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“Am I slightly forgiven now?” — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans”
There’s a new contender for “worst episode ever”…
By Keith R.A. DeCandido
|
Published on August 28, 2025
Before I say anything else about this awful episode of SNW, let me say this: don’t stop it when the credits start, as there is a post-credits scene that beautifully shows off the comic talents of Patton Oswalt and Ethan Peck. It’s kinda dumb, but it’s fun, and worth a look.
And it might wash the taste of this dreadful episode out of your brain. But probably not.
Move over, “Hegemony”! Take a seat, “All Those Who Wander”! Step aside, “Charades”! SNW has a new nadir, and it’s this week’s episode, which should take its place proudly alongside “And the Children Shall Lead” and “Shades of Gray” and “Profit and Lace” and “Threshold” and “A Night in Sickbay” as a Trek episode that is actively painful to watch and which need never be viewed ever again if one can possibly avoid it.
Paramount+ released a clip from this episode prior to season three’s commencement, and it raised several red flags for me, but I was hoping that there was some missing context to salvage it. Technically, there is, it’s just not enough.
The concept of this episode is that there’s a pre-warp society that was contacted by the Vulcans a while back when the planet was in danger. First of all, let me say how happy it made me to once again see the current crop of Trek shows repudiating the hidebound, overly rigid, morally bankrupt version of the Prime Directive that too many of the first batch of spinoffs adopted (cf. “Homeward,” “Dear Doctor,” etc.). Yes, there’s a Prime Directive, but it takes a back seat to saving lives.
However, the Vulcans limited contact, just doing enough to save the planet. Unfortunately, the equipment that maintains the world is breaking down, and there are no Vulcan ships close enough. In order to maintain the Prime Directive, the repair team must present as Vulcans. But these aliens have very effective scanning equipment, so a cosmetic disguise won’t cut it.
Enter the cure Chapel created for Spock when he was made fully human back in “Charades.” They can use that to make Pike, La’an, Uhura, Pelia, and Chapel into actual Vulcans. Unfortunately, Pelia’s Lanthean physiology rejects the serum, so she stays as she is. The rest all become genetically Vulcan.
At first, what you expect to happen happens: they all become incredibly overwhelmed by the powerful emotions. As established in a number of places on the original series—“The Naked Time,” “Amok Time,” “This Side of Paradise,” “Balance of Terror,” “All Our Yesterdays,” etc.—Vulcans aren’t emotionless, they actually have emotions that are way fiercer and more turbulent than those of humans. They chose to control those emotions through logic.
And then, the new Vulcan versions of Pike, La’an, Uhura, and Chapel start acting like contemporary Vulcans. The hand-wave for this is that the serum is based on Spock’s brain chemistry, so it incorporates his notions of what being a Vulcan is like, but I call bullshit. Even by the often pliable standards of Trek science, that’s nonsense. Vulcan arrogance, Vulcan logic, Vulcan suppression of emotions, all of that is cultural, not genetic, not biological. There is simply no way that a serum that alters their DNA would also alter their cultural norms. That’s not how this works.
My disbelief having been choked to death before the credits even roll, I’m watching the rest of this episode with annoyance and frustration.
I hasten to add that the fact that the foursome all start acting like assholes is not why I dislike the episode. Indeed, in three of the four cases, it was actually kind of interesting. Uhura approached her nascent relationship with Beto analytically, Chapel saw that she could be an even more efficient workaholic, and furthermore that her personal relationships were all illogical, and La’an starts getting all Machiavellian. (In a nice touch, both La’an and Pike recognize that the former is acting kinda Romulan, as the two of them both know—thanks to time-travel shenanigans, La’an in “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” Pike in “A Quality of Mercy”—that Romulans are Vulcan offshoots. But those events were classified, so neither of them talks about it past a quick mention and then go back to avoiding talking about it.)
The weak link, sadly, is Pike. Anson Mount chooses shouting as his mode of being Vulcan, and it honestly feels like he was told he was playing a Conehead rather than a Vulcan.
Anyhow, Vulcans being assholes isn’t exactly new. If you watch the original series closely (or even casually, honestly), you’ll see that Spock is a spectacular asshole on many occasions, and the other Vulcans we met on the original series—Sarek, Stonn, T’Pring, T’Pau—were even more spectacular assholes. One of the more moronic complaints about Enterprise in 2001 by many in fandom was that it portrayed the Vulcans as assholes, when that just proved they were paying attention. (Personally, I blame the mountains of tie-in fiction and fanfiction in the 1970s and 1980s that wrote Spock and the Vulcans as noble space elves rather than a bunch of arrogant snots.) Enterprise did plenty wrong, mind you, the Vulcans just weren’t one of them.
The problem is that the transformed quartet shouldn’t be snots because, again, that’s cultural and not biological. They should’ve all been acting like La’an, or acting like Spock did in “All Our Yesterdays.”
At least the damage is minimal, as the Enterprise is on shore leave, so they’re not actually on missions or anything, y’know, dangerous. Which is good, as—after they solve the problem on the pre-warp planet—they decide to stay as Vulcans, as it’s much more logical for them to be Vulcan than human.
One of the few good things about this episode is that it shows the growing friendship between Jim Kirk and Montgomery Scott. Kirk comes on board because the Farragut is still under repair from the events of “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” and he wants to visit his brother. Sam, however, has already gone on shore leave. (Maybe call first, Jim?) So Kirk decides to hang with Scotty, as Kirk is grateful to the young engineer for saving his ass in the prior episode. They wind up getting sucked into La’an’s plan to turn the Enterprise into a warship, and also to manipulate the Klingons, Tholians, and Gorn into fighting each other, a war that will result in the Federation dominating the galaxy. That part of the story is generally fun, with a nice little continuity hit thrown in for good measure. (Scotty calling Kirk by his first name in “Mirror, Mirror” was always a jarring moment—on purpose, mind you—and this episode has Kirk first asking Scotty to call him that.)
Other parts of the story, not so much. We have Pike being a dick, including nearly scuttling Batel’s attempt to get Pasalk (Graeme Somerville, back from “Ad Astra per Aspera”) to let her get back to work for the JAG office. (That turns out for the best, as Batel’s frustrated outburst at both Pike and Pasalk leads to the latter offering her his job after his imminent retirement.) We have Uhura using a mind-meld to brainwash Beto into being more Vulcan-like. And we have Chapel breaking up with Korby and ending all her friendships so she can devote all her time to research.
The solution is even more cringe-y, as we’re introduced to Number One’s ex, Doug the Vulcan (Oswalt). Doug’s family has always been fascinated by humans, going so far as to give their children human names. However, Doug and Number One have a rather significant effect on each other, and both of them act completely dippy and loopy when they’re together. It’s a side of Number One we’ve never seen before, and which frankly, I never wanted to see. It’s yet another doofy sitcom bit in an episode choked with them. I might have been willing to put up with it in a better episode, but at this point it was just piling on the stupidity.
Doug is also an expert in katras (the essence of self in Vulcan beliefs, as seen initially in The Search for Spock), and Spock believes—and Doug confirms—that if they can get at the foursome’s respective katras and show them who they really are, they’ll agree to be turned back into humans.
And then that part happens off-camera! In an episode filled with missteps, this is by far the biggest one. Instead of showing Pike, Uhura, and Chapel confront their true selves, it all happens between scenes, fobbed off into a first officer’s log voiceover. The only one we actually see is La’an, because she refuses to change back even after seeing her true self. Spock theorizes that her Vulcan DNA mingled with her Augment DNA to cause her to become the megalomaniac she was turning into, and it takes a telepathic confrontation between Spock and La’an to get her to finally come back to herself. And credit where it’s due, that confrontation is beautifully staged, modulating from hand-to-hand combat into the dancing that Spock and La’an have been doing together since “Wedding Bell Blues,” and hats off to the show’s choreographers.
One of the few genuine laughs in the episode came when Pelia decided she wanted a high-five from Pike, and Pike flinches when Pelia raises her hand to him, thinking she’s going to hit him before he figures it out. This, in turn, set up another laugh, at the end, when Spock is discussing bits of human behavior with Doug, including a deadpan Vulcan riff on up-top-down-low-too-slow.
Or maybe by then I was just punchy…
I’m off to Dragon Con 2025, so forgive me if I don’t respond much in the comments on this one. But if you’re in Atlanta this weekend for the con, come see me![end-mark]
The post “Am I slightly forgiven now?” — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” appeared first on Reactor.
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