Art In The Green Blood

It’s time to keep your eye out for Trekkies, my friends -- the Spock barrier has been broken.

Last night I accompanied my wife and our old chum Elsie (Trekkies both) to see Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. As it was billed as the last movie to feature the original cast of the Star Trek TV series, we all expected some surprises and some resolutions. But I had no idea just what the biggest surprise of all would be.

Mr. Spock, the elf-eared Vulcan who has been a centerpiece of Star Trek from day one, is now claiming descent from Sherlock Holmes. "As an ancestor of mine once said," Spock says in the latest movie, "once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

I suppose it was inevitable. Trekkie Sherlockians have been fiddling with the Spock-Holmes connection for years, as the ever logical Spock does remind one very strongly of Sherlock Holmes. Ruth Berman was the first person to put it on paper in 1970, when her article "Was Sherlock Holmes a Vulcan?" appeared in Son of a Beach #1. In 1978 an entire journal sparked by the Spock-Holmes similarity was created by Signe Landon, entitled Holmesian Federation. During its eight-issue run, Holmesian Federation had Spock meeting Holmes, pretending to be Holmes with Dr. McCoy as Dr. Watson, meeting Holmes's descendants, meeting artificial Holmes clones, filling in for Holmes in Victorian England . . . if there was a way to mix Spock and Holmes, this journal did it.

And now, at long last, the Star Trek canon has caught up to what speculators have been saying for years. There is a connection -- Spock's logic isn't just Vulcan, there's also a touch of "art in the blood," as Holmes said of his own ancestry.

Or is there?

Upon walking out of the new Trek movie, I immediately commented upon the Spock-Holmes connection.

Our friend Elsie, a non-Sherlockian Trekkie, remarked, "I didn't take it to mean that Spock was related to Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle was his ancestor."

I was horrified. I had forgotten that there were those out there who attribute everything Holmes ever said or did to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And Spock did only say, " . . . an ancestor of mine once said . . . . "

The more I thought about it, the worse the matter became. This season on Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV's modern Trek incarnation, for those of you who avoid this stuff) Spock appeared with the Next Generation crew, giving some long-awaited solid continuity between worlds of the old and new Treks. And in the world of the newer Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes has already been established as the fictional creation of Conan Doyle, in an episode entitled, "Elementary, My Dear Data."

I argued the point anyway. Spock said that an ancestor of his once “said" the Holmes quote. If he had meant Doyle, he would have said, "As an ancestor of mine once wrote . . . .”

Elsie was unpersuaded. She insisted that Holmes was fictional, and Doyle was Spock's true ancestor.

Bad enough we have the Doyleans to deal with, I thought, now the Trekkies are on their side.

By the twenty-fourth century (the era of Star Trek), will Doyleans have managed to drive Sherlockiana, and its knowledge that Holmes was real, out of existence? Or will Sherlockian scholars finally have found the concrete proof that shows the world once and for all that Dr. Watson did indeed write the chronicles of the detective?

I think Star Trek has given us a clue to our future.

There will be Mr. Datas, as in Star Trek: The Next Generation, who will think of Sherlock Holmes as a fictional character. There will also be the Spocks, as in Star Trek VI:The Undiscovered Country, who know Holmes was real.

(By the way, the guy who wrote Spock's line, Nicholas Meyer, says he meant Holmes, not Doyle. But we all knew Star Trek was just a TV show/movie anyway, didn't we?)

(This column appeared in the January 1992 issue of Plugs & Dottles.)