When remembering her assignment for “Charades,” Jordan Canning recalled her excitement:
“I remember watching the first season after finding out I got the job and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I love this Spock.’ I love Nimoy. I mean, Nimoy set the tone for all of this. But I just think Ethan is doing an amazing job with the character. And I was very drawn to this Spock. And so I was so excited I was getting a Spock episode and that we got to really play around. Ethan, we had a lot of conversations leading up to shooting where we talked about, ‘Okay, so there are scenes where he is going a bit bing-bong.’ He is a live wire of emotions that he’s feeling for the first time.”
Of course, Canning didn’t allow herself to stretch too far with the material, as Spock, however comedic, shouldn’t do anything that was grievously out-of-character. While he may be a human version of himself, this was still the Spock we knew and loved for decades. The changes had to be subtle. Canning figured a lot could be communicated through body language:
“[W]hat are those little changes that we can sense in Spock? […] One of the things we talked about was […] a Vulcan versus a human in terms of body language, that would even change. He would hold himself differently. He would touch people. That was one thing I was like, ‘Spock doesn’t touch people.’ He might help. He might need to fight someone, but he doesn’t pat someone on the arm or give them a hug or have those little bits of physical intimacy that humans just naturally do.”
This Spock was a hugger.