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.
No amount of handwaving can bat away how weird it is to have put this “hijinks” episode at this point in the season, and it just further speaks to Strange New Worlds wanting to have it both ways with what elements of itself it allows to carry over and form arcs across a season and what it wants to forget about and move on from in its episodic format. “Four and a Half Vulcans,” however, is quickly the kind of episode that wants to move on from itself, only ever thinking, “What’s something funny we could do with all these four characters being stuck as Vulcans?”
Unfortunately, the funny thing is it’s the same thing for La’an, Chapel, Pike, and Uhura: it’s to make them all cardboard-cutout jerks that comically overplay Vulcan restraint and logicism into social ostracization and blunt humor. It’s the same gag, refracted through four separate arcs. La’an is arguably the one most different, and the area where “Four and a Half Vulcans” comes to an even remotely interesting idea: her Vulcan jerkishness instead manifests as a sidestep into the discovery of Romulan paranoia made manifest, as manipulative and suspicious traits begin to transform a steadfast commitment to ship security into a kind of gunboat diplomacy, exaggerated into her wanting to take control of the Enterprise and start an interstellar war.
But even that falls into the same kind of pattern as each of the rest of the Vulcanized characters in the episode do: all of their stories end up being about control. La’an wants to control the ship and, through it, the galaxy (before someone else can control it instead). Uhura takes advantage of her relationship with Beto (just as he’d tried to in the episode prior!) to mind meld with him, making him more agreeable to her logical way of spending all their time together and trying to make him more Vulcan in the process. Chapel dumps first Dr. Korby and then all of her friends, believing that by controlling her “frivolous” social life she can better dedicate her time to scientific research. Even Pike’s story is about a gendered idea of control when he sabotages Batel’s meeting with a Vulcan admiral in charge of Starfleet’s judicial branch about a potential return to service there, because as a Vulcan he now knows what’s best for her in conversation with another Vulcan.
But Strange New Worlds has nothing particularly interesting to say about any of these storylines other than “haha, those Vulcans sure are jerks, aren’t they?” It’s not that there isn’t fun to be derived out of that kind of scenario—Star Trek‘s been taking the piss out of the Vulcans on and off since the very beginning!—but “Four and a Half Vulcans,” at every opportunity, chooses the easy excuse out of tackling its premise, one that’s already risky enough to engage in given the prejudicial tone it’s built on, by only engaging in simple slapstick and cheap gags.
That equally applies to its resolution, too. When the Vulcan Pike, La’an, Uhura, and Chapel all agree that it’s logical to reject an eventual cure to their condition and remain Vulcan, Una and Spock hatch a plan to communicate directly with each of the affected crew’s Katras (the Vulcan concept of the spirit). To do so, they recruit an ex-paramour of Una’s, a Vulcan katric expert… named Doug (guest star Patton Oswalt). The joke, of course, is that he is a Vulcan obsessed with human culture, but really, it’s just another excuse for Strange New Worlds to yell to its audience, “Look, we’re being silly!” instead of doing anything particularly funny.
Ultimately, “Four and a Half Vulcans” is another case of Strange New Worlds struggling to engage beyond a surface level with what it’s trying to grapple with—whether it’s a tone, or a format, or a genre, the series’ willingness to explore a variety of styles for itself has proven to be much broader than it ever is deeper.
As fraught as its premise is in the first place, the episode is incurious to unpack its view of Vulcan culture, either internally or externally, even after it handwaves getting most of the affected crew back to normal (La’an, the final holdout, is convinced by a mental grapple match/tango with Spock, because… she’s part augment thanks to being a Noonien Singh? It kind of feels like an excuse to shove a fight-slash-dance sequence in at the end just because). It’s incurious to engage in comedy beyond the most basic of levels, leaning on knowing that the show has been rewarded and lauded for being a bit cute with its audience. You can’t be mad if it’s a silly one, because the episode knows it’s a silly one, after all!
But Strange New Worlds has been rewarded and lauded for that experimentation and willingness to have fun in the past because at its best, it hasn’t allowed that levity to masquerade for surface-level depth. Season two’s musical episode and the Lower Decks crossover perhaps remain the very best examples—episodes that were, on the surface, silly escapades that still managed to have important impacts on our heroes and have weight as part of their character arcs over the season.
“Four and a Half Vulcans” is just one tired joke after the next until it suddenly slams the reset button in time for the next episode. Strange New Worlds can be so much better than that, and just because it wasn’t as bad as some people may have feared coming in, doesn’t make that realization any less frustrating.
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