A few disclaimers at the top. We were never that into the seminal television show or any of the movies that came before this one. We knew enough—Captain Kirk was kind of a horndog, Spock had some emotional issues (but he wanted people to live long and prosper), the U.S.S. Enterprise was some sort of amazing spaceship and etc—but we happily discovered early on it didn't matter and this movie isn't exclusively for the fanboys.  It's an origins story, and as we've said before, who doesn't want to get down with an origins story? We learn at the start of the film about some of the events that sent James T. Kirk hurtling down a path to greatness (hey, nice three-second cameo, House's Jennifer Morrison!).  Kirk (Chris Pine) is a handsome hothead who is mainly concerned about who will next share his bed. But after meeting Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood, who we now have a super-duper crush on) he's convinced to give Starfleet Academy a whirl. We also meet Spock (Heroes' Zachary Quinto), half-Vulcan and half-human (his mother is Winona Ryder! Seriously! It's kind of crazy, and even more so that our poor waif-y heroine from yesteryear doesn't get more screen time) who must make a decision about which culture he needs to embrace. When Spock and Kirk first meet, they don't like each other one bit and both actors do an excellent job in doing pretty good homages to Mr. Nimoy and Mr. Shatner without ever once seeming silly or contrived. There is a lot of space stuff and excitement and high-class weapons and about a thousand references we're sure we didn't get but you know what? We got enough, and Mr. Abrams made sure even those who don't know the tenets of Vulcanism or every facet of Starfleet etiquette could follow along and have a good time. 

We either owe Mr. Abrams a huge debt or should be really mad at him for how much space in our brain has been taken up watching his television shows: Felicity, Alias, Lost. On the other hand, we did not appreciate Cloverfield. But here with Star Trek, he manages to control the action scenes with great pacing while slowing things down at the right time to get some real emotion, and some big laughs in as well (more Simon Pegg next time, please!). For us, the craziest part was realizing after the movie was over that the big bad villain this time around is played by Eric Bana. Is that guy just everywhere these days or what (you'll see, he's still got Funny People and The Time Traveler's Wife as well as his documentary about being in love with his car). Anyway, Mr. Bana takes on evil with relish, and threatens the end of the world as we know it with aplomb. We can't wait for the sequel. 

“He is measured and stable,” said Mr. Nimoy, who played Mr. Spock on Star Trek, and who has supported Mr. Obama since they first met about a year and a half ago at a small Los Angeles fund-raiser. “It’s true that he has an intellect that works for him, he handles difficult problems with aplomb. Reliability and stability are very important assets in this race, in these particularly volatile times.”

Mr. Obama, as far as anybody knows, does not greet strangers with a cloven V salute, practice debilitating neck pinches, bleed green or have a constitutional incapacity to fib. But his methodical, unflappable style and otherworldly resistance to overt displays of emotion—not to mention his temperamental inability, or refusal, to connect on a visceral level with working-class voters—makes him, by contemporary candidate standards, downright alien.

That’s usually not a good thing. Yet, with less than a month until Election Day 2008, the Vulcan is winning.

Mr. Obama now holds statistically significant leads in the national polls, and once out-of-reach states like Indiana and Missouri are floating into his orbit. More significantly, battleground states like Colorado, Ohio, Florida and Michigan are drifting out of the reach of the McCain campaign.

Extraordinarily, Mr. Obama has gotten to his current position, for the most part, by refusing to budge. Stylistically, since the beginning of the primaries, he has consistently delivered his “change” message in a cool, measured and almost emotionally detached manner that stands in stark contrast with his 4-year-old reputation for soaring oratory.

“Normally voters do prefer a candidate who is more emotionally engaged,” said Dan Schnur, a Republican strategist who served as Mr. McCain’s communications director in the 2000 race. “Obama has had the good sense to recognize the larger political tides and stay out of their way.”

Mr. Schnur said he couldn’t remember the last time a candidate with such a dispassionate presentation did well in a presidential election, but said, “The question for voters is whether they want a fighter or a soother. In these tumultuous times, the soothing approach might be working better. John McCain is best at rallying people to a cause, but it is important for that cause to have a very specific target. When it is Al Qaeda or special interests, that’s one thing, but it’s harder to rally people against a recession.”

Mr. McCain, of course, is the passionate, emotional and all-too-human candidate who strikes a chord with voters but can often be seen to be doing battle in real time, Kirk-like, with the enemy within.

During the first presidential debate in Mississippi, he persistently avoided eye contact with Mr. Obama despite the moderator’s entreaties for the candidates to engage directly with one another. Mr. McCain’s advisers said afterward that he had done so deliberately in order to avoid becoming enraged.

And then, last week, Mr. McCain met with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register, a paper that endorsed him during the primary.

When asked whether he worried about the criticisms of Sarah Palin coming from some conservative Republicans, Mr. McCain seemed to dedicate every ounce of his being to not tearing out the throat of his interlocutor as he answered: “Really? I haven’t detected that. And I haven’t detected that in the polls. I haven’t detected that amongst the base. We get 20,000 people that come to our rallies. So, again, I fundamentally disagree. Now if there’s a Georgetown cocktail party person who, quote, calls himself a conservative and doesn’t like her, good luck. Good luck. Fine.”

THE MCCAIN CAMPAIGN has accurately reflected the candidate’s own impulsive nature, focusing on narrative-shifting tactics—the high-impact, high-risk selection of Ms. Palin as his running mate, say, or the decision to “suspend” his campaign in order to take “action to address this crisis”—to seize control of individual news cycles, at the cost of any appearance of steadiness.

After the Register put a video of the editorial board meeting online, The Washington Post wrote about it under the headline, “McCain: The Angry Warrior?” In an article headlined “Anger vs. Steadiness” in Time this week, Joe Klein called Mr. McCain “pinched,” while Mr. Obama was the “least angry man” who has kept his head throughout one of the most exhausting, and brutal, years of continuous campaigning in memory. In a cover story called “Mr. Cool vs. Mr. Hot,” Newsweek did the same. Mr. Obama was “precise, occasionally withdrawn and methodical,” while “[w]atching McCain swoop and veer over the past two weeks has been enough to induce vertigo.”

The Obama campaign has been delighted to watch this view hardening, however belatedly, into conventional wisdom.

“If there is one thing that has to be said about our campaign is that it has been a consistent campaign,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist. “There is some uncertainty of where Senator McCain is at, because he has been going from pillar to post, from the economy’s fundamentally strong to days later, and hours later, perhaps, saying that we are in crisis. That doesn’t inspire trust or credibility in your message.”

Mr. Axelrod was talking to The Observer in a hallway outside a media center at Washington University in St. Louis before the Oct. 2 vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Ms. Palin, during which Mr. Biden, even on his best behavior, exhibited more emotion, sentiment and fire than his running mate ever has.

Mr. Axelrod said, “We’re facing some really significant challenges in this country and the ability to deal with them with a kind of centeredness and consistency and poise I think is going to be important. People sense that and we have seen it in the last two weeks.”

Some of Mr. Obama’s other surrogates, in the hours after the debate, also talked up the process-based contrast between the campaigns.

“There has been only one candidate in this cycle who has never had any drama,” Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri told The Observer. “There have never been any backbiting or public leaks, there has never been any time that they ran out of money and had a financial crisis. The irony is the McCain people want to say that Barack Obama is risky. Hello? Look in the mirror.”

“This is the best-run campaign that has ever existed,” Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico flatly proclaimed to The Observer. “They don’t have management by consensus. They make a decision and they stick to it.”

The campaign has certainly managed to present itself that way, even in the face of actual substantive changes of position. As when Mr. Obama broke a promise to accept public funding and the spending limits that come with them, or when he relaxed his opposition to off-shore drilling. The shifts were presented, with a minimum of facade, as strategic decisions, taken to adjust for changed circumstances. Opprobrium arrived, was endured and then dissipated.

More often, though, the campaign’s finest moments have been its most aggressively passive ones.

When, in April of this year, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain both came out in favor of a federal gas-tax holiday, Mr. Obama refused to go along with it, calling the measure out as the election-time gimmick it was. He maintained his position, when both the Clinton campaign and then the McCain campaign thought they had him in a blunder, on an easily demagogue-able (and perhaps improvised) pledge to meet without precondition with leaders of hostile nations. And most recently, when Mr. McCain announced the suspension of his campaign in order to parachute into Washington for the bailout-legislation negotiations, Mr. Obama kept campaigning.

THAT'S JUST THE WAY he is, say some longtime associates.

“There was a sense of centeredness and calm about him from the very beginning that was really one of his most impressive features,” said Laurence Tribe, a professor of Constitutional law for whom Mr. Obama served as a research assistant at Harvard Law School. “I’ve never asked Barack this, but I think he must meditate or something.”

Mr. Tribe recalled a tempestuous year at the law school, a racially charged controversy erupted over the proposed hiring of a black female professor.

“Barack, being African-American, was right in the middle of it, with people tearing at him from both sides,” said Mr. Tribe, who at the time assigned Mr. Obama to help research a paper he was writing about the application of Einstein’s theories to law called “The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn From Modern Physics.” “He had some crisis of some sort; I don’t remember if it was personal or if other students were disagreeing with him about something. I was amazed that he could deal with these very abstract ideas and then calmly return a call and get into a completely different gear.”

Decades later, as Mr. Obama competed in debates against Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Tribe—an early Obama supporter—said he would send e-mails saying, “Barack I thought you should have done this or that.”

“And he wrote back saying, ‘You may be right, but wait. I grow,’” Mr. Tribe said.

Orin Kramer, one of Mr. Obama’s most influential fund-raisers, recalled first having lunch with him in the winter of 2004, when he was running, from behind, in a U.S. Senate primary in Illinois.

“He analytically thought the dynamic was different than people perceived, and in retrospect he nailed it,” said Mr. Kramer.

Later, just before the current election, Mr. Kramer met with other top New York donors at a D.C. steakhouse and decided to support Mr. Obama instead of Mrs. Clinton, the heavy favorite of the local establishment. What impressed him, Mr. Kramer said, was “the way in which he analyzed the race, which involved a number of factors that certainly weren’t visible, but were in the works, and it wasn’t so much that he happened to win, because frankly things occurred, circumstances that are unpredictable, but he had a sense of where the country was going.”

Not all of Mr. Obama’s supporters have always been so at peace with his extraterrestrial self-assuredness.

In October of 2007, Mr. Obama’s donors and supporters restlessly agitated in an attempt to shake the campaign into more aggressive action as their national poll numbers sagged against Mrs. Clinton. The campaign kept their gaze trained on Iowa and won.

Just a few weeks ago, when the McCain campaign seemed emboldened by Ms. Palin’s performance at the Republican National Convention, and Clintonites polished their “I told you so” lines and mocked Mr. Obama as a Kerry-esque wimp, supporters again began pulling out their hair.

THEN WALL STREET imploded. And a preternaturally, almost weirdly calm academic type—a Vulcan, essentially—suddenly seemed like exactly what the country needed.

Hence, perhaps, the multiple Web sites currently hawking “Obama ’08 … and Prosper” buttons and “Live Long and Prosper” T-shirts, portraying the candidate with black helmet hair, pointy ears and a tight blue Spock shirt.

On his blog, Henry Jenkins, director of MIT’s comparative media studies program, said that when National Public Radio asked him who in popular culture most evoked Spock, “The fan boy in me immediately went searching through contemporary science fiction television. I considered and then discarded Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica as probably too obscure to make sense to an NPR audience,” he wrote, adding, “But, then, my mind went in a very different direction and before I quite knew what I was saying, I found myself talking about Barack Obama.”

Spock himself was reluctant to lay the alien comparisons on too thick, for fear of rendering the candidate ridiculous.

“There’s already stuff on the Internet joking about him being Vulcan–like,” Mr. Nimoy said, before adding, in starkly non-Spockian terms, “Jesus Christ! This is serious business going on here. This is the safety of the world at stake.”

jhorowitz@observer.com

Directed by Lost’s J. J. Abrams and starring Winona Ryder and Eric Bana, the movie is a prequel chronicling the early days of Captain Kirk and the U.S.S. Enterprise crew members, reported a source on the highly protected set, where actors playing alien creatures are forced by producers to cover themselves with enormous umbrellas when they walk from location to location.

Mr. Nimoy, who has played Kirk’s lovable Vulcan sidekick Spock since the dawn of Trek and has recently developed a second career photographing naked ladies, makes several cameos in the film in the form of a spirit, according to the source; on this, the veteran actor’s last day of filming, Mr. Abrams gave a speech about what an honor it was to have worked with him. (The original Kirk, William Shatner, has been left out of the production and is reportedly bristling about it.)

A group of set designers and grips were overheard discussing Mr. Nimoy’s fall.

“You know the sets are so dark and he’s an old guy,” said a makeup artist of the actor, who turns 77 on Wednesday, March 26. “He must have just tripped.”

“There was some talk about using a double and how they were making a wig for the double, so that the guy would look more like Leonard Nimoy,” said the original source. “But then they ended up using Leonard Nimoy.”

A male crew member eased everyone’s nerves. “Well, you know, with CGI, you know they can fix that nose right up, have it looking normal,” he said. Phew!

Mr. Nimoy’s agent had no comment on the incident.

We went to talk to Mr. Nimoy the other day at his new theater. He took a seat in the back row. He is tall and thin, and he wore a light brown V-neck sweater, khakis and white New Balance sneakers. He had a snazzy crew cut, and his hair was dark gray. Mr. Nimoy's 71 now. He looked great. We checked the ears. The ears looked great, too.

The weird thing is, Mr. Nimoy had never seen a single film at the Thalia before he and his wife, Susan, decided to invest $1.5 million in it. He wasn't one of those West Siders who could tell you about the time he held his wife-to-be's hand for the first time during Children of Paradise , or watched a pair of rats in flagrante delicto during Jules and Jim . He wasn't the guy at work who can't stop telling you about the time there was a flood in the Thalia during the climax of Wages of Fear and, instead of leaving, everyone simply propped their feet on the edges of their chairs.

Mr. Nimoy just liked movies. He'd been in a couple, of course, and directed some, too ( Three Men and a Baby , don't forget). But he also spent a lot of time in Los Angeles going to screenings at the Coronet Theater on La Cienega Boulevard. It was thousands of miles away, but the Coronet had the same "sensibility" as the Thalia, Mr. Nimoy said.

"You could see the silents, you could see the Truffauts and the Bergmans and the Fellinis and what have you, and you could see a film that you have always heard about but nobody ever played," Mr. Nimoy said in a low, gravelly voice. "It would be coming up in about six weeks, and you'd mark the date and say you had to go there that night. It was that kind of place."

The Thalia renovation is part of a greater renovation of Symphony Space, the performance hall upstairs from the movie theater. Mr. Nimoy had a relationship with Symphony Space from reading short stories in its "Selected Shorts" program, so the Symphony Space people asked if he'd be interested in helping with their overhaul of the Thalia. He came one day to witness the construction, wore a hard hat-"This place was a dug-out concrete hole," he said-and signed on. That was about all he did, he said. For a guy with a theater named after him, Mr. Nimoy was pretty low-key about it.

The new Thalia is a souped-up version of its woebegone predecessor. There's new paint, new seats, new acoustic paneling and fancy lighting that can be used for live performances. The old reverse-parabolic floor-the one you could drop a Raisinet on and have it roll away and then back to you like a boomerang-is gone. But it's still small-176 seats, or about a third of the size of a multiplex coliseum.

Mr. Nimoy was joined in the theater by Isaiah Sheffer, Symphony Space's artistic director. Mr. Sheffer was excited about a movie that was coming to the Thalia on April 20.

"We have this new print that Martin Scorsese has paid for us to have struck of Rossellini's The Rise of Louis XIV ," he said. "Fabiano"-Fabiano Canosa, the Thalia's film curator-"is now in Paris picking it up. Scorsese gave some money to have it subtitled. Fabiano will bring it back in his hand."

Alas, Mr. Sheffer said, not every classic is in such fine form. Time and mistreatment have done great damage to classic films.

"If you want to show Jules and Jim ," Mr. Sheffer said, "the best print available is not so wonderful."

"I have a good print of Satan's Satellites if you want to run that," Mr. Nimoy said. He added, dryly: "known as Zombies of the Stratosphere ."

Mr. Nimoy laughed and propped a sneaker on the back of the chair in front of him. Get a theater named after you, and you can do that whenever you want.

-Jason Gay

Bite Me

What's all this fuss about cooking? If you ask me, cooking sucks. You're gonna waste four hours of your life, then feel good because you made some food ? Hours, days, months in the kitchen-and for what? Just be a man and go to the Chirping Chicken on West 77th Street, get a whole chicken. Takes 30 seconds.

Cooking is practically a religion these days, it seems. But face it: There's nothing elevating about food. It's boring. On Sunday, April 14, there were an unbelievable seven- seven !-cooking shows on PBS. Food porno. These shows are barbaric. Amanda Hesser's column in The New York Times Magazine ? Her, too. Centuries from now, they're all going to be laughing at us.

Here's my idea of acceptable food commentary, from Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises : "We had a good meal, a roast chicken, new green beans, mashed potatoes, a salad, and some apple-pie and cheese." Or this: "We ate the sandwiches and drank the Chablis."

Hemingway never would have been able to stomach the first PBS cooking show I forced myself to watch, Mexico-One Plate at a Time with Rick Bayless. Mr. Bayless is a very annoying, bespectacled, goateed man who talks about Mexican cuisine in endless detail, and in hushed, almost X-rated tones as he over-pronounces words like "tortilla" ("tor- teeeee- ya").

Then : A Food Memory . Grown men talking about things like the smell of bread in Grandma's house. That madeleine bullshit. Next up: Lidia Bastianich's show, Lidia's Italian Table , if you need to remember when Mama used to cook for you.

At 4 p.m., I got a quickly delivered lunch from Sel et Poivre on Lexington Avenue consisting of a duck-pâté sandwich, mashed potatoes, French green beans and coffee. I ate it while watching Great Food , about a group of too-cheerful, early-rising lunatics who spend a week in a castle in Scotland and laugh hysterically as a master chef, a British plumper named Rosemary, teaches them to cook things like "scallops in a paper cup," sole Amhuiinnsuidhe and fresh tarragon-fettucine profiteroles. I don't understand food excursions. Why not pay to have someone cook for you and relax on your vacation, rather than blow $750 a day to spend six hours a day working in the kitchen?

My kitchen, conversely, is mostly where I put my beer bottles. I make corn on the cob, Annie's Mexican mac and cheese from a box, and there's nothing "retro" or "ironic" about it-I like it, I eat it, O.K.? Or I hard-boil three eggs, sprinkle some Morton salt on and then chow down. I cook jalapeño sausages in the microwave. Very occasionally, I will fry up a burger, put ketchup on it- not salsa-and eat it off a paper plate.

But more often than not, I pick up the phone and order something, like some fusilli with ground beef from Focaccia Fiorentina or chicken vindaloo from Chola. Or I'll go to Hell's Kitchen and get a tasty $8.95 skirt-steak sandwich at Cafe Andalucia or go to Island Burgers & Shakes for a Slick Willie (a burger with ham, relish, American cheese, bacon, sour cream, barbecue sauce and onions).

Back in the 1950's, people used to eat normal. No one complained. No one was on a quest for the ultimate meal; they didn't need this peak-experience crap. They didn't spend half their day at the grocery store getting a bunch of stuff, bringing it home, washing it off, chopping it, slicing it, cooking, preparing, all that endless fussing and talking about it, all for something that was over in 20 minutes.

At 5 p.m., Michael Chiarello's Napa came on. Seriously, do I want to tag along with this guy while he's stocking up on pantry items for the "perfect pantry," or when he's comparing notes with Sally on preparing the "perfect picnic"? Or when he's making vanilla gelato for his kids, or off on a mushroom hunt so he can "prepare roasted barley mushroom risotto"?

No, I do not.

Jacques Pepin Celebrates! came on. It was going to be a "puff-pastry showcase."

I picked up the phone and ordered a medium cheese from Domino's, and it was good-better than anything you've eaten in six months.

-George Gurley