Spock’s death at the end of The Wrath of Khan was a punch to the gut, and it would have been even more effective if the entertainment media had not repeatedly outed the surprise or — weirdly — denied that there was a surprise coming. 

For example, The Kansas City Star blabbed the news a couple of weeks before the movie premiered, writing “Spock — the green-blooded alien stoically played by Leonard Nimoy — dies.” I pasted that article into my scrapbook in the spring of 1982, before I saw the movie.

The Toronto Star also addressed the spoiler in the pages of its Starweek TV-guide magazine. The April 24 to May 1, 1982, issue included an interview with William Shatner, fresh off the movie sound stages and about to return to the set of T.J. Hooker. Writer Eirik Knutzen told readers:

Though no amount of money would make Shatner do Star Trek as a television series again, he would love to make the feature film versions forever. “I think this film, which comes out in June, is so good that the possibilities are endless. I’m not contracted for any more of them, but I’ll do them if asked. So will Leonard Nimoy (putting to rest rumors that the pointy-eared Vulcan has been killed off) because we had a grand time.”

So those fans who had not yet heard the rumour about Spock were now saying, “Wait, what?”

I can’t figure out why Paramount would show the movie at a convention two weeks before its premiere (as detailed in the article linked above), and maybe Shatner’s comment about Nimoy was an attempt to fight the stories that were already flying around — but the writer made sure readers weren’t fooled.

Building buzz around a film is important but surely the point of a big plot surprise is to have it be a surprise. I know that Gene Roddenberry himself leaked the news of Spock’s fate because he had been locked out of the film’s production (and that made the simulation fake-out at the beginning really clever), but this is not that: this is the studio and the media wrecking the big reveal. Baffling. 

The rest of the Shatner interview is standard fare, except there is a good bit in which he talks about how important the show was for some fans. And reading this piece did make me think I should revisit Hooker. It’s been a long time.

Postscript

And here are the TVs we would have watched T.J. Hooker on back in 1982, from the back cover of Starweek.