Strange New Worlds S3E8: Four-and-a-Half Vulcans
Well this one was just dumb.
The Enterprise has to come to the aid of a civilization that hasn’t yet discovered spaceflight. The Prime Directive forbids them from interfering, but the Vulcans had already visited the planet before the Prime Directive was written. So they’re aware of Vulcans, and nothing else about the galaxy.
Because the only Vulcan nearby is Spock, any of the crew who help him have to appear to be Vulcan. However, the Tezaar have “advanced scanning technology” which means they can’t just go in disguise, they have to become Vulcan.
It’s a pretty convoluted setup, and all for the payoff of revisiting last season’s dumbest episode, in which Spock becomes fully human, through an equally convoluted setup. Like that episode, this one casually ignores one of the fundamental things previous Star Treks have established about Vulcans: they are not naturally logical. In fact, their nature is far more emotional than ours, but they suppress their emotions through intensive cultural conditioning. This has been established and re-established on multiple Star Trek series, including this one.
But we ignore that for the gag of Pike, Uhura, La’an, and Chapel as Vulcans. And man does the show play it to the hilt — we get an extended walking-down-the-hallway montage of the foursome, pointy ears on display. They rub it in Spock’s face that he’s part human (the half-Vulcan of the episode’s title). And they talk stiffly and invoke logic with such hammy overacting that it only serves to appreciate just how well Ethan Peck captures Spock’s mannerisms from week to week.
They solve the planet’s problem with typical Vulcan efficiency, and prepare for shore leave. Except the procedure doesn’t wear off. They’re stuck as Vulcans. So we get some very leaden comedy as our suddenly-Vulcan crew try and go back to their normal lives. Uhura and Pike become condescending dicks towards Beto and Batel, respectively. (Anson Mount also yells all his lines for some reason.) Chapel goes crazy multitasking instead of focusing on the problem at hand. La’an becomes weirdly imperialistic.
Chapel comes up with a solution, but she and the rest decide to remain annoying Vulcans. It’s pretty annoying.
The good news is, Una knows a Vulcan expert on Vulcan stuff who she thinks can help. (Remember when Spock was the only Vulcan nearby who could help? Forget that ever happened. The writers did.) The better news is, he’s played by special guest star Patton Oswalt. The bad news is, the episode just gets dumber and dumber the moment he shows up. His name is Doug. (His parents were fond of human names.) Una broke up with him because they have too much chemistry, so the normally-reserved Number One acts like a giddy schoolgirl around him. And to keep herself from throwing herself at him, she pretends to be married… to Spock.
It’s a hokey sitcom premise that was played out when the original Star Trek aired, and it just adds another layer of forced wackiness onto an episode that already has far too much (and on a show that really needs none whatsoever.) We also get the even hoarier “the boss is coming over for dinner,” setup, as Batel tries to impress a stern Admiral into letting her return to active duty, and Pike screws it up by being an intrusive dick, and we have to say, screwing up his girlfriend’s career for no reason isn’t terribly logical.
Doug does at least help them solve the problem, but it happens entirely off-camera. We just get a restored Pike, Uhura, and Chapel, and then a confrontation between Spock and La’an, who’s the most determined of the four to stay as she is. Which is at least in character for La’an. But the entire episode falls flat from start to finish. A thudding attempt at comedy, which is inexcusable, given how many unemployed Lower Decks writers must be floating around. Usually the worst Strange New Worlds episodes are at least buoyed by an excellent cast, quick pacing, and dazzling visuals, and this episode didn’t even have any of that. Two episodes left this season, and on the heels of last week’s disappointing episode, we’ve gone from marveling at how well Strange New Worlds does Star Trek to hoping they can right the ship.
Stray tachyons:
• The transformation doesn’t work on Pelia because of her alien biology. “Honestly, I had the same problem with LSD in the 1960s. And the 1990s. And last July.”
• It’s usually cute when the show plays with the opening sequence (animated for the Lower Decks crossover; a capella for the musical episode), but Mount’s stilted re-reading of “Space, the FInal Frontier” in his Vulcan voice is pretty awful.
• Kirk also shows up to have a drink with Scotty, for no real reason other than a heavy-handed bit of “we make a pretty good team!” fanservice. Why, I bet we’ll have many more adventures in the future, maybe three seasons and six movies’ worth, who knows?
