Near the time of this production Nimoy told a newspaper writer, “Although we are essentially a humanistic show, the Enterprise is heavily armed and a lot of guns get shown. My way of avoiding participation in the violence was the Spock Pinch. I decided that Vulcans knew so much about the human anatomy that they could knock out an enemy just by pinching a nerve in the neck and the shoulders.” Nimoy approached Leo Penn with his idea. Shatner had been listening in, so when Penn asked for a demonstration, he quickly volunteered to be the guinea pig. Nimoy recalled, “I applied pressure to the juncture of Bill’s neck and shoulder, and he most convincingly fell into an ‘unconscious’ heap on the floor. Thus the famous neck pinch was born, in part because of Bill Shatner’s talent for fainting on cue.”