William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy appeared together in numerous commercials over the years, promoting all sorts of products as they riffed on their real-life friendship and the bond between their most famous characters, Star Trek’s Captain James T. Kirk and Spock. One spot in particular stands out as not necessarily the best, though it's terrific, but the most interesting. And that’s a German advert created for Volkswagen and released in the fall of 2014, just a few months before Nimoy’s death on February 27, 2015.
The commercial begins with a young boy playing outdoors, in front of his house, with a model of the U.S.S. Enterprise. He glimpses William Shatner across the street, overseeing movers carrying furniture and boxes toward what appears to be his new home. Excited, the boy runs into a room in his own home -- the room is brimming with Star Trek and Shatner memorabilia and posters -- and emerges sporting a yellow command uniform and wielding a phaser. Then, as the boy stands in front of Shatner’s home, the garage door opens, revealing Shatner at the wheel of a then-new VW electric car. Cut to the boy sitting in the car, interacting with Shatner. And then comes the tag: Shatner and the boy are in the car driving away on the street when a car approaches from the opposite direction. Its driver is Leonard Nimoy, who says “Fascinating” in German and, in pure Spock fashion, raises an eyebrow, eliciting bemused looks from Shatner and the boy.
It's 45 seconds of Star Trek bliss, from the familiar Trek theme music to the boy’s room full of ships, posters, action figures, and even Tribbles, to the presence of both Shatner and Nimoy. It was the last commercial Shatner and Nimoy made as a tandem, and it’s, well, fascinating that it even happened. Shatner has said and written in a memoir that he and Nimoy hadn’t been in touch in about five years before Nimoy died, and Shatner did not attend Nimoy’s funeral, making a charity appearance instead, and stating that he felt uninvited to the funeral. So, all that means is that, while shooting the Volkswagen commercial, the men put aside their differences long enough to conjure their familiar chemistry briefly and give fans one more memorable enterprise.