Spock
“I find your argument strewn with gaping defects in logic.”
I’ve already talked about badass starship commander James T. Kirk on this site (and in one of my books), but I’ve been massively remiss in my duties as webmaster by not singing the all-too-deserved praises of one of science fiction’s all-time greatest First Officers and perhaps the greatest paragon of nerd hero awesomeness to ever drop a fucking telepathic mind-meld on a polar bear and then go off to Vulcan nerve pinch space Nazis unconscious while surreptitiously hitting on evil Romulan space babe military commanders. The only alien on the crew of the Starship Enterprise, this master of the Vulcan Bladed Q-Tip Death Implement was a stoic iron-jawed green-blooded logic machine who hated babies and idioms, looked good in a fedora, mastered the fine art of shit-talking and adamantly refused to suffer fools who thought they could try and match wits with his razor-sharp alien space brain.
Even fifty years after he stomped balls all over the Styrofoam sets of outer space, this time-traveling battle scientist is still the most chill emotionless automaton in all of sci-fi. He’s the guy you call when you need exposition on what the hell is going on with the story plot. He’s the guy you call when you need someone to build you a thermonuclear warhead out of alien materials you found on a planet nobody has ever heard of before. And he’s also the guy you call when you’ve been accidentally teleported back to 13th-century Mongolia and you need an alien commando to quickly take out three of Genghis Khan’s henchmen in a series of badass open-hand Vulcan Pimp Slaps before they can raise the alarm. He’s Gandalf, MacGuyver, Snake Eyes and Neil Degrasse Tyson with pointy ears, green blood, and a super-strong musculo-skeletal system that lets him punch through lead pipes with his fists.
“If this is your god, he’s not very impressive.”
- Spock, after meeting God
Spock was born on the planet Vulcan to a Vulcan father and a Human mother, but like a good badass he did everything he could to suppress his human nature and live as a single-minded ultra-stoic Lawful Neutral stoicist who based life-or-death decisions on logic, reason, and stone-cold badassitude. The first Vulcan in Starfleet, he was posted on the Enterprise under James T. Kirk, where he served as First Officer, Science Officer, computer expert and the dude everybody runs to when they need to figure out how to time-travel using nothing more than a warp drive and the materials available to the United States Air Force in 1969 (Answer: You slingshot around the moon, reach Warp 10, and teleport forward in time to 2200 AD… no bigs). He discovered that you could cold-start a warp drives by blowing it up with a controlled explosion, which is every bit as insane an idea as you might think, beat everyone’s ass in 3D chess, shredded the Vulcan lute like a cold-blooded Yngwie Malmsteen, and once flew a shuttlecraft into a space amoeba so he could detonate an antimatter bomb inside it and save billions of people from being devoured by a star system-sized space-born parasite. When Khan, an ancient evil dictator, took over the Enterprise, he flooded the ship with gas to knock him out. When Khan came back, Spock sacrificed himself by going into a plasma core to save the ship, died a slow agonizing death, then came back from the dead like some kind of post-Transcendental literature symbolic Christ-like figure or Optimus Prime.
He also has a Mirror Image Evil Twin that rocks an awesome diabolical goatee and becomes the Emperor of Earth. This version of him basically fights the entire crew at the same time using Spock’s time-honored hand-to-hand martial arts system of double backhand bitch slapping everyone in the face, throwing them into tables, and then ripping off flying double-hammerfists to everyone from Kirk to Uhura, and only gets taken out when Kirk clubs him in the back with a marble bust of some old composer or some shit.
"Nowhere am I so desperately needed as among a shipload of illogical Humans."
Well sure, Vulcans are emotionless and awesome and don’t scream out like whining crybabies just because they’re being horrible mutilated and tortured to death, but they’re also a savage people who kick balls even when the balls they’re kicking aren’t located in the same spots most species keep their balls. Spock rules because he gets pissed, hits on chicks, and cracks jokes, then ascends to Ultimate Hipster God Mode by ruthlessly shit-talking Humans who do the exact same thing but with less style and class. Sure every once in a while he gets captured and tortured, or some alien babe pulls out his brain, but even when he and Kirk were abducted by the Fascist Space Gestapo he fucking made a laser beam out of a transponder and a lightbulb and burned his fucking way straight into the Fuhrer’s skull with it. Then he negotiated a peace treaty with some other race, ended a centuries long war, and ran the underground resistance against the Romulans before packing up his six string and heading to the bikini beach party planet for shore leave just for the hell of it. In his decades-long career with the Federation he received a chest full of medals, was made a Federation Ambassador, killed his evil brother and told Space God to shut the fuck up and suck on some photon torpedoes.
I mean, there’s a reason the Vulcan sexy time death match is called Pon Farr, and it’s because you travel a far distance to get Powned by Spock after he pummels you with an American Gladiators implement to impress some Vulcan space chick in a skimpy outfit.
Spock was portrayed by Leonard Nimoy, who passed away today at the age of 83. A badass in his own right, Nimoy was a poet, musician, photographer, and life-long actor who invented the Live Long and Prosper sign, served two years in the Army, wrote two books, produced a half-dozen albums and directed Three Men and a Baby of all things.
But rather than sit around feeling sorry and being all sad and everything, let’s go full Vulcan instead and watch a badass supercut of the greatest episode of Spock’s long and badass career, then spend the rest of the day humming the awesome Kirk-Spock Ultimate Cage Match battle song every time we attempt to do something even a tiny bit cool: