TVSquad

Today is Mother's Day, and while J.J. Abrams' new big screen version of Star Trek re-imagines the mythology of the Enterprise crew and vanquishes Spock's mother Amanda in an alternate time line, I prefer to remember Spock's mother the way she was on television. On the original Star Trek episode that aired on November 17, 1967, "Journey to Babel," introduced Ambassador Sarek of Vulcan and his lovely human wife Amanda, when they boarded the Enterprise on a diplomatic mission. It was a shock to Captain Kirk to discover that the elegant older couple were not merely envoys, they were in fact, Spock's parents.

Like a lot of Star Trek and classic TV fans, I'll be in line for the new movie when it opens tomorrow (actually, tonight in many cities - check your local listings, as they say). Leonard Nimoy is in it (no, that's not a spoiler), and this morning he sat down to talk with Al Roker on Today (video also here). Roker says that Nimoy put the ears on for the first time in 18 years. Wait, 18 years? That can't be right. I feel old.

Don't you just love the web? News traveling so fast, ideas extrapolated and speculated upon based on the simplest of facts. That said, here's a sweet little tidbit that I found amusing. Tom Cruise was spotted on the Los Angeles set of the new Star Trek feature film. He reportedly was visiting writer/director JJ Abrams. The two men, you'll recall, collaborated on Mission Impossible 3.

This exclusive, courtesy of JFXOnline, revealed that Tom stuck around the set for a couple of hours. Prior to this sighting, there had also been talk last fall that Abrams had wanted to enlist the superstar to make a brief cameo appearance in the revamped Star Trek opus, telling the story of how creator Gene Roddenberry's original characters came to be. How Captain Kirk made it out of the Star Fleet Academy (in The Wrath of Khan he said he cheated on his Kobyashi Maru simulation test), as well as the first time Kirk met the half-Vulcan, half-human Mr. Spock.