Vulcan Nerve Pinch - Origin and Use in The Series

Origin and Use in The Series

Leonard Nimoy, who portrayed the Vulcan science officer Spock, conceived the maneuver in the early days of the original Star Trek series. The script for “The Enemy Within” stated that Spock "kayoes" Captain Kirk’s duplicate, but Nimoy felt that such a brutal action would be undignified for a Vulcan — he therefore invented an alternative by suggesting that Vulcans have the ability to project energy from their fingertips, which if applied to a nerve cluster correctly could render a human unconscious. Allegedly, the director of the episode didn't understand the idea when Nimoy explained it to him, but William Shatner understood immediately and reacted in exactly the way Nimoy had hoped when they executed the move during filming. From then on, the pinch was referred to as the FSNP, for Famous Spock Nerve Pinch in Star Trek’s scripts.

Since Spock, various other characters in the Star Trek spin-offs have used the technique, however the fact that some of these have included non-Vulcan characters creates some confusion about the above explanation as to how the nerve pinch is achieved. The first non-Vulcan was Khan Noonien Singh, later followed by others such as the android Data, the Changeling Odo, Voyager’s holographic Doctor, and the humans Jean-Luc Picard, Seven of Nine, and Jonathan Archer (though Archer was carrying the katra of the ancient Vulcan Surak at the time). In Carpenter Street, T'Pol uses the nerve pinch on the kidnapper Loomis to stop him escaping from his apartment, and again later in the episode. She also uses it in the 4th episode of the first season on Travis Mayweather to calm him down.

Some humans, however, have been unable to use the nerve pinch. Spock once commented that he tried but failed to teach it to James T. Kirk. Likewise, when Dr. McCoy was in possession of Spock’s katra, he was unable to use the nerve pinch.

The nerve pinch has been used on Vulcans and the vulcanoid Romulans several times, showing that neither race is immune to the technique.