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Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3x08 - "Four-And-A-Half Vulcans"

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While I'm not exactly thrilled with the seeming biological essentialism, I'll go in with an open mind. A random throwaway line like the Vulcan personality profiles are based on Spock or a racist Vulcan with projective telepathic powers (maybe Oswalt's character?) would make it fine. Ultimately though, it's just TV so I can just make up some dumb rationalization for it to work.
 
Surprising that the very first preview scene was for such a late episode.

Excited for this one, I love the annual tradition of Vulcan farce episodes personally and the promise of amusing comments from MVPelia is icing on the cake.

Edited: I just noticed because my phone disconnected and switched over to my data I had to re-log in and it cut off part of what I'd typed.
 
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Surprising that the very first preview scene was for such a late episode.

Excited for this one, I love the annual tradition of Vulcan farce episodes personally and the promise of amusing comments b

2 years ago one of the scenes in the initial trailer (Ortegas and Pike in the shuttlecraft) was from the finale. That was a bit surprising to me.
 
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Feels like another TOS revision based episode, like the second episode of Season 3 was a revised version of the Squire of Gothos. This episode feels like the Enterprise Incident (Human posing as a Romulan) except with more humans and just replace Romulans with Vulcans.
Yeah, no.
 
Okay, wait, why are they acting like genetic modification for going undercover is some new and unusual thing? They did it in the series premiere.
 
I'm not sure why biological essentialism is seen as undesirable when writing fictional alien races. Different species of animals here on Earth have very different experiences of the world and very different cognitive responses, it makes sense that other sapient life out in the universe would too, especially if very non-humanoid like the Horta.

Obviously it's boring if everyone on a planet has one trait or the writers just go with "Vulcans = emotionless" (even though it's meant to be the opposite) but I don't think, say, having Betazoids be naturally predisposed to prosociality and love is a bad thing, nor is having Klingons be more prone to violence and less prone to compassion. It gives people like Worf and B'Elanna a lot more texture if they genuinely are battling against something innate in pursuit of their higher morals and ideals, because otherwise, if all sapient life is the same and there's nothing cognitively or biologically different about Klingons, they're both just deeply unimpressive people who occasionally fail to control a completely normal temper.
 
Well, it wasn't as bad as the Space Adventure Hour, but I still didn't like that episode. I hated that turning them back into humans happened offscreen, but most of all during the first half I was thinking about the Enterprise vulcan trilogy and how Soval pretty much became from Jerk to hero overnight. We needed more of the Sarrenite vulcans and less of the V'las Vulcans. I think this episode tried too hard to force vulcan dominance and it came across as kind of mean spirited. Vulcans might be arrogant, but at least Sarek was able "read the room" as it were.

If Space Adventure Hour got a 4, I would say this episode is slightly above it, and I'll give it a 5. I'm also glad they didn't start the season with this and I would love someone to ask the writers why they used this episode to show a very first look at Season 3 during Comic Con. It seems like if you wanted to sell a season, showing something that was actually great would have worked better. Maybe showing the alien from last week's episode as a clip would have sold the season better because it's such a beautiful looking visual effect and it provides a mystery of who and what they are.

And it was barely funny. More forced silliness than funny.
 
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