Forty years ago when I was at college — it’s forty years? — I organised a group to go see the then-new “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock” at the cinema.

No one came.

Now, look, all this time on, I’m obviously over it. I mean, today I couldn’t even tell you how many of the bastards were supposed to join me. Though I do wonder if this is why I so rarely throw parties and even yesterday was over-concerned about an event I’m producing.

But anyway. Since it is forty years, the film was briefly re-released in cinemas and I didn’t turn up. Mostly because I forgot to book, I forgot the whole thing, but possibly on some kind of principle. I don’t know.

I do know that I went in to see the film that day in 1984 and from curiosity and nostalgia, the other day I watched the movie on TV. Or tried to. I’m not knocking the film, but it just wasn’t holding me, and so instead I switched on the audio commentary by actor/director Leonard Nimoy.

And got so annoyed.

“You know, it’s science fiction,” says Nimoy in the commentary track. “There’s always possibilities. So you go to the extreme, you do the thing that everybody is scared to do, creates drama, and then you find a way to rebuild out of it.”

Bollocks.

In this case, he was specifically talking about how the USS Enterprise is destroyed in this film, but it’s okay because a duplicate is ready in the next movie. Generally speaking, he could also have been talking about his own character, Spock, who died in the previous film but was of course recalled to life in this one.

At the time, the destruction of the Enterprise genuinely was a big moment. And the death of Spock was actually moving. Both were also surprising: these were key, tentpole parts of a story and they were gone.

So well done, Nimoy and writer Harve Bennett, this was Star Trek being actually fresh and maybe even brave. Except it wasn’t brave at all, both ship and Spock were back soon, and if nothing can take away from it seeming fresh at the time, it is stale now and the stench persists through every subsequent film that tries the same bullshit.

All these years on, the same total bollocks is somehow believed by film and TV makers. They are correct that killing a character or altering something fundamental to a story is extreme, is “the thing that everybody is scared to do,” and that it “creates drama”.

But you cannot then undo it.

Undo it and the drama is destroyed, the extreme becomes the mundane. Actually, more than that, the extreme becomes the cheat.

I’m not saying that killing of a character or doing anything else extreme is automatically dramatic and successfully so. Captain Kirk’s son is killed in that Star Trek movie, for instance, and he doesn’t come back to life. Yet his death gets a few frames of reaction and then he’s rather forgotten.

But specifically in science fiction, and almost solely in science fiction, there is this. If any major character is killed off in any science fiction tale, you can’t even pay me to give a toss.

Maybe the friends who let me down that day were just ahead of the game.