I said "tend to tell the truth", since when does that mean that someone is incapable of lying?
So name a Star Trek moment that you just didn't "get".
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I said "tend to tell the truth", since when does that mean that someone is incapable of lying?
Nobody is holding it against him. Just pointing out that Vulcans can, in fact, be quite duplicitous when there is a logical reason to do so. The idea that Vulcans place a higher value on truth than other species has been exaggerated somewhat over the years, and doesn't really match up with what we saw on TOS.
(T'Pring didn't lie per se, but she did conspire to get either Spock or Kirk killed, so she could marry Stonn instead. Again, pretty darn sneaky and underhanded.)
And in Valeris's defense, she also thought that she was doing the right thing. Her lies were not self-serving either. She genuinely thought she was stopping the Federation from making a catastrophic mistake.
Lying for a good cause is still lying. But sometimes it's necessary, as the Vulcans know quite well.
Perhaps the average Vulcan is incapable of lying, but then they leave the home world and interact more and more with other races and soon discover the truth doesn't mesh well with the vast majority of races who don't deal in it.
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My favourite pon farr blooper is a rabid T'Pol demanding Phlox submit to her "needs" when TSFS showed that all a Vulcan in heat really needs is some light finger-stroking.
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My favourite pon farr blooper is a rabid T'Pol demanding Phlox submit to her "needs" when TSFS showed that all a Vulcan in heat really needs is some light finger-stroking.
I think it's pretty obvious that the finger stroking was just foreplay and the real hot Pon Farr action happened off screen.
I didn't know the joke was real either - I thought they just made it up right then and there. Just some random line, with no setup.
Yes, it was just randomness to make the viewer think "What on earth was the set-up for that punchline?!?"
All right then, so is tharp in on a little secret that none of the rest of us are? 
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My favourite pon farr blooper is a rabid T'Pol demanding Phlox submit to her "needs" when TSFS showed that all a Vulcan in heat really needs is some light finger-stroking.
I think it's pretty obvious that the finger stroking was just foreplay and the real hot Pon Farr action happened off screen.
That was my interpretation as well.
True story: I saw Nimoy in person not long before TSFS came out. He teased the audience by hinting that there was maybe a bit of sex in the movie.
I assume the pon farr bit was what he was alluding to.
"Doctor, you are a sensualist."
"You bet your pointed ears I am!"
If you're a fan of the novels, don't forget Section 31 member L'Haan, who debuted in TNG - A Time to Kill. Or Sakonna, who debuted in DS9 - "The Maquis, Part I" and also appeared in the more recent Section 31 - Disavowed. What Sakonna does it rather unsettling.
I take exception to the use of the word "duplicitous" to caracterize Spock's actions in that episode; "duplicitous" implies an evil agenda. It's ironic that people stigmatizing Vulcans about their alleged lack of honesty can't do so without resorting to that kind of bastardization of the language.
That is the best explanation, still I think the treatment of Ferengi women should have gotten a token mention.
It just really seemed to me like the writers trying to say, see, Ferengi culture ain't so bed when, yes it actually is.
Never dismiss the possibility that this was just some sloppy writing.
Yes, but you could apply generalisations like "shifty, unreliable and resort to thievery" to just about any race in the Star Trek canon.
Klingons are generally violent, aggressive, adversarial. They are an Empire that subjugates entire planets. The same could be said of the Romulans or the Cardassians. The Cardassians, in particular, perpetrated a planet-wide holocaust on Bajor. Not all Klingons, not all Cardassians, not all Romulans, of course. But as a matter of culture and official policy.
But for some reason, the Federation seems to take a particular exception to the Ferengi. The Ferengi who were introduced as "yankee traders" in The Last Outpost and whose defining cultural trait is that they engage in capitalism. That is their hat, as much as the Klingons are "warriors."
How often is the adjective "greedy" used to justify the mistrust of the Ferengi?
(To say nothing of the vaguely anti-Semitic undertones of how the Ferengi were portrayed in early episodes. I don't want to get bogged down in some thread drift here, so I'll just note that Ross S. Kraemer goes into a bit of depth on that in Religions of Star Trek.)
None of the species you've listed are particularly sympathetic. The least detested are the klingons, because they're the ones we've had non aggression pacts with for the longest. But we are often wary of them. As I said the ferengi are not all bad. The fact that they usually detest violence and that some of them feel empathy, plus they are often open to reason while the Klingons often behave like a bunch of stupid hotheads, look at Martok, an otherwise valuable ally, the way he keeps bickering with the Romulan Representative, it's ridiculous, pitiful even , definitely unworthy of a plenipotentiary.
Fair point.
I'm not talking about the audience's perception of the Ferengi so much as the show's perception of them.
The Original Series portrayed the Klingons as unsympathetic in its first two years, but The Day of the Dove worked hard to stress that not all Klingons are monsters. The Romulans were portrayed as noble from Balance of Terror. When the Cardassians were introduced in The Wounded, the same episode went out of its way to explain that they are not all monsters.
In contrast, the Ferengi appeared in the first season of TNG. It wasn't until the sixth season of TNG (and the first season of DS9) that the franchise even suggested the idea that Ferengi could be more than money-hungry monsters. (Bok is an exception, but he was monstrous for other reasons.)
To put it all in perspective, we got a truly sympathetic and well-rounded Borg before we got a truly sympathetic and well-rounded Ferengi.
That's kinda what Quark's speech is getting at. It would be great if Behr had edited out the "slavery" line, but the core point still stands - it is a criticism of the Federation's (and, thus, the show's) perception of Ferengi culture as obscene and grotesque in a way that other more brutal and violent Star Trek cultures are not seen as obscene.
(Not that one can quantify it so that enslaving a gender is objectively worse than enslaving and mass-murdering another culture, but the franchise never really equated the two. Cardassia's imperialism and war conduct was frequently brought up, but the franchise suggested that both sides needed to move past that and heal. When the treatment of Ferengi women came up before DS9, it was "just another reason to hate the Ferengi" rather than something seriously fundamentally wrong with Ferengi culture that needed to be fixed if it were to be deemed at all credible.)
)? I wonder how many other species he'd been warned about.
Not sure anyone is trying to bad-mouth Vulcans here. Just pointing out that they're complicated and occasionally contradictory, just like any other species. They have their virtues and their flaws. They can be heroes or villains or morally ambiguous.
Which, to my mind, makes them all the more fascinating--and believable.
And "duplicitous" is not necessarily a bad thing. Secret agents are duplicitous. Kirk can be be duplicitous. (Remember "corbomite" or "fizzbin.") Outwitting and misleading your adversaries can be admirable sometimes.
Heck, that was the whole premise of Mission: Impossible. (Also produced by Desilu.)
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