At San Diego Comic-Con 2024, Paramount teased our very first look at Star Trek: Strange New Worlds‘ third season with a clip that proved to be rather baffling. A contextless gag that saw Pike, Chapel, La’an, and Uhura seemingly permanently transformed into Vulcans, the clip immediately sparked discussion about the Vulcan crew’s sudden racially prejudiced treatment of Spock as, well, the extra half-Vulcan among them.
What did Strange New Worlds think it was doing making a scene of jokily played prejudicial harassment our first look at a new season? Why is the show so wholly fixated on only considering Spock’s heritage through the lens of horrific discrimination? Did a Star Trek show just make racism a genetically inheritable trait!?
Fast forward just over a year later, and we now have the full end result of that scene in context with the release of “Four and a Half Vulcans.” And I have great news! The episode is not racist.
Well. It’s not explicitly so. It is kind of, in that it’s just under an hour of jokes about incredibly lazy stereotypes that get assigned as intrinsic elements of Vulcan culture trying to masquerade as a camp farce. But at least the racism isn’t genetic!
That’s… kind of all we’ve got, really.
Okay, it’s obviously not all we’ve got, really. It couldn’t be for an episode as messy and full of bizarrely retrograde ideas as “Four and a Half Vulcans” is, especially one that fails on almost every level to execute even the silliest of its ideas very well. It’s an episode with weird concepts about Vulcans. It’s an episode with weird concepts about gender and romance. It’s an episode with weird concepts about how stories should finish. It’s an episode that is, ultimately, so keen on screaming “we’re doing a silly one!” at its audience that it just doesn’t really think about the context it’s putting all that farce into, both in the episode itself and in the broader context of the season.
It’s perhaps fitting, then, that it was “Four and a Half Vulcans” that provided our first look at season three, well before we knew just how all over the place the bulk of the season would turn out to be. An episode that deliberately wants to ignore the context of its own place and narrative, being previewed sans further context, and looking poorer for it? Out of context, it seemed rough. In the context of what we’ve seen in Strange New Worlds season three so far, it might be worse, albeit not in the way many people had feared.
“Four and a Half Vulcans” sees the Enterprise anticipating a short period of shore leave, only to be interrupted by a special request by Vulcan’s high command. A pre-warp civilization, Tezaar, encountered by the Vulcans before even they had established the non-intervention policies that would define the Prime Directive (and kept hidden since the foundation of the Federation), is suffering from a potential radiation leak that could cause a planetary nuclear meltdown. With the Vulcans unable to render aid, Enterprise is tasked with helping Tezaar, but due to the fact that they have yet to encounter other alien races—and do not have adequate enough scanning technology that a cosmetic disguise could alert them to other species than Vulcans—an away team must endure genetic modification to appear Vulcan and provide the world assistance.
That away team turns out to be Pike, La’an, Uhura, and Chapel, who, as we all saw in the clip released over a year ago, quickly become Vulcan, quickly complete the mission, and quickly become huge assholes to Spock explicitly because it’s “logical” that they treat him as lesser due to his half-human biology. The crisis with the Tezaar is not the focus of “Four and a Half Vulcans”; the focus is instead the impending shenanigans that come when the away team discovers that they cannot easily be turned back to their human selves.
But the episode is still rooted in that bizarre moment of racial prejudice, no matter how quickly the episode tries to dance around it. Literally a scene later, post-opening-titles, narration from Una’s log assures us that the away team’s Vulcan assholery is predicated on having, through their transformation being based on a formula derived from Spock’s lived experience, also been given a super-sped-up induction of Vulcan cultural history. But the explanation is a single line of handwaving of a moment we already feel much worse about in context: it was literally just last week in “What Is Starfleet?” where Spock candidly, directly to a camera, revealed a childhood incident of self-harm and mutilation brought about by an incident where he was ostracized for being half human. The two people in the scene who mockingly point out Spock’s “inferiority” are his captain and one of his best friends in Pike, but also La’an, who we now know is in a romantic relationship with Spock.
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