Redshirts Always Die
Fansided

Leonard Nimoy’s sci-fi career beyond Star Trek

By Mike Poteet

LOS ANGELES - AUGUST 9: Actors Leonard Nimoy (L) and William Shatner (R) promote the "Star Trek" 40th Anniversary on the TV Land network at the Four Seasons hotel August 9, 2006 in Los Angeles, California. Episodes of the show will air September 8. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
LOS ANGELES - AUGUST 9: Actors Leonard Nimoy (L) and William Shatner (R) promote the "Star Trek" 40th Anniversary on the TV Land network at the Four Seasons hotel August 9, 2006 in Los Angeles, California. Episodes of the show will air September 8. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images) /
facebooktwitterreddit
Prev
2 of 7
Next

Leonard Nimoy (barely) enters The Twilight Zone

No overview of Leonard Nimoy in science fiction can overlook his appearance, however brief, in the classic anthology series The Twilight Zone.

Unlike his Star Trek co-stars William Shatner and George Takei, Nimoy never had a major role in a Twilight Zone story. In the 1961 episode “A Quality of Mercy,” he plays a U.S. soldier in World War II named Hansen, but he isn’t the episode’s star. That honor went to Dean Stockwell—yes, who later played Al the hologram opposite future Star Trek: Enterprise star Scott Bakula’s Dr. Sam Beckett on Quantum Leap.

(It’s always fun to play Six Degrees of Star Trek!)

You’ll get a sense of the episode’s plot in this skillfully edited eight-minute synopsis from YouTube user reggie. (Nimoy is the solider on the field phone who, near the video’s end, announces the bombing of Hiroshima.)

With Stockwell spending much of his screen time in Japanese makeup and attempting a Japanese accent, “A Quality of Mercy” hasn’t aged well. It may be just as well Leonard Nimoy wasn’t the lead. On the other hand, as Emily Todd VanDerWerff wrote for The A.V. Club:

"… it’s still a surprisingly stark and beautiful portrayal of the mindset of [writer Rod] Serling and those who agreed with him about the cost of war, and it offers at its core an obvious, if wrenching thought: The life you end may be your own."

Home/Star Trek