So what happens when four of your most essential crew members turn full Vulcan overnight?
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds just dropped its most absurd episode yet, and it is so illogically fun it might scramble your sensors. This is season 3, episode 8, “Four and a Half Vulcans,” and right off the bat, you know the drill: major spoiler warning. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it and come back.
I’m going to tell you up front that this one ends with two scores, because the critic in me and the Strange New Worlds fan in me did not walk out of this episode holding the same number. That’s not me hedging. That is genuinely what happened.
The Fastest Crisis in Star Trek History
Let’s set the scene. The Enterprise crew is about to enjoy some well earned shore leave when an urgent call comes in from Vulcan High Command. A pre-warp planet is about to have a nuclear meltdown, because a power system the Vulcans gifted them is failing. The Vulcans can’t get there in time, so the Enterprise is once again their only hope.
To fix it without violating the Prime Directive, the away team has to appear Vulcan. Conveniently, Nurse Chapel has a modified serum on hand, and for those of you paying attention, yes, that’s a direct callback to the tech from last season’s “Charades,” the one that turned Spock fully human. Apparently it works both ways. Pike, La’An, and Chapel all take the plunge.
They beam down sporting fresh pointy ears and, in Pike’s case, a bizarrely tall hairdo. I still don’t know what that’s all about. They handle the whole thing, and what follows is maybe the fastest crisis resolution you will ever see anywhere in Star Trek history. Epic slow motion with music and everything, a bunch of them power walking, a quick montage, and boom. Crisis averted.
That was all in the first ten minutes.
The whole Vulcan transformation plot is quite literally the MacGuffin that gets us into the thing. And that’s funny to me, because it’s also the part of the episode that has the most going on.
The Stuff That Kept Stopping Me
There are things I love about this episode and things I hate about this episode, and they alternate at speed. As soon as something upset me, it was only there long enough for the next fun scene to grab me, and then I was having a great time again until I bumped into the next thing. That is the up and down I personally experienced, and I would absolutely love to hear whether yours matched.
Here’s my list. Why in the world do they turn full Vulcan, hair and everything? Pike has hair product in. I don’t know how genetics affect hair product.
Second, they put on the outfits to go down to the planet so they look like Vulcans, fine, but then they stay in those same outfits after they come back up. And then you get the later story beat where they decide they want to stay this way, because being a Vulcan is great. Hold on. One, why would Starfleet let them stay that way? Two, even if you are staying that way, why aren’t you wearing your uniforms? It plays like the show decided that not only do we have to dress you like Vulcans, we have to keep you dressed like Vulcans so everyone remembers that you’re Vulcan.
I had a conversation with Salty right after the episode aired, and he hadn’t even seen it yet. He goes, “Based on what I’ve seen, I figured it would be this, this and this,” and he walked the whole thing through, and I said, yeah, you didn’t miss a beat. That’s pretty much exactly what it is. And then he said something I do agree with: if you’re not going to have real sci-fi writers, what you end up with is a writers’ room trying to write like real sci-fi writers even though they don’t know how to do that. That’s fair.
La’An, Romulans, and the Best Two Minutes in the Episode
I did think the twist that La’An leans more into the genetics of a Romulan than a Vulcan was cool. And then there’s that brief moment where she and Pike both realize they have separately had time travel shenanigans and both encountered Romulans, and they have to talk around it, because neither of them is permitted to discuss the mission where they learned it.
“Perhaps if we speak of it simultaneously.”
That works, and it works precisely because nobody else in Star Trek at this point in the timeline knows what a Romulan is beyond what’s been seen on a screen. That’s a real idea, executed well, inside an episode that mostly isn’t interested in real ideas.
La’An’s arc from there is that our ship needs to be better prepared for war, and she starts literally planning how to get a war started. Reach out to the Klingons and convince them the Orions are plotting to invade, tell the Orions the Tholians are behind the plot, tell the Tholians the real puppet masters are the Gorn Hegemony. Great scene. Not attached to anything.
A Kirk With Nowhere to Be
Which brings us to the Kirk cameo. Paul Wesley shows up on the ship, and I feel like the entire back half of this season is setting up Wesley’s Kirk much more heavily.
This is what I mean when I say the episode is a series of scenes. There’s no real viable reason for him to be here. Yes, it’s shore leave, and there are excuses. He’s coming to visit his brother, and his brother is gone. Clearly we can only afford one Kirk at a time. But why is he here at all? Is it just to give us the Scotty and Kirk material?
And I’m kind of okay with that, because again, those scenes were great. The chemistry was good. I like what they’re doing with him as the guy who’s still learning, and you get that one wonderful moment where they land on “we make a really good team.” That’s a long way to go for that, though.
Everybody Gets a Storyline
There’s a lot stuffed into this episode and a bunch of it I don’t think you needed, but I enjoyed it while it was happening. It’s crazy like that.
Pike goes full Vulcan efficiency expert. Now that he’s Vulcan he can really cook, and he zeroes in on making the ship more efficient. Spock has to deal with being inadequate and subordinate to everybody else, because now he’s the half in “Four and a Half Vulcans.” Uhura and Beto get a domestic bit that includes cleaning his quarters, poetry and vegan soup, and Uhura apparently mind melded him into it, though he was willing. The Ortegas storyline felt completely out of context and was still fun to sit through.
Then there’s Chapel, who realizes how efficient she could be if she didn’t need so much sleep, and starts swearing everyone in her life off in the name of efficiency. We get a Korby cameo on a screen. Again: scenes for scenes’ sake. I don’t know that we needed it.
There are some genuinely good callbacks in here. We get plomeek soup, the same plomeek soup Chapel makes for Spock in The Original Series, and it is received about as warmly here as it was there.
Lot of moving parts. None of it felt cohesive. All of it felt good on its own.
A Good Joke Is Not a Good Sketch
Back in the day at SNL, when people would pitch, the note was: this is a good joke, but it isn’t a good sketch. You can get maybe one joke out of this. How do you fill ten minutes with it?
That is the exact same thing happening here with the idea of the crew turning into Vulcans. I feel like several people had ideas about this. What about an episode where we do Spock human again? What if Chapel became a Vulcan? What if this person became that? And someone said, what if we did it all together?
It feels undercooked. This episode comes across like somebody had an idea board covered in all the different scenes and moments they wanted to do, and went, yeah, let’s do that, that’s it, and then put the scenes together.
I don’t necessarily know what the show is going for. Salty’s read is that they believe episodic television is randomness, and they think The Original Series was random, rather than The Original Series having good sci-fi writers writing good, solid sci-fi stories. That’s fair, and I’m still here for it.
The Verdict
This is the part I was hinting at at the top. I’m giving this two scores.
The first is my critical score, and it’s a simple 5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index. This episode is a mess. It’s all over the road. Characters come in and out with no rhyme or reason and there’s no overarching plot. There’s an idea, and the idea never becomes a story.
The second score is the Star Trek fan in me, the Strange New Worlds fan in me, who had a lot of fun. That one is a 7.5 out of 10.
That’s the thing I’m starting to realize about a lot of this. You have to look at it and ask: did I have a good time, or did I get so hung up on the items I’ve been listing that the good time never arrived? And I didn’t get hung up. The minute I got past the beats and moments that stopped me, I had fun with what was actually here.
Hopefully that’s been your experience too. If not, let me know in the comments on the video what you thought. I’m enjoying this show. I don’t even know where to say it’s going, because I have no clue. But overall, I’m having a good time with it.
Comment on the video above: did the Vulcan swap hold together for you, or did the seams stop you cold? Never forget, everyone loves to know.
