I dragged my sainted wife to the new Star Trek flick on Friday and as usual, she found the secret hidden gem that no one else ever would.
In the morass of explosions and makeup, she was initially confused over the actor-character match-ups between Sarek (Ben Cross) and Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood). Now neither looks much like the other, but that’s precisely what lays at the root of the strange (dis)connection.
This is not the first time that Greenwood and Cross have appeared in a film together — They were in Twist of Fate (nee’ Pursuit) a 1989 made-for-TV movie in which they played the same character, a Nazi officer who got plastic surgery and went into a concentration camp posing as a Jew during the waning days of WWII. Greenwood played the pre-surgery Nazi as well as his son, a documentarian who later unravelled the whole thing. Cross was the post-op officer who winds up being a Jewish hero for his role in the creation of modern Israel.
The NYTimes review at the time of the original airing pretty much says it all. We looked for a young JJ Abrams in the credits, but found nothing. So the casting connection must be a “Twist of Fate,” indeed.

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