The mission lasted only a few minutes due to Vulcan efficiency. I only wish the writers had, like Christine Chapel, abruptly ended things to spare our time from this mess of an episode that once again is more interested in being safe and silly than using the Star Trek platform to risk saying anything challenging.
When shore leave is called off for a stealth assignment to save a pre-warp Vulcan society, an experiment gone wrong turns Pike, La’an, Chapel, and Uhura into Vulcans permanently. With their personalities dramatically altered, the four turn Enterprise upside down and nearly start a war.
Thus far, Strange New Worlds delivered one Vulcan-centric screwball comedy every season. season one gave us the body swap farce, “Spock Amok,” and season two had “Charades,” where Spock is transformed into a human. I thought “Wedding Bell Blues” counted as this season’s continuation of this tradition and even called it the third entry in a trilogy in my review. But not only does “Four-And-A-Half Vulcans” appear to be a second Vulcan farce this season but it acts more directly as a sequel to “Charades” by using the same serum but in reverse to turn our human characters into Vulcans.
Perhaps the episode’s greatest flaw is its biological essentialism, treating the Vulcan cultural devotion to a philosophy of strict logic and stoicism as if an intrinsic component of the species’ biology. Writers Dana Horgan and Henry Alonso Myers breeze past a justification that still makes no sense even by typical Star Trek technobabble standards.
The pitch must have been: What if the human characters became Vulcans and were out-Vulcaning Spock? Perhaps this would have been the better time to deploy Trelane than in “Wedding Bell Blues” as a magical Q finger-snap feels like a slightly more elegant way of getting there than the path they chose. Q Continuum powers have a history in this franchise of working however the hell Q wants them to regardless of any perceived logical holes the audience might think up.
Still, “Four-And-A-Half Vulcans” could have worked as an effective character study if Pike, La’an, Chapel, and Uhura each still felt like reasonable extrapolations of their original personas but with just one trait tuned way up to some extreme. But because the characters behave so radically differently from how we’ve come to know them over these three seasons, it’s impossible to believe they would be cleared for duty by psychological tests.
Photo: Marni Grossman/Paramount+
I’m reminded of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Dramatis Personae,” which also featured wild personality changes, but even then, it was a first season episode before characters learned to know and trust each other, and the political instability of The Federation/Bajor relationship lent some plausibility to Benjamin Sisko’s sudden extreme paranoia of an imminent coup. No such plausibility exists that the Nyota Uhura we know would ever be capable of brainwashing her romantic partner.
But strong writing is capable of rising above a flimsy premise. In 2025, there’s clear social commentary one could mine from a premise involving major body transformation. A transgender allegory might not graft easily onto the humans-become-Vulcans conceit but the universal themes of identity and identity crisis could probably still speak in some ways to the trans experience if the writers were interested in using the Star Trek platform to address the social justice issues of our time and not just as a wacky space adventure hour, as it was depicted in a meta story earlier this season.
There are elements I did enjoy in this episode though. Patton Oswalt’s Doug not only plays to the famous stand-up’s comedic strengths — such as Oswalt’s perfect delivery of “Sarah slash Doug” at the end of the list of Una’s and Spock’s non-existent family together, invented on the fly — but Doug is conceptually interesting. We’ve seen non-conventional Vulcans before, but a Vulcan who maintains his core commitment to logic while also being a fan of human culture and envying Spock’s human side is something new and even…fascinating: “What I would give to be half the human you are. All of my life, I have studied humans. Your music. Your culture. Your savoir-faire. It’s what the ancient humans once called it ‘very cool’.”
This might also be the best material the show has yet given to Melanie Scrofano. I’ve always liked her Marie Batel but this season has reduced the captain of the USS Cayuga to little more than a Gorn victim and medical patient. Here, she finally gets to assert herself again as a full character with her own goals separate from being just Pike’s girlfriend. I’ve feared her Gorn situation would result in a storyline where she ultimately becomes a Gorn or leaves to live with the Gorn or something equally cringe. And while I think there’s still a high probability that’s where the show is taking her, this episode has given me hope the writers may have a better plan for Batel.
“Four-And-A-Half Vulcans” is another miss for season three. It reduces humanity to biological essentialism and fails to use its lousy premise to at least deliberately say something substantive about our world or the human condition. And each character’s Vulcan iteration is so out of character it’s like they lack any real agency, and so the episode fails to even provide insight into who they really are at their core, at their katra.
New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds release Thursdays on Paramount+.
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