Star Trek: Spock's Movie Resurrection Was Weirder Than Android Picard

Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Picard's Season 1 Finale

At the end of Star Trek: Picard season 1, Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) died and was resurrected in a new synthetic body — and yet, this doesn't hold a candle to the weird way Spock (Leonard Nimoy) was brought back to life in the original series Star Trek movies. In Star Trek: Picard, Jean-Luc was diagnosed with a fatal brain abnormality but this didn't prevent him from embarking on his mission to save Soji (Isa Briones), the synthetic daughter of the late Commander Data (Brent Spiner). Jean-Luc's heroic example was the spark that helped save the galaxy, but at the cost of him sacrificing his life in the process. Luckily, his mind and personality were transferred intact into the golem, a new synthetic body, so the Starfleet legend lives again.

However, Spock was the original Star Trek icon who died and was resurrected. The Vulcan died from radiation poisoning after saving the Starship Enterprise from destruction at the hands of Khan (Ricardo Montalban) in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Spock's body was placed in a photon torpedo and launched towards the newly-formed Genesis planet as Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and his crew bid farewell to their friend. But that wasn't the end for Spock: the crafty Vulcan mind-melded his katra — his living soul — into Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForrest Kelley) prior to his death. In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Kirk soon learned that he must return Spock's body and soul to Vulcan in order to bring his best friend back to life — a mission he and the Enterprise crew undertook, even though they committed insurrection against Starfleet. But the circumstances of what happened to Spock on the Genesis planet are where the story gets fascinatingly strange.

In Star Trek III, Kirk's son David Marcus (Merrick Butrick) and Lt. Saavik (Robin Curtis) landed on the Genesis planet and they were shocked to discover Spock's empty casket. It turns out the unstable energies that created the Genesis planet also affected Spock: somehow, Spock's corpse was regenerated as a baby, only to experience rapid aging in accordance to the Genesis planet's equally rapid degeneration. When David and Saavik found Spock, he was mindless, emotional 9-year-old and he continued to quickly age in dramatic bursts throughout the film. Spock turned 13, 17, and 25-years-old in a matter of hours before finally returning to the age Spock was when he died (about 55). And, in an eyebrow-raising moment, when Saavik realized the adolescent Spock was undergoing the excruciating pain of Pon Farr — the Vulcan sexual mating ritual — she voluntarily helped him through it by having sex with Spock before the Klingons and Kirk arrived at the Genesis planet, which soon imploded.

Finally, Kirk and his crew recovered Spock and whisked him back to Vulcan where his body and soul were successfully reunited in a dangerous procedure called the fal-tor-pan. The Vulcan Trekkers knew and love was indeed back, though he was still in the process of regaining his full mental faculties throughout the next film, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Since the TOSStar Trek movies came out in the early-1980s, Trekkers have had 35+ years to get used to Spock bizarre resurrection. Revisiting the TOS films highlights how utterly mad the whole scenario was — but the happy end result of getting Spock back made it all okay. Still, Picard's rebirth in a synthetic body is more reasonable and straightforward, by comparison. The most important thing is that, despite the wacky, sci-fi circumstances of their resurrections, the fundamental personalities of Spock and Picard remain intact and they remained the same characters Trekkers love.

Spock's death in Star Trek II was originally designed to give Leonard Nimoy a satisfying exit from the franchise, but the actor enjoyed himself so much while shooting the sequel that he changed his mind and became open to resurrecting Spock (as long as Nimoy directed Star Trek III). Similarly, Patrick Stewart had happily put Star Trek in his past before producers Alex Kurtzman and Akiva Goldsman approached him about returning in Star Trek: Picard. Thankfully, like Nimoy, Stewart ultimately became fascinated by the possibilities of returning as his iconic Starfleet hero — and Star Trek is all the better for it. Still, Jean-Luc's unusual death and resurrection simply pales in comparison to Spock's.

Star Trek: PicardSeason 1 is available on CBS All-Access and internationally on Amazon Prime Video.

Source: screenrant.com