star trek: it's all fun and games until somebody loses a planet

>SPOILER ALERT<

The first nightmare I ever had, or the first one I can remember, had Kirk and Spock in it. It involved the mixing of magic potions that looked like buckets of paint: the brown one was a healing salve and that was for Captain Kirk, the blue one was a toxin and that was for Mr. Spock. I, however, managed somehow to sit in the blue bucket and when I stood up and looked at my hands, three of my fingers were gone: two from the left hand, one from the right.

One of the many thousands of things my mother did right in raising us was that we watched the original Star Trek faithfully from the first episode to the last. I was two when it first aired, and I guess I slept through most of it, but by the third season I can remember a serious discussion between my older brother, my mother and me, about whether or not we'd be allowed to stay up for the new nine o'clock airtime on Friday nights to watch. (We were. She was and is a total champ.) I can very distinctly remember that first surreal time I saw Abe Lincoln sitting in the middle of space talking to Captain Kirk. I found the use of his word "negress" when addressing Lt Uhura slightly embarrassing although I couldn't place why. Apollo was the first Greek God I knew about because he's the only one who ever appeared in an episode. To this day I mistrust the Earps and suspect they were the worst of the bad guys at the OK Corral. You could say with some truth that everything I knew about life before the age of seventeen I learned from Star Trek, Shakespeare, or Hollywood.

Mr. Spock was my first great love, and remains one of the few fictional figures from my childhood who still resonates strongly in my underconscious as an adult. That's all prologue to the admission that I went into this new Star Trek with some trepidation, and emerged with wildly mixed feelings. On the one hand, I don't remember the last time I had so much fun sitting in a theatre. It had me from the first moments: that lovely, stoical Captain Robau (Faran Tahir) going to his death at Romulan hands, the woman in labor in the midst of deadly chaos while her husband sacrifices his life to save hundreds... I'm weeping just thinking about it. And after that, it gets downright delightful.

Here are some things I love: Simon Pegg is a brilliant Montgomery Scott, for one, and the Endorian Mud Flea vaccination scene between Bones (Karl Urban) and Kirk (Chris Pine) is hilarious. My sincerest gratitude and joy go out to Anton Yelchin and whoever wrote this script for turning Chekov into what he ought to have been all along. (Apparently this is the young man who plays Kyle Reese in the new Terminator movie, or "Kyle FRICKIN' Reese" as an outraged blogger put it in a recent rant. He seems an unlikely choice to carry the Michael Biehn sultriness, but after the perfection of his Chekov, I'll give the boy plenty of room to take his shot.) It's also exactly right, very satisfying, that Kirk gets the crap beat out of him again and again, like a repeating motif. It's the only possible counterweight to that young Kirk arrogance, and we wouldn't put up with him without it. The Lens-Flare-As-Futuristic-Aesthetic tactic is bold but works for me, and the Romulans are fantastic, with their ferociously antisocial look. I could gaze upon Eric Bana's mutated face for some hours and feel that my time was well-spent. There are fierce ice-bears! And crazy giant snow-lobsters! And how about Scottie's little sidekick, eh?

As with most fun, however, there's a downside. All credit to these guys for doing the research, learning the mythology, then creating a credible time disruption to explain the many changes they make. That said, I'm just not ready to live in a universe in which Vulcan has been destroyed and Spock and Uhura spend their time kissing. (Yes, you could argue that I've lived my whole life in a universe that didn't have Vulcan in it... but you'd be wrong.) It kills me that a whole generation of kids, maybe multiple generations, will grow up thinking that this alternate history is the true one, the important one, relegating the original, the Star Trek that thrives, a living universe inside my head, to the status of the passe, the mendacious, or, at best, the secondary. On the one hand, you have to admire any approach that brings this kind of vitality into what had become an inert franchise, but at what cost?

Consider Mr. Spock. The beautiful thing about Spock, one of the crucial factors which lift him above the meager ranks of Character and into the realm of the Archetype, is that he is, ultimately, the Man Alone. Because his Vulcan and human halves vie in neverending and always fascinating conflict, he walks alone, by choice and necessity. And as a direct result of it, he belongs to all of us. Any fantasy can be projected onto him; he can fit into almost any story; it's why so much slash fiction has been lovingly devoted to him over the years. He is a brilliant embodiment of the war between the left and right halves of the brain, that age-old moral dispute between making one's life-choices from the heart or from the mind. As such, he is a vital and never-aging animus projection whose ongoing drama offers lessons for anyone who uses the current homosapiens version of the bicameral brain.

This new Spock, I fear (very well played by Zachary Quinto, he of the impossibly kissable mouth... see above), will be reduced to the status of mere romantic hero. If he continues (in the inevitable sequels) on his current path favoring his human side over his Vulcan, Spock takes a step backward out of his previous greatness into a life of possible happiness, but little more. No doubt he will serve the Federation and Captain Kirk with loyalty and glittering hyperintelligence as before, but we as a people will have lost a hero of larger-than-life nobility, wisdom and self-sacrifice. At the risk of blaspheming, I'd like to submit into evidence the following example: remember the Last Temptation of Christ? The devil lets Willem Dafoe step down off the cross and live a happily married life with Barbara Hersey's Magdalene, and at the natural end of it he realizes with some horror that he has betrayed the very heart of what he was set on this earth to do, thrown aside his own greatness of purpose for some scant years of human contentment.

Call me alarmist, but I fear that our Spock is about to make a similar mistake.