When Spock first appears in the film, he is on Vulcan undergoing a ritual to remove the last vestiges of emotion from him. But he senses V'Ger out there and leaves before completing the ceremony to see if V'Ger has the answers he is seeking. He joins up with the Enterprise crew and, along with them, encounters V'Ger. He then secretly (because he's there mainly for his own needs, not for the Enterprise's mission) sneaks out and mindmelds with V'Ger to find out if that is what he is seeking. Through the mindmeld, he learns about V'Ger and realizes that V'Ger has achieved the levels of logic and knowledge he thought was his own personal goal. But despite this, V'Ger is empty inside due to the lack of emotion. This understanding is shown in the scene where Spock is recuperating in Sick Bay after the mindmeld. Spock grasps his hand with Kirk's hand and says "this simple feeling is beyond V'Ger’s comprehension" because V'Ger has no understanding at all of the feelings in the bond of friendship. And Spock understands that V'Ger, despite having achieved the highest levels of logic and knowledge, asks "Is this all that I am? Is there nothing more?" Which tells Spock then that the pursuit of pure logic and knowledge and the giving up of his emotion is the wrong path for him. So he does not return to Vulcan to complete the ceremony to remove his emotion. And for the first time in his life, Spock is truly content with who he is.

This may be the longest footnote in history, but I really must pause and tell two more Harlan stories, one apocryphal, the other Harlan's version of the same incident.

The apocryphal, which I first heard at a science fiction bookstore, and later at several different fantasy and science fiction conventions: It was told that Paramount Pictures had a preproduction conference of Big Name Science Fiction Writers prior to shooting on StarTrek: The Movie. The purpose of the conference was to toss around ideas for a mission that would be big enough to fly the Starship Enterprise from the cathode tube to the Silver Screen . . . and BIG was the word that the exec in charge of the conference kept emphasizing. One writer suggested that the Enterprise might be sucked into a black hole (the Disney people scoffed that idea up about three months later). The Paramount exec didn't think that was big enough. Another suggested that Kirk, Speck, and company might discover a pulsar that was in fact a living organism. Still not big enough, the writer was admonished; the writers were again reminded that they should think BIG. According to the tale, Ellison sat silent, doing a slow burn . . . only with Harlan, a slow burn lasts only about five seconds. Finally, he spoke up. "The Enterprise," he said, "goes through an interstellar warp, the great-granddaddy of all interstellar warps. It's transported over a googol of light-years in the space of seconds and comes out at a huge gray wall. The wall marks the edge of the entire universe. Scotty rigs full-charge ion Masters which breach the wall so they can see what's beyond the edge of everything. Peering through at them, bathed in an incredible white light, is the face of God Himself."

A brief period of silence followed this. Then the exec said, "It's not big enough. Didn't I just tell you guys to think really BIG?"

In response, Ellison is supposed to have flipped the guy the bird (the Cordwainer Bird, one assumes) and walked out.

Here is Harlan Ellison's recitation of the True Facts:

"Paramount had been trying to get a Star Trek film in work for some time. Roddenberry was determined that his name would be on the writing credits somehow . . . . The trouble is, he can't write for sour owl poop. His one idea, done six or seven times in the series and again in the feature film, is that the crew of the Enterprise goes into deepest space, finds God, and God turns out to be insane, or a child, or both. I'd been called in twice, prior to 1975, to discuss the story. Other writers had also been milked. Paramount couldn't make up their minds and had even kicked Gene off the project a few times, until he brought in lawyers. Then the palace guard changed again at Paramount and Diller and Eisner came over from ABC and brought a cadre of their . . . buddies. One of them was an ex-set designer . . . named A-Park Trabulus.

"Roddenberry suggested me as the scenarist for the film with this Trabulus, the latest . . . of the know-nothing duds Paramount had assigned to the troublesome project. I had a talk with Gene . . . about a storyline. He told me they kept wanting bigger and bigger stories and no matter what was suggested, it wasn't big enough. I devised a storyline and Gene liked it, and set up a meeting with Trabulus for ii December (1975). That meeting was canceled . . . but we finally got together on 15 December. It was just Gene (Roddenberry) and Trabulus and me in Gene's office on the Paramount lot.

"I told them the story. It involved going to the end of the known universe to slip back through time to the Pleistocene period when Man first emerged. I postulated a parallel development of reptile life that might have developed into the dominant species on Earth had not mammals prevailed. I postulated an alien intelligence from a far galaxy where the snakes had become the dominant life form, and a snake-creature who had come to Earth in the Star Trek future, had seen its ancestors wiped out, and who had gone back into the far past of Earth to set up distortions in the time-flow so the reptiles could beat the humans. The Enterprise goes back to set time right, finds the snake-alien, and the human crew is confronted with the moral dilemma of whether it had the right to wipe out an entire life form just to insure its own territorial imperative in our present and future. The story, in short, spanned all of time and all of space, with a moral and ethical problem.

"Trabulus listened to all this and sat silently for a few minutes. Then he said, `You know, I was reading this book by a guy named Von Daniken and he proved that the Maya calendar was exactly like ours, so it must have come from aliens. Could you put in some Mayans?'

"I looked at Gene; Gene looked at me; he said nothing. I looked at Trabulus and said, `There weren't any Mayans at the dawn of time.' And he said, `Well, who's to know the difference?' And I said, "I'm to know the difference. It's a dumb suggestion.' So Trabulus got very uptight and said he liked Mayans a lot and why didn't I do it if I wanted to write this picture. So I said, "I'm a writer. I don't know what the fuck you are!' And I got up and walked out. And that was the end of my association with the Star Trek movie."

Which leaves the rest of us mortals, who can never find exactly the right word at exactly the right time, with nothing to say but "Right on, Harlan!"