Watching BBC4’s programme on parallel universes in sci-fi (and, ahem, Sliding Doors) last night, I waited in vain for someone to acknowledge that the point of Mirror, Mirror is that while Kirk and his human crew may be transformed into venal, war-mongering, backstabbing sadists by having been brought up, so to speak, in the obscene supplement of the Federation, Spock is by virtue of his rationality essentially the same in any universe (give or take a goatee beard - well, he is half-human).

Star Trek doesn’t want to be a hymn of praise to cold, inhuman rationality - it wants to proselytise for an impossible synthesis of “logic” and “emotion” - but Spock is a creation beyond the control of his creator. If a genetically-engineered virus turned as all Vulcan tomorrow, pointy ears and everything, I for one think it would be a better world.

So far as I can remember, in all of Star Trek it’s only ever the bad guys who do torture; it’s one of the ways you can tell they’re bad guys (I’ve often thought that Deep Space Nine could have been called Why Don’t We Just Bomb Those Cardassian Bastards). Then again, I’ve not seen much of Enterprise, which looked very much like the sort of show where they might try to introduce some “moral ambiguity” - absolute poison when your moral universe is so radically simplified to begin with.

The joy of Star Trek is that you can always see exactly where the nuance is in each episode - also known as This Week’s Excuse For Violating The Prime Directive. It never was This Week’s Excuse For Repeatedly Zapping The Baddy With A Phaser Set To “Stun”, however. Don’t phase me, bro! Even the Klingons wouldn’t do that.