Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were not only Star Trek stalwarts but actually good friends, who shared a similar and fascinating background. So why did they fall out?
On 10 February 2014 Leonard Nimoy appeared on Piers Morgan’s CNN chatshow for what would be the final interview before his death 12 months later. Nimoy, then 82, had agreed to the gig in order to publicise the dangers of smoking. Although he had quit 30 years earlier, he had recently been diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and, to make the point of how horrible it was, had brought along his oxygenator as a fearful warning. Morgan was just as you’d expect – polite enough about COPD and its ghastly consequences, but bursting to talk Star Trek (Morgan is exactly the right age to have been captivated by the programme – it arrived in Britain in 1969, and ran on a continuous loop throughout the early 70s). After sprinting through a few tired jokes about Vulcan nerve pinches and beaming up, Morgan asks Nimoy about how often he sees the old gang, William Shatner in particular. Without missing a beat, Nimoy says: ‘Not in a while … we don’t have that kind of relationship any more. We used to.”
From there the conversation tacks off into Nimoy’s favourite episode (“Amok Time”), and the weirdness of the early Trek conventions at which thousands of fans would descend on some provincial hotel dressed in bri-nylon pyjamas in an approximation of their favourite Enterprise crew member. But for those of us steeped in Star Trek, which means not simply knowing every one of the 79 episodes almost verbatim but also its many backstage narratives, we had stopped listening by this point. What was that Nimoy had just said? That he was no longer in touch with Shatner? It felt like the mother of all phaser stuns.
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