The son of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, Leonard Nimoy grew up in a Boston tenement where Yiddish filled the kitchen and English climbed the stairs. He left for Hollywood at eighteen with two hundred dollars and spent seventeen years in obscurity before a pointed pair of latex ears changed everything. But the story of Nimoy and Spock is not the one you think — it's stranger, more human, and it begins in a synagogue.

This episode traces the line from a boy in Boston's West End who saw something sacred he was told not to look at, to a man who smuggled that gesture onto a soundstage and watched it become the most recognizable hand sign in science fiction. Along the way: the alcoholism no one knew about, the marriage that couldn't survive the character bleed, the photographs of bodies that defied Hollywood's gaze, and the quiet love that arrived twenty-five years late and made him want to stay in the room.

Leonard Nimoy spent forty years trying to answer one question: where does Spock end and I begin? The answer surprised even him.

• (00:00) - The Mirror