‘Star Trek III’ at 40: The Story of How (and Why) Leonard Nimoy Brought Spock Back After Being Killed Off In ‘The Wrath of Khan’

Star Trek is an enormous and expanding universe, but if there is one specific thing, one icon that projects the essence of this franchise with the power of a starship at warp, it’s Mr. Spock and his pointy ears. Like John Wayne on a horse or Charlie Chaplin falling down, Leonard Nimoy’s stern visage is one of the key texts of the moving image. And after Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the geniuses in charge had killed the character. Illogical.

Now 40 years old, Star Trek III: The Search For Spock course-corrected the franchise, and brought the best first officer in the galaxy back to life. The movie is certainly the weakest of the arc that connects the second, third, and fourth films, but it is by no means anything other than a blast. If you remember it as mostly being the glue between The Wrath of Khan (the awesome showdown with Ricardo Mantalbán) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the one with the whales) you owe yourself a second ride with the crew of the USS Enterprise, motivated to break all the rules to save one of their own. 

How the movie came to be is a little amusing. Though Leonard Nimoy is remembered now as a warm, older representative of interstellar kindness who, toward the end, signed off his tweets as “Grampa,” there was a period where the Boston-born actor, director, photographer and philanthropist had a reputation as being a bit of a grump. In 1975, the Star Trek star published a memoir called I Am Not Spock, that many interpreted to mean “hey, don’t confuse me with that dorky TV show.” (It wasn’t really the case: the book’s title was inspired by an encounter with a confused child who met him at an airport, and contains imagined dialogues between Nimoy and his famous screen character.) Prior to production on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a puzzling movie that can now be recognized for its greatness, Nimoy and Paramount were in a bit of a legal war over the studio’s licensing of Spock’s image for a series of Heineken ads. (The corporation got paid, Nimoy did not.) After a drawn-out case, Nimoy agreed to appear in Star Trek II conditional on the character getting a big death scene. His wish was granted, and that sacrificial moment is—with Spock announcing that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one—without question the most touching and memorable moment in the entire 58-year-old history of Trek. 

The legend goes that Nimoy’s attitude toward wearing the ears again thawed during the making of the movie. The producers were able to convince him to shoot a little insurance: an insert of Spock gripping Dr. McCoy’s face and uttering the word “remember.” A final shot of Spock’s coffin (a refitted photon torpedo tube) on the new planet Genesis, then-roiling with regenerative molecules, was just enough ammunition for fans to argue that Spock would definitely be coming back. When Leonard Nimoy was given the chance to direct the next movie (his first feature film, though he had experience on television) the phasers were officially charged. 

The resultant work, Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, is the dorkiest look at Cartesian dualism put to film. The mission is this: get the mind of Spock, temporarily dumped in his old Frenemy’s noodle, and the body of Spock, luckily regrowing on the weird (and unstable) man-made planet, and bring them both to the sacred Mount Seleya on Vulcan so an old Priestess could mumble some hocus pocus and make everything right again.

To make the movie more interesting, of course, there has to be some complications. First up, Starfleet has cordoned off Genesis, but that just means Captain Kirk and his buddies have to steal their old ship. Second, there are some pesky Klingons (led by Christopher Lloyd and including…John Larroquette?) who want the secrets of Genesis, and are ready to kill anything in their path. Then there’s the planet itself, a scientific failure about to blow up, and on it are Lt. Saavik and Kirk’s son David, trapped there doing recon work. Also: a rapidly aging Spockling who, even though I first saw this when I was a very young boy, I somehow intuited that he got it on with Saavik to survive the throes of his pon faar, a fearsome time in which normally logical Vulcans turn to absolute brutes if they can not find a mate. (Don’t look for court-ready evidence of this in the movie, but follow-up Trek novels offer more hints that this is what happened.) 

It’s a fairly simple story, but there’s a lot to treasure. It’s well-known that throughout the masterpiece of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Kirk and Khan are never “on stage” together, they only communicate through screens. Well, in this one, Kirk never knows his enemy’s name. He calls Christopher Lloyd’s Commander Kruge “Klingon Commander” right up to the end. 

And what an end! It’s William Shatner pounding Doc Brown in the face with his boot shouting “I have had ENOUGH of YOU!!!!!!” Hardly the classic dialogue from Spock’s death scene, but somehow perfect. There’s also a hilarious scene in a space station bar where it is implied that Dr. McCoy has an ongoing flirtation with a kitschy Jetsons-like waitress. It’s one of the few moments of high camp in the entire franchise, and it’s wonderful. Also, Star Trek III has some terrific sartorial choices, like Sulu’s not-quite-jacket/not-quite-cape that he wears during a scene in which they break McCoy out of the brig. 

The big finish, featuring the Vulcan ritual of Fal-Tor-Pan, is shot in a surreal, stage-like manner. The background actors include more beefy guys and willowy women than you typically think of as residents of the science-forward desert planet. Though it is somewhat dependent on the measure of your emotional investment in these characters, the concluding resurrection is surprisingly cathartic. It’s just plain nice to see the gang back together again. 

It is amusing, though, that the film’s stated message is that, no, the needs of the few or the one actually outweigh the needs of the many. When Kirk and Spock have this exchange, I always wait for one of them to add a “sometimes.” It never comes. I guess they just got swept up in the emotion of the moment, because this sentiment is hard to defend!

Anyway, Nimoy came back to direct Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and stuck around for two more movies, made a memorable appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation, then was the connective tissue for J.J. Abrams’s 2009 Star Trek reboot and sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness. Clearly he turned his opinion around a bit. Indeed, in later years he wrote a second memoir, with a very funny title: I Am Spock. The choice was logical. 

Jordan Hoffman is a writer and critic in New York City. His work also appears in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and the Times of Israel. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and tweets at @JHoffman about Phish and Star Trek.