Illogical, Captain: was Spock really a police lieutenant?
been trying to get my son into Star Trek.
Not the new movies, but the original TV series, Kirk, Spock, Dr Mccoy and all.
Now, I piqued his interest by telling him that Scotty, the engineer, was supposed to come from Scotland, but his favourite character is Spock.
I know he’s an alien, from the planet Vulcan, but can you tell me where the inspiration for the character originally came from? – G.
From the Los Angeles Police Department!
Of course, we all know the character of Spock was played by actor Leonard Nimoy in the TV series from 1966-69 and in several of the Star Trek movies. The character was invented by writer and producer, Gene Roddenberry.
Texan Rodenberry was raised in Los Angeles and was an airline pilot in the late 1940s but decided his future lay in writing for television.
The ideal training ground for that, he concluded, was the LAPD, the Los Angeles Police Department.
There he encountered chief of police William Parker. The pair enjoyed long philosophical talks, and Roddenberry remembers the legendary hard-line chief as being almost a liberal on some subjects.
“He played the right-wing autocrat, but there was another side to him,” Roddenberry recalled.
The future creator of Star Trek was impressed with Parker’s openness to new ideas and his diverse intellectual interests.
Years later, these became characteristics of Spock and his philosophy of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations”.