Spock begins to demonstrate his unusual capabilities of empathy towards alien others in his mind meld encounter with the silicon-based Horta life-form on the mining planet Janus VI. The workers of the mineral production station are menaced by a hideous creature they are not sure they have ever seen. The beast has allegedly killed more than fifty of them, apparently via exudation of a highly corrosive mixture of nitric, hydrochloric, and hydrofluoric acids. Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock are the first to get a clear look at the low to the ground, slithering being as it moves with great speed through the underground labyrinth of caverns and tunnels.
The rampaging creature has left security guards like Schmitter, played by Biff Elliott, and several maintenance engineers “burned to a crisp.” It seems to possess the ability to burrow through solid rock, since a number of new tunnels have been noticed that are not on mine charts from as recently as one year earlier. The horrific killing began three months ago, after the miners started a new excavation operation on mineral-rich level 23. As Chief Engineer Vanderberg, the administrative head of the highly automated colony, played by Ken Lynch, explains to Kirk, Spock, and other landing party members, machine parts that the miners put in place on the newly opened level mysteriously disintegrated, and a multitude of unidentifiable spherical silicon objects were discovered in the same area. The colonists would like nothing better than to definitively terminate the atrocious monster so they can get on with their normal work of extracting rare and valuable plutonium-based pergium, as well as uranium, platinum, and gold, from the hard rocks exposed by their shafts and drifts.
Spock, however, deduces from various pieces of evidence that the enigmatic entity is intelligent, and that the caves are its natural habitat. It must be capable of rational thought, the Science Officer conjectures, because it stole the one item of equipment, the corrosion-proof moderator perfusion pump, vital to the functioning of the PXK uranium fission reactor used by the mining colony residents for heat, electrical power, and life support. Since the creature was not injured by a blast from the type one phaser technology fired at it by production chief Ed Appel, played by Brad Weston, it must be constitutionally different from a carbon-based life-form. Only the latter genus of life is damaged by directed-energy phaser beams. Spock reasons that the alien entity must be silicon-based in its elemental composition. The dark grey silicon nodules with a light oxide outer layer found by the miners must be its eggs.
With a “supercritical” meltdown of the antiquated reactor looming, perhaps forty-eight hours of breathable oxygen still available, and the miners’ anxiety level rising, the senior Starfleet officers must act quickly to find the unknown alien being. They assemble a search team on level 23, and enter the serpentine complex of tunnels. Mr. Spock adjusts his tricorder to pick up traces only of “silicon life.” Moments after one of the Enterprise security men is fatally attacked, Kirk and Spock espy the crawling, rock-like creature just meters away from them on the tunnel floor. The animal makes a rattling sound and charges them.
The Captain and the First Officer shoot the creature with type two handheld phasers. It escapes rapidly despite being wounded, instantly cutting a new passage through the stone walls. Detecting that it has come to a standstill a few thousand yards from their position, Kirk and Spock separate into parallel tunnels to continue the hunt. Alone in a small chamber, Captain Kirk’s options for movement are narrowed when rocks from above suddenly collapse around and behind him. The bulky life-form appears and blocks his way, as Kirk becomes aware that he is trapped within the creature’s inner lair.
But the multi-colored alien beast does not menace him. Observing its hesitant moves, Kirk sees the deep gouge in its side where its fibrous silicon skin was ripped away by the phaser beam. The entity is too severely injured and in too much pain to attack. Although it is afraid of Kirk’s weapon, it stands its ground in a protective posture, close to the many silicon nodules embedded in the wall.
Mr. Spock arrives at the clearing in the rocks with a raised phaser, but Kirk tells him not to shoot. The Enterprise‘s second-in-command instead initiates the Vulcan technique of the joining of two minds to attempt a reciprocal communication. Spock closes his eyes and concentrates his mental powers. He comes within a few feet of the obscure alien, which is in obvious agony from the phaser wound, and establishes a first telepathic contact.
Spock screams out in torment and collapses to the ground. “Waves and waves of searing pain,” he emotes. The animal slides wormlike to an open space, then moves again, leaving a three-word message in broken English branded in the ground: “NO KILL I.” The open-ended, grammarless utterance is neither unambivalently indicative nor imperative. Is it a promise or a plea? It is unclear whether the Horta, as Spock has found out the alien being is called, is asking that its life be spared or stating that it will not kill further.
Spock touches the Horta with outstretched hands, fingers separated in pairs as in the Vulcan salute that Leonard Nimoy derived from Jewish Kohanim tradition. He reenters the trance, and begins a genuine communion with a true alien other. He becomes, for one instant, the voice of this last of a dead race whose offspring are about to hatch in renewal of life, but are threatened by holocaust. “The thousands, eternity ends, it is the end of life, murderers, go out into the tunnel, to the chamber of the ages, cry for the children, walk carefully in the vault of tomorrow, sorrow for the murdered children, sadness for the end of things, it is time to sleep, it is over, death is welcome, let it end here.”
Mr. Spock breaks with notable difficulty from the spiritual copula. With tears in his eyes, he explains to Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy (who has been called in to try to heal the wounded creature) what he has learned. The highly intelligent, sophisticated, and normally peaceful Horta species has lived underground on Janus VI for millions of years. Every fifty thousand years, all Horta except one die out. The sole survivor is responsible to care for the unhatched eggs of the coming generation. The miners broke into the nursery on level 23 and unknowingly killed hundreds of the silicon spheres, which were unrecognizable to them as eggs, with their operations. The “mother Horta” only became bellicose in defense of its unborn children.
With this new recognition of the Horta’s reality, the miners agree to peaceful co-existence with the alien creature and its offspring. The reactor pump is returned. The pergium excavators begin to see the young Hortas’ natural-born aptitude for digging tunnels (“they move through rock the way we move through air”) as an economic asset to their business enterprise.
After getting past his first reaction that “I’m a doctor not a bricklayer,” McCoy abets healing in the life-form composed of stone and plastics with some inventive medical treatment. He trowels over the phaser-induced gap in the Horta’s epidermal plating with thermoconcrete.
All parties are left to contemplate what Mr. Spock has accomplished with his remarkable empathy towards otherness. In his making contact with the starting point of the monster, there is an important truth-lesson for Spock’s own existential struggle as a cyborg.
The most fruitful insights to be gained from working out the concept of the cyborg require going beyond the popularized and trivialized definition of the cyborg as an entity combining organic and machinic parts. Mr. Spock as techno-cultural figure can above all be grasped within the cybernetic paradigm of a self-regulating information-processing machine built for purposes of command, communication, and control. But examining without prejudice the major early Star Trek episodes that feature Spock discloses that he can also be understood as a cyborg in the important second sense fleshed out in Donna J. Haraway’s thinking. Spock turns out in these canonical stories to be a creature of fractured identity, permanently existing at the problematic boundaries between previously defined dichotomous entity attributes – human and nonhuman, human and machine, self and other – which have more and more lost their distinct opposition. The dissolution of these rigidly antinomical categories should make us aware that traditional humanism and anthropocentrism are being brought into question from the standpoint of radical recognition of others and broader appreciation and ethics of life itself.
Cyborg Spock shows himself to be capable of enlarged apprehension of that which is other than myself, and uncommon sensitivity towards our joint kinship with animals and machines. Spock’s ongoing search for freedom in these crucial Original Series episodes occurs in the shadow of his hybrid and initially awkward circumstance as a life-form made by technoscience. “As my parents were of different species, my conception occurred only because of the intervention of Vulcan scientists. Much of my gestation was spent outside my mother’s womb.” (Leonard Nimoy, I Am Not Spock) Spock is an illegitimate offspring of technoscience. His dual predicament leads to a “slightly perverse shift of perspective” and to starting out on a subversive quest for an own “identity.” (Donna Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto) But it must be an “identity” that is non-essentialist and willingly accepts contradictions.
Cyborg is the mode of resistance to the mode of techno-bio-power of the first order of cybernetics. The simulating and seductive android resists the second order. The body without organs or nomad in reversion resists the third.
Spock transmutes in the direction of a heterodox, many-layered, and trickster position that is no longer satisfied with the established truths of either of his – Vulcan or human – heritages. Facing his situation as a “processed” technological being with exceptional machinic skills, he moves away from the model of the mastering subject patterned after a tool, and towards the expression of his real self that starts from the other. This affirmation grows from sustained dialogue with interlocutors like the Horta, or between Spock and his double.
Spock’s Double
Leonard Nimoy is an accomplished actor and film director generally more interested in the inherent values of his Thespian craft than in pure commercial success. He has always had a deeply ambivalent relationship to his significant media other. Nimoy wrote two books about his half-Vulcan double, entitled I Am Not Spock (1975) and I Am Spock (1995). In both volumes, the Jewish-American graduate of Boston College’s drama school writes his best passages when he goes beyond the Paramount Pictures and Simon & Schuster money-making imperative to report on the insider history of Star Trek,and instead engages in conflictual inner dramatic dialogues with his alter ego.
Nimoy says that these exchanges with the imaginary yet hyper-real “Spock” were “a philosophical discussion about whether or not an actor was the character he played.” (I Am Not Spock) Living in a television-addicted society which made a cult of Star Trek as an alternate fantasy world which in effect really exists, Nimoy was identified by people in elevators and on the street as being the character whom he had played. It can be extrapolated that what bothered the veteran actor with deep roots in the Yiddish theatre was the hyper-reality (“more real than real”) of the Star Trek phenomenon, promoted by the culture industry and tens of millions of fans, which profoundly betrays the literary and artistic ideal of fiction transmitted in Nimoy’s educational background. Fiction is a necessarily inexact mirror held up to incite self-questioning on the part of the audience.
The best episodes of Star Trekembody the theatrical ideal of reflexive doubling and shadowing, as in Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect, of the existential reality of viewers.
Leonard Nimoy’s anxiety in the 1970s about being “consumed” by the character of Spock was a remarkably sincere admission of the reversibility of the relationship between the classical actor and his role. As a scene of intensively invested fantasy, the role “plays” him.
The tactile contact of fingers and hands plays an important role in Nimoy’s portrayal of Spock and shaping of the symbolism of Vulcan culture. Spock dispatches a special energy from his fingertips. He signifies a state of anxiety through the trembling of his hands.
Nimoy derived the Vulcan salute, where the fingers of one hand other than the thumb are separated into touching pairs, from a ritual gesture of the orthodox Jewish High Holiday services he remembered from childhood. The priest tribe Kohanim’s blessing of the congregation with their dexterous shaping of the Hebrew letter shin intimates the proximity of writing and eternal spirit. This comes close to the Kabbalist creative force of Shekhinah, the appearance of the sacred in the world, or in the opening up of the sense of the world.
The touch telepathy of Vulcans is suggestive of Donna J. Haraway’s ethic of radical technoscience projects. Her scholarly resolution is that we must be part of the world into which we inquire. There is an interdigitation between techno-scientific and cultural practices. Relational science studies is like a game of intellectual cat’s cradle played on several pairs of hands. (Haraway, How Like A Leaf)
Mr. Spock was originally designed by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry to look like the devil. With his foam rubber pointed ears, diagonal yak-hair eyebrows, and yellowish-green skin tone, Spock was supposed to “project a sense that there was danger lurking within him, a darker half that might take over at any moment.” (I Am Not Spock)The half-Vulcan’s diabolical appearance, toned down at NBC’s request after The Cage, was intended at the beginning to evoke incomprehensible strangeness. This suppressed double remains always present.
Spock’s renowned divided self issues from his condition of being torn between two cultures or senses of who he is, and his discontent with both of his inherited identities. What surprisingly emerges from the dilemma is an almost accidental new subjectivity or mutated experimental way of life, generated as a side effect by technologies. Spock has many more doubles – third-culture kids in living rooms all over virtual America – with multiple screens and digital techniques for potentially recoding and reinventing Artificial Life.
Without Spock’s complex, conflictual, and literary relationship to his double, there is no Star Trek at all.
Spock has no language to express his striving to become a cyborg in Haraway’s double sense — as someone who belongs to a real scientific history yet seeks a new radical sense of self. He must slowly figure out which elements of his human side and which elements of his Vulcan side to weave together to give form to his cyborg identity, which is not an identity in any conventional sense.