Star Trek Killed Another Spock That Everyone Forgets

Who the heck is Spock Two, you ask? In The Animated Series episode appropriately named “The Infinite Vulcan,” a landing party beams down to the planet Phylos, and Spock ends up getting kidnapped by some natives.

They take him to their mysterious master, Dr. Stavos Keniclius 5, who decides to clone Spock in his weird attempt to create a galactic peacemaker.

For reasons that are never made entirely clear, that clone–Spock Two–is a giant. He could have easily killed Captain Kirk, but the clone’s mind is still a bit groggy, giving Kirk the opportunity to try some diplomacy.

In short, he convinces the clone that the Federation had already become peaceful due to their own efforts and therefore did not need any giant-sized Vulcans to force peace on them. 

The gamble worked, and Spock Two used his own Vulcan powers to heal the original Spock, who was in danger of dying after the cloning process. As for the clone, he decides to stay on Phylos because the race is dying, with its tiny handful of survivors being completely sterile. In traditional Star Trek fashion, he wants to dedicate his life to saving this dying planet.

After that, we didn’t hear about Spock Two for many decades, and that was largely thanks to franchise creator Gene Roddenberry. He was apparently embarrassed by the classic cartoon and basically decided to remove the show from the official canon after the first season of The Next Generation, so it was not referenced in official documents like the Star Trek Encyclopedia.

After Roddenberry died, though, more and more shows and films began referencing Animated Series episodes; between this and the official Star Trek website adding info from the cartoon to its library section in 2007, it’s generally accepted (though never officially confirmed) that the cartoon is canon.  

Years later, the Lower Decks episode “Kayshon, His Eyes Open” brought Spock Two back in a rather grisly way, with his bones appearing in the collection of an alien named Kerner Hauze. That brought up a natural question: since Vulcans are so long-lived, why would the clone of Spock have died prematurely?

According to the Star Trek: The Animated Series Supplemental Guide (an RPG reference book), he died only three months after his Animated Series appearance because the cloning tech wasn’t prepared for half-Vulcans, though he was able to cure the Phylosian sterility before he died.

In retrospect, there were some eerie parallels between the death of Spock and the death of Spock Two: for example, Spock died after fighting with Khan, a genetically-augmented villain from Earth’s Eugenics Wars.

Spock Two died after being imperfectly created by the clone of a scientist who was alive during the Eugenics Wars and wanted to create his own genetically superior master race to keep the peace. Furthermore, each Spock worked fervently right up until their death to save everyone around them.

Most modern Star Trek fans are only likely to know about Spock Two from the throwaway visual gag in Lower Decks, which (while admittedly funny) turned the character into nothing more than a punchline.

In reality, he deserves a much more prominent place in franchise history as someone whose life and death were a precursor to Spock’s sacrifice in The Wrath of Khan and deserves his own appropriate memorial (it’s only logical, you see). As Kirk might say, of all the souls we have ever encountered in our streaming, his was the most…giant.