Every season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has exactly one very silly Vulcan-focused episode. Spock (Ethan Peck) and his fiancé accidentally swap bodies after doing a mind-meld ceremony in season 1’s “Spock Amok.” Highly advanced aliens turn Spock into a human in season 2’s “Charades.” The season 3 episode “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” instead turns four of the Enterprise’s human crew members into Vulcans, and the measures the crew takes to remedy the situation raises some big questions for Star Trek’s most notorious Vulcan mishap.
[Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3, episode 8, and the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Tuvix.”]
In “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans,” Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush), chief of security La’An Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong), and communications officer Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) use the same serum that was able to restore Spock’s Vulcan half last season to turn themselves into Vulcans. The transformation is necessary to help a pre-warp species without breaking the Prime Directive: They have made contact with Vulcans, but aren’t aware of any other aliens yet.
It’s pretty absurd that the Enterprise crew would use a medical treatment they don’t really understand, rather than just figuring out a way to bypass a pre-warp people’s scanners. And predictably the experimental procedure doesn’t work as planned.
The Vulcanized crew members don’t naturally revert back to humans afterward. When a solution is found and the process could be reversed, they say they wish to remain Vulcans, because they’ve inherited the species’ strong sense of superiority. The rest of the Enterprise accepts that decision, and lets them return to their duties.
Is that Starfleet’s policy on accidental transformation? Because if so, it makes the events of the notorious 1996 Star Trek: Voyager episode “Tuvix” even more horrifying. In that episode, a transporter accident causes the Vulcan Lieutenant Tuvok and the mostly Talaxian cook Neelix to fuse into a new being dubbed Tuvix. Since there doesn’t seem to be a way to separate them, Tuvix is welcomed to integrate himself into Voyager’s crew, and proves to be a model officer and a good person.
When the Voyager’s Doctor does find a way to undo the fusion, Tuvix says he wants to stay the way he is, and that he views Neelix and Tuvok as his parents who gave him life. His pleas are so convincing that the Doctor decides the procedure would violate his oath to do no harm. Voyager’s Captain Kathryn Janeway has no such moral code, and does it herself.
Adding to the monstrousness of Janeway’s decision is how the Enterprise crew in Strange New Worlds strives to ensure they’re adhering to the actual wishes of their friends, who had never before said they wanted to be Vulcans. They seek out a human-loving Vulcan named Doug (played by Patton Oswalt) who specializes in a psychic technique that can be used to access the new Vulcans’ subconscious minds and check whether they want to be human again.
This technique might have been very hard for Voyager to pull off, especially since the ship’s highest-ranking Vulcan was part of Tuvix. But since the events of Strange New Worlds happen well before Voyager, presumably Janeway and the Doctor would have been able to read about the case when deciding how to proceed. Obviously this episode was actually written much later than “Tuvix,” so that would actually be impossible, but “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” seems to acknowledge why “Tuvix” was so ethically messy and make it even worse in the process by setting a precedent in the prequel.
Tuvix deserved better. He was destroyed despite being a good friend to the whole crew, while Enterprise’s new Vulcans are given the benefit of the doubt despite being colossal jerks representing the worst stereotypes of the species. Pike, sporting an even more ridiculous pompadour than usual, belittles his human girlfriend Captain Marie Batel (Melanie Scrofano) in a meeting with a Vulcan admiral she’s seeking to impress. Chapel becomes so consumed with her work that she decides she doesn’t have time for any sort of social life. Uhura pushes her boyfriend Beto Ortegas (Mynor Luken) — who she’s somehow still dating, despite his awful behavior last episode — to undergo a mind-meld to make him act Vulcan too. They’re all horrible to Spock, repeatedly reminding him that he’s just half Vulcan.
Thankfully, they’re each quickly persuaded to go back to being human after they’ve thoroughly embarrassed themselves in Vulcan form. The exception is La’An, who has a different reaction to the Vulcan serum. The augmented DNA she shares with her ancestor Khan Noonien Singh activates the evil side of Vulcan genetics, and she begins acting like their scheming cousins, the Romulans. Luckily, James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley) and engineer Montgomery Scott (Martin Quinn) manage to stop her from executing a ludicrously convoluted plan to start a war. Spock is then able to persuade her to change back with another one of the steamy dance sequences they’ve been sharing this season.
Everyone in “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” would probably have been better off if the humans had been turned back to their original forms as soon as a solution was found, considering how much apologizing the transformed crew winds up doing once they’re restored. Pike was apparently so compromised by his transformation that he ignored the threat La’An posed to the ship even though he recognized that she was acting like a Romulan. It would have been hard to blame the crew for a bit of mutiny to turn their friends back for their own good.
The fact that the Enterprise crew works so hard to ensure that colleagues’ wishes are actually respected demonstrates the powerful ethical code and views on bodily autonomy that they live by. If only Captain Janeway adhered to the same standards, Tuvix wouldn’t have been brutally killed.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is available to stream on Paramount Plus. Further episodes will be released weekly on Thursday.
