It is First Contact Day! The 50th Pre-Anniversary
of First Contact day! Yep, 50 years from now, the T’Plana Hath will be heading
into Earth orbit after picking up a warp signature, just hours from landing in
Montana. Zefram Cochrane will offer his hand to the strange visitor and then
introduce them to the music of Roy Orbison…
We’ll be lucky to avoid them wiping us out for the good of
the galaxy. I have a theory the Xindi attack was in fact entirely motivated by
Zefram Cochrane trying to pass his CD’s to other races.
Anyway, I digress from the point I was vaguely considering
making. Well, less of a point and more of a list! Yes, to commemorate this
momentous pre-anniversary, I am listing my top 5 Vulcan moments in Trek! These
are my personal top 5 moments, other opinions are available.
I am a dude who got into Star Trek with The Next Generation.
By the time Sarek rolled around I was already gaining some familiarity with the
character and Vulcans, having got through the movies, though had yet to realise
the full backstory from Journey to Babel. This episode always stuck out for me
as particularly brilliant though. I think this was the first time I really
understood that Vulcans do have emotions, they just control them. The concept
of a Vulcan who is losing that control is brilliant. It’s almost horrifying to
watch, the character has such gravity and dignity and it’s gradually crumbling.
The final solution, for Picard to meld with him to give him emotional strength
is also marvellous as it leads to the scene of Picard struggling with all of
Sarek’s 200 years of repressed emotion. Which give Patrick Stewart the chance
to let loose, which is awesome to see and underscores how much control a Vulcan
must have to exert over a lifetime, which makes Sarek and Spock and all the
Vulcans more impressive for managing it.
Ah Enterprise. For three series I persisted and struggled with you. Then season 4 arrived and wow, you got seriously awesome!
I’d never been too keen on Enterprise’s portrayal of Vulcans
as a race. I liked Soval and T’Pol just fine, I just wasn’t keen on the idea of
Vulcan as an overbearing, disapproving group holding us back from exploring
space. I liked even less the idea that they were engaged in ongoing hostilities
with the Andorians. I didn’t mind the hostilities as much as the way the Vulcan’s
were dicks about it. They were, they were being dicks.
So this episode went a long way to redress that. In fact it
was pretty momentous in terms of changing the status quo with Vulcan, as we
pretty much have them go through a big old shift in philosophy. Yes, they’ve
retained the basic idea of emotional control and logic, but from here they have
to re-assess a lot of what they think they know about Surak’s teachings. As
with so much of Enterprise’s fourth season, I would loved to have seen where
this led in future years, but of course, that’s not possible now. Also, I
really enjoy Robert Foxworth, I loved seeing him as a Vulcan/Romulan agent! I loved the character of Tuvok. I thought he was brilliant and tragically underused on Voyager. And when he was used, I felt they often failed to make good use of him. There seemed to be a lot to do with Tuvok losing emotional control through injury or some other thing or being injured.
But this episode Tuvok just got to be a Vulcan. Trapped on a
planet alone apart from three scared children and a monster! Brilliant! Though
I quite like the twist at the end that the children are actually really old
people, the highlights for me are Tuvok’s interactions. He talks about his
children and how Vulcan’s raise their young and his attempts to teach the 3 ‘kids’
Vulcan techniques to control their fears are all really brilliant.
I adore this episode! From the opening scene, when the Vulcan ambassador openly disses Spock and then Kirk offers Spock the chance to beam down to visit his parents and there’s the slightly awkward pause before Spock explains the Vulcan ambassador and his wife ARE his parents, you know this is going to be good. What often happens in Trek is when an actor comes in to play a Vulcan, that stoicism coupled with that slight air of superior feeling that Vulcan’s seem to have means they come across as more Romulan than Vulcan. But Sarek comes across as perfect Vulcan while still having this air of disapproval and being a complete hard ass, but doesn’t end up feeling more like a sneering Romulan. Of course, Spock totally ups his game on the no emotion stakes by flatly refusing to donate blood for his father’s life saving operation as he needs to be in command of the ship. Throw in poor Amanda trapped in between the two most important people in her life for years of this conflict and now faced with losing one due to the others refusal to act… it’s marvellous. And leads to the payoff at the end, when in the face of Amanda’s emotional outburst, Spock asks why Sarek married her, the answer being, ‘it seemed logical’! You… you probably had to be there.
My number one moment with the Vulcans! The pon farr thing is kind of ridiculous if you think about it, but it’s one of the big things now in Star Trek lore, Vulcan’s absolutely have to mate every seven years… OR THEY DIE!!!
There’s a lot of big moments in this episode, our first real glimpse of Vulcan, our first encounter with other Vulcans and a pretty awesome fight and a crazy crazy Spock. It establishes that for a race steeped in logic, the Vulcans have a penchant for needless ceremony and ritual. It also seems odd that when everyone thinks Spock has killed Kirk in ritual combat, everyone is pretty ok about it. That seemed odd, admittedly 20 minutes of outcry would be rendered pointless at the final reveal, which is still very effective for Spock’s emotional slip when he sees his friend is ok. It’s one of those episodes where if you look deeply at it there’s a bunch of stuff that is actually stupid. But it doesn’t matter because it all works and you’re swept into this story where every moment is just brilliant. Who cares that needless gongs are necessary for a people steeped in logic, that Spock’s mother didn’t bother coming to his wedding/fight, that the deadly mating urge can also be cured by a punch up, altogether these things are brilliant because this episode is just brilliant. See, I can't even make that coherent an argument for why this episode ranks number 1 in my list of 5 great Vulcan episodes, it’s just so brilliant I am reduced to babbling and gushing about how much I love it.
I’m going to go watch it again this weekend. Actually, I
think I need to watch this episode every seven weeks…OR I MIGHT DIE!!
(But I’ll probably be ok if I can have a fight instead)
