I got the new Wrath of Khan BluRay for my birthday a couple of weeks back, and a few nights ago I watched it with the new Nicholas Meyer/Manny Coto commentary. Meyer was talking about his feelings of not wanting to resurrect Spock after working so hard to kill him off and then finally acquiescing and coming to terms with it by the time of the later movies, and it struck me that I'd heard these same arguments from another notable writer: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Doyle quickly developed a love/hate relationship with his most famous creation. He loved the notability and monetary rewards that the Sherlock Holmes stories brought him, but he felt that Holmes took people's attention away from his more serious historical novels. Doyle finally killed off Holmes at the end of his second cycle of short stories, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, in 1893. And just like Nimoy and Meyer, he thought it was going to be for good.
Doyle started to soften his stance a bit years later, when he was inspired to write a supernatural thriller but needed a good central character for it. Rather than create one out of whole cloth, he brought back Holmes for a single story, being careful to set it in a time period before Holmes' death. The Hound of the Baskervilles became the most famous Sherlock Holmes story of all, but it still wasn't enough to sate the public's interest.
So in 1903 Doyle finally gave in and resurrected Holmes in a story called The Empty House. And just like Harve Bennett and Leonard Nimoy in The Search For Spock, he found himself having to walk back a death that was supposed to be definitive, yet still had a trap door or two built into it.
(SPOILER WARNINGS for 120-year-old Sherlock Holmes stories to follow)
Consider: Holmes was supposed to be definitively dead at the end of The Final Problem, yet he still didn't have an onstage death. All we have is the circumstantial evidence of footprints on a path, an abandoned walking stick and cigarette case, and a hastily-written note from Holmes. Even the master villain of Professor Moriarty is never personally encountered by the narrator of Dr. Watson. Innocent men had been wrongly accused with greater evidence in earlier Holmes stories, and the Great Detective had always proven how deceiving appearances could be by the end of the tale. Needless to say, the lack of an onstage death proved to be of great benefit to Doyle 10 years later, when he revealed that Holmes had survived his plunge into Reichenbach Falls by never falling into them in the first place.
Unlike Holmes, Spock had had an onscreen death, but like the Great Detective before him, there were several elements that lent it a certain ambiguity. The same film that killed Spock off introduced Genesis, a planet that was literally described as "life from lifelessness." During the shooting of TWOK, Harve Bennett asked Nimoy to introduce another story element for the future, and thus we got the Spock/McCoy mind meld with the deliberately mysterious "Remember." And after test screenings, footage of Spock's casket on the surface of the Genesis Planet was added, over the protests of writer/director Nick Meyer. With all of these elements in play, it was a pretty simple matter to resurrect Spock himself in the next film. Indeed, The Search For Spock screenwriter Harve Bennett maintained that most anyone could have brought back Spock with the story elements he had to work with.
The more I think about it, the more interesting parallels I find. Both Spock and Holmes were killed off after their primary creator had tired of them and the hoopla that overshadowed their other work. Both characters were killed off in a story thought of as one of the definitive stories in the Canon, though the actions of a supervillain who, despite only appearing in a few stories, casts a long shadow over the rest of the franchise. Both characters were resurrected by the same creators who had once been determined to keep them dead. And both characters went on to further notable adventures in their Canon, even if they never quite reached the same heights as before.
I wonder if perhaps the subconscious minds of Doyle and Meyer knew something that their conscious minds did not, that characters as iconic as Spock and Sherlock could never truly be killed off, and therefore made their deaths more ambiguous than they'd intended. And I wonder if Meyer realized that he was paralleling Doyle's actions of 90 years before when he protested the idea of resurrecting Spock in TSFS. And by the time of TUC, he'd come to terms with it enough to both give a tip of the hat to Doyle in a line of dialogue ("An ancestor of mine maintained that if you eliminate the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.") and have Spock make light of his own resurrection ("I've been dead before.").
But mostly, I'm amazed that I've been a Trek fan since the 1970s and a Holmes fan since the 1980s and it's taken me this long to realize all of this.
Doyle quickly developed a love/hate relationship with his most famous creation. He loved the notability and monetary rewards that the Sherlock Holmes stories brought him, but he felt that Holmes took people's attention away from his more serious historical novels. Doyle finally killed off Holmes at the end of his second cycle of short stories, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, in 1893. And just like Nimoy and Meyer, he thought it was going to be for good.
Doyle started to soften his stance a bit years later, when he was inspired to write a supernatural thriller but needed a good central character for it. Rather than create one out of whole cloth, he brought back Holmes for a single story, being careful to set it in a time period before Holmes' death. The Hound of the Baskervilles became the most famous Sherlock Holmes story of all, but it still wasn't enough to sate the public's interest.
So in 1903 Doyle finally gave in and resurrected Holmes in a story called The Empty House. And just like Harve Bennett and Leonard Nimoy in The Search For Spock, he found himself having to walk back a death that was supposed to be definitive, yet still had a trap door or two built into it.
(SPOILER WARNINGS for 120-year-old Sherlock Holmes stories to follow)
Consider: Holmes was supposed to be definitively dead at the end of The Final Problem, yet he still didn't have an onstage death. All we have is the circumstantial evidence of footprints on a path, an abandoned walking stick and cigarette case, and a hastily-written note from Holmes. Even the master villain of Professor Moriarty is never personally encountered by the narrator of Dr. Watson. Innocent men had been wrongly accused with greater evidence in earlier Holmes stories, and the Great Detective had always proven how deceiving appearances could be by the end of the tale. Needless to say, the lack of an onstage death proved to be of great benefit to Doyle 10 years later, when he revealed that Holmes had survived his plunge into Reichenbach Falls by never falling into them in the first place.
Unlike Holmes, Spock had had an onscreen death, but like the Great Detective before him, there were several elements that lent it a certain ambiguity. The same film that killed Spock off introduced Genesis, a planet that was literally described as "life from lifelessness." During the shooting of TWOK, Harve Bennett asked Nimoy to introduce another story element for the future, and thus we got the Spock/McCoy mind meld with the deliberately mysterious "Remember." And after test screenings, footage of Spock's casket on the surface of the Genesis Planet was added, over the protests of writer/director Nick Meyer. With all of these elements in play, it was a pretty simple matter to resurrect Spock himself in the next film. Indeed, The Search For Spock screenwriter Harve Bennett maintained that most anyone could have brought back Spock with the story elements he had to work with.
The more I think about it, the more interesting parallels I find. Both Spock and Holmes were killed off after their primary creator had tired of them and the hoopla that overshadowed their other work. Both characters were killed off in a story thought of as one of the definitive stories in the Canon, though the actions of a supervillain who, despite only appearing in a few stories, casts a long shadow over the rest of the franchise. Both characters were resurrected by the same creators who had once been determined to keep them dead. And both characters went on to further notable adventures in their Canon, even if they never quite reached the same heights as before.
I wonder if perhaps the subconscious minds of Doyle and Meyer knew something that their conscious minds did not, that characters as iconic as Spock and Sherlock could never truly be killed off, and therefore made their deaths more ambiguous than they'd intended. And I wonder if Meyer realized that he was paralleling Doyle's actions of 90 years before when he protested the idea of resurrecting Spock in TSFS. And by the time of TUC, he'd come to terms with it enough to both give a tip of the hat to Doyle in a line of dialogue ("An ancestor of mine maintained that if you eliminate the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.") and have Spock make light of his own resurrection ("I've been dead before.").
But mostly, I'm amazed that I've been a Trek fan since the 1970s and a Holmes fan since the 1980s and it's taken me this long to realize all of this.
