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Sometimes I’ll be going about my day, minding my own business, and I will remember the JJ Abrams destroyed the planet Vulcan in his Star Trek movies and never did a single narratively meaningful thing with it.
What would’ve been daring is if, after destroying Vulcan in the first Star Trek movie, the new series made Spock the center of the story instead of Kirk. Then it would’ve been the story of a genocide survivor and the other handful of survivors who could relate to him.
Spock’s consistent avoidance of violence except as a last resort would be tinged with melancholy because his own civilization was destroyed by violence, the very outcome Vulcans hoped to avert by embracing logic over emotion.
Of course his human half would want revenge. This would’ve been an intensification of the internal logic/passion conflict already present in TOS. This conflict would amplify the character’s quest to avert violence in future storylines.
But instead of something like this we got Mr. Spock being a glorified sidekick to Kirk yet again and being an afterthought in a lot of major sequences while Kirk dealt with his daddy issues, which nobody except JJ Abrams cares about.
I know it’s old news and it’s not even in the top 1 million of things to be angry about but it still makes me mad. A great character was done dirty. And for no good reason at all.
I was hoping that if they were going to stick to that “Vulcan is destroyed“ storyline we would at least see Spock engaged in a series of complex relationships with other genocide survivors throughout the remaining films, basically Enemies: A Love Story in space.
Also, Zachary Quinto is a great actor, and if the new Star Trek movies had concentrated on Spock he might’ve had an Oscar nomination by now.
