that the order in which classic Trek episodes are listed varies depending on the source. For our purposes, we’re using the numbering from streaming service Paramount+.)

10. Mirror, Mirror (season 2, episode 4)