Strange New Worlds S2E5: Charades

The Enterprise is scanning a moon in the Vulcan system that once contained an ancient civilization. I feel like the more-scientifically-advanced Vulcans would have thoroughly explored their own star system by now, but it’s all just an excuse to get Spock close to home for some Vulcan shenanigans.

It’s also an excuse to revisit his flirtation with Nurse Chapel, and to put her character — who we haven’t seen much of since she was punching out Klingons in the season premiere — front and center. We get a fun montage of her hanging out with various crew members while studying for a short-term fellowship with the Vulcan science academy. Notably absent is Spock, who’s been decidedly chilly towards her as he tries to suppress his emotions — towards her and in general.

He’s equally unemotional towards his fiancé, T’Pring, who wants to move up the date of their ceremonial engagement dinner. Her mother is meddling; Spock’s father disapproves — all typical pre-wedding stuff. It is only logical that Spock acquiesce in order to smooth over tensions. But before he can land on Vulcan, he has a mission — a shuttle flyby of the moon with one passenger, Nurse Chapel.

On the moon, they find the ancient civilization has left behind not just ruins, but some kind of space-time anomaly, which sucks in the shuttle. It crashes, Spock is hurt, and when he comes into sick bay, he learns the shuttle was repaired and returned to space, and he has somehow become fully human. I’m just going to throw this out there from the beginning — this is kind of a dumb twist. The show has been interested in Spock wrestling with his dual heritage — far more than the original series was — but this is the most unsubtle possible way of doing so. 

Uhura discovers that Enterprise can communicate with the aliens via the space-time anomaly, which is some kind of artificial wormhole. Pike speaks to someone named “Yellow” who sounds remarkably like an automated chatbot, and assures him that both the shuttle and the crew were “repaired.” That included rectifying Spock’s “dual instructions,” because he and Chapel “did not match.”

Spock tries to get back to his regular life, but he’s unused to having outsized emotions that aren’t deeply repressed. We get a clever montage where he’s laughing with crewmates, annoyed at Sam Kirk being a slob, and swooning over the bacon Pike’s cooking, and in each case starts off tentatively trying out his new emotions, fitting in, and then taking things too far.

It takes the second-most-emotionally-repressed person on the ship to give him advice. La’an suggests that what he’s feeling isn’t too far off from human adolescence, and he simply needs to relearn some of that Vulcan impulse control. (Another reason the premise is dumb — Vulcan’s aren’t logical because of their DNA. By nature, they’re deeply emotional, but as a culture they’ve learned to suppress those emotions and embrace logic. If anything, taking Spock’s Vulcan side would make him less emotional, as there’s no reason a lifetime of consciously choosing logic over emotion would disappear, as Spock clearly has his memories intact and is essentially the same person.)

Yet Spock is the one person who can comfort Chapel when her interview for the Vulcan fellowship doesn’t go well. The imperious academic questions her commitment to values like rote memorization, while dismissing her actual hands-on experience. “Vulcans can be such jerks,” Spock assures her before hugging her warmly. While the show tries to mine humor out of Spock embarrassing himself around the rest of the crew, we’re glad to see they don’t go that route here. He cares about Chapel, and as confused as his feelings towards her are, he’s able to  be a good friend to her in the moment.

But of course, we have to have some shenanigans. Amanda, Spock’s human mother, arrives to say T’Pring’s family are not happy with the repeated delays, and insist on having the engagement dinner soon, and on the Enterprise. We get some sitcom-style nonsense where Spock tries to keep up the lie that everything’s fine and Pike scrambles to back him up, but they can’t maintain that long and come clean.

In order to save face with her Vulcan in-laws, Amanda resolves to teach Spock to be a better liar, so he can bluff his way through the engagement dinner. The event is highly ritualized, and T’Pring’s disapproving mother will be scrutinizing Spock’s every move. Long story short, the practice fails. They need to get Spock back to his old self.

After exhausting herself testing out every method known to Starfleet, Nurse Chapel realizes the only ones who can fix Spock are the ones who did this to him in the first place. She, Uhura, and Ortegas fly to the moon without Spock, only because the show needs him to try to hold it together in front of T’Pring’s hypercritical mother. It’s typical sitcom shenanigans, up to and including Pike trying to lead the stiff Vulcans through a game of charades. And we get a moment of high-school-level drama, where Chapel has to admit to the interdimensional aliens that she like-likes Spock before they’ll tell her how to put him back to normal. 

But it also leads to a nice moment where Spock defends humanity to his future mother-in-law, not for his own sake, but for his mother’s. He’s finally able to understand the sacrifices she’s made, raising him under the eyes of a whole planet of disapproving Vulcans, and he gains a deeper understanding of her. That in turn gives him a deeper understanding of another human woman who’s in love with a Vulcan. He and Chapel finally admit their feelings for each other, and it’s a well-earned payoff to a season and a half of simmering tension, even if we know their romance has to ultimately cool off to rejoin the original series’ continuity.

And therein lies the strength of Strange New Worlds. We already know how things end for Spock and Chapel, and more importantly, we already know who Spock becomes. He’s the most familiar, most beloved, most iconic character in the franchise, if not in all of science fiction. It’s an audacious move trying to take a character fans know so well (and one who’s so identified with Leonard Nimoy that Nimoy defiantly titled his memoir I Am Not Spock, before giving in and titling a subsequent book I Am Spock), and try and add to what we know about him.

Yet that’s exactly what Strange New Worlds does so well. Ethan Peck’s Spock isn’t Nimoy’s Spock. He’s younger, less fully formed, less sure of himself, and yet feels entirely of a piece with the Spock we already know and love. It’s a remarkable tightrope walk for both Peck and the writers. Even in a fairly silly episode like “Charades,” being able to mine new depths from such a well-established character more than half a century after his first appearance is a remarkable achievement.

And across the board, Strange New Worlds’ winning cast makes even a lightweight episode like this a whole lot of fun to watch. Let’s just hope next week gives them more of an adventure.

Stray tachyons:
• Voyager did a similar plotline with B’Elanna’s human and Klingon sides becoming separate people. That was also unsubtle and dumb, but unsubtle and dumb was far more par for the course on Voyager. Strange New Worlds’ writers room usually sets the bar a bit higher.

• To make Spock look more human, all the makeup department does is take away the pointy ear prosthetics and muss his hair, and that’s all it takes. Ethan Peck does the rest, keeping Spock’s overly formal speech patterns while giving the dialogue a clear emotional charge. Even when Spock’s not speaking, his wide-eyed reactions make it absolutely clear this isn’t the stoic, logical Spock we’re used to, and Peck’s commitment to the bit makes the somewhat silly premise work. Throughout the series, he’s given a masterclass in subtle acting, letting hints of emotion show through Spock’s logical facade, so it’s fun to see him flip that dynamic here and chew the scenery a bit.

• Spock reveals to Pike that most Vulcans use “nasal suppressants” because “The smell of humans is something most Vulcans must become… used to.”

• As is often the case, Ortegas gets very little screen time but makes the absolute most of it, including a hilarious bit where she teaches Spock how to do the classic Spock eyebrow raise, and an attempt to be the voice of reason when Chapel wants to fly back into the anomaly. “I gotta be the one to vote against doing the crazy maneuver? Does that sound like me?”