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A Rant about NuTrek Vulcans
Warnings: This is a rant about NuTrek Vulcans. If that's going to be a bummer, you may wish to stop here. Light SPOILERS (a couple of details) for SNW through season 1, ep. 7 and a tiny bit beyond.
I feel torn between not wanting to spew negativity and wanting to get something off my chest. Chest has won. I hope this has a germ of a useful cultural point. This is, of course, my own perspective; many others don't feel the same way and that's fine.
I like Strange New Worlds. I've mostly enjoyed it; I'm glad it exists. I think it's the best of the NuTrek shows—but I cannot stand the NuTrek Vulcans—or actually the Vulcans on any series dating back to Enterprise. But I'm going to focus on NuTrek.
The problem with the NuVulcans, as I see it, is the writers approaching science fiction from an ethnocentric perspective. They seem not to know how to write (or see the value in writing) a culture other than their own. Thus, they write Vulcans as us, our culture. The Vulcans are arguably the most intriguing culture Star Trek ever created. Over the lifetime of Nimoy Spock, they are fleshed out across decades of writing, not always brilliant or consistent, but amounting to a civilization both instantly recognizable and subtle, relatable but extremely culturally alien. NuTrek has thrown most of that away. A few examples:
* Old Vulcans deny having emotion and/or the value of emotion.
* NuVulcans talk openly about their emotions all the time. The only concession to less emotionality is that they are low affect.
* Old Vulcans have a complex, somewhat contradictory philosophy oriented around what they call "logic."
* NuVulcans occasionally mention logic but it is not foregrounded.
* Old Vulcans don't/can't lie (it's culturally taboo).
* NuVulcans lie just like we do.
* Old Vulcans have, at least sometimes, rigid arranged marriages they have to practically face death to get out of.
* NuVulcans can split up at will (just like us). Or if that particular example was a ruse, minimally, couples are clearly expected to be in love and do all the "healthy relationship" stuff—just like we are.
* Old Vulcans, by extraordinarily strong implication, only have sex once every seven years during pon farr. And with really old Vulcans, its implied pon farr only affects men (T'Pring does not go crazy). And if you want to count Roddenberry's odd fantasies as canon, it's pretty violent.
* Enterprise (if not before?) extends pon farr to women (because—just like us—men and women are supposed to have exactly the same kind of sexual desires).
* NuVulcans just have sex whenever—like us—in a way that's coded as typically romantic—like we're supposed to.
* Depending on what era you're in, Old Vulcans are straight-up sexist, and that's an interesting thing to explore.
* Vulcans since probably TNG have been written as sexually egalitarian (or that's the aim)—just like we try to be.
In a nutshell, the NuVulcans are mostly just like us, minus some superficial differences in dress and social presentation (not smiling), and an impressively high IQ. This rewrite has stripped them of just about everything interesting:
* The fierce battle to deny emotion. (This came back a little in the derelict ship episode.)
* The extremely complex and often very efficacious but also often illogical adherence to this thing called "logic."
* The tense (nigh) inescapability of social expectations.
* The weird sex—connected to the fierce battle to deny emotion.
* The strange fact that despite all these contradictions, denials, rigidity, and cold ferocity, they are, in fact, very ethical and conscientious—or rather because of. Because all this intense cultural weirdness has built up over millennia as a means of subduing their violent impulses into peace.
That's good worldbuilding, good cultural creation—and out of this crucible came arguably Star Trek's finest character, Spock.
It's mostly gone.
Now we have NuSpock chatting about this complicated journey he's on to synthesize his Vulcan and human halves. Just like we're supposed to feel positive about all the pieces of ourselves and nurture our healthy relationships with our friends and partner, and so on.
It's characteristic of NuTrek to display a desire to do good role modeling, as if in a series of "very special" episodes (though SNW has done this less). This rewrite of the Vulcans suggests the desire make Spock an exemplar of a mixed-race person going on a wonderful journey of self-discovery.
Thing is, Old Vulcan society never existed to be a morality play for how we should behave. No one ever said we should have rigid arranged marriages and not smile and deny all emotion and preach logic. They were a different culture, even in some ways a genuinely different species, with different physiology, sexuality, etc. If they existed to tell us anything (and they did), it was to respect different cultures. Sure, Kirk, McCoy, and company ribbed Spock about his Vulcanness (in some ways that look overtly racist today), but they never expected him to stop being Vulcan. They accepted him for who he was. TOS has McCoy bickering with Spock about his being a "green-blooded inhuman" So-and-So in a way that's clearly intended to show McCoy's bias, and Spock blows him off and stays himself. SNW, has a random character (Angel) ambush Spock and tell him to become the person they think he should be in a scene that might be intended to expose Angel's own bias but is played damn straight as "wasn't that good advice Spock should definitely listen to?" SNW has Spock being pushed into trusting a "hunch," doing so quickly and without complaint, and then being criticized for not doing so easily enough, as if the only way to be an acceptable person is to jump easily at hunches. (Again, one might argue the critic, Angel, here is biased—but nothing in the episode, not Spock himself, challenges their advice; rather, it's played as the gray outsider speaking the truth.) A later episode has Chapel telling Spock his extreme anger is human (and thus a thing he should embrace). I would argue its extremity is not human; it is Vulcan—and Vulcans suppress it because it is extreme, which makes her advice not only culturally disrespectful but dangerous.
Old Vulcan culture could be ugly, and it could be wrong about things. And it messed up Spock royally, yet to the day he died, he identified primarily as a Vulcan because they were his people (the people he grew up with) and there was much in them he valued. That's life. That's cultural complexity. And some specific duds across the years aside, that's good writing. And his life with his shipmates is a lesson in how to live with cultural diversity. And I feel it shows disregard for cultural diversity to simply stop representing it so that Spock, instead, can represent a psychologically healthy 21st century Western young adult.
I feel torn between not wanting to spew negativity and wanting to get something off my chest. Chest has won. I hope this has a germ of a useful cultural point. This is, of course, my own perspective; many others don't feel the same way and that's fine.
I like Strange New Worlds. I've mostly enjoyed it; I'm glad it exists. I think it's the best of the NuTrek shows—but I cannot stand the NuTrek Vulcans—or actually the Vulcans on any series dating back to Enterprise. But I'm going to focus on NuTrek.
The problem with the NuVulcans, as I see it, is the writers approaching science fiction from an ethnocentric perspective. They seem not to know how to write (or see the value in writing) a culture other than their own. Thus, they write Vulcans as us, our culture. The Vulcans are arguably the most intriguing culture Star Trek ever created. Over the lifetime of Nimoy Spock, they are fleshed out across decades of writing, not always brilliant or consistent, but amounting to a civilization both instantly recognizable and subtle, relatable but extremely culturally alien. NuTrek has thrown most of that away. A few examples:
* Old Vulcans deny having emotion and/or the value of emotion.
* NuVulcans talk openly about their emotions all the time. The only concession to less emotionality is that they are low affect.
* Old Vulcans have a complex, somewhat contradictory philosophy oriented around what they call "logic."
* NuVulcans occasionally mention logic but it is not foregrounded.
* Old Vulcans don't/can't lie (it's culturally taboo).
* NuVulcans lie just like we do.
* Old Vulcans have, at least sometimes, rigid arranged marriages they have to practically face death to get out of.
* NuVulcans can split up at will (just like us). Or if that particular example was a ruse, minimally, couples are clearly expected to be in love and do all the "healthy relationship" stuff—just like we are.
* Old Vulcans, by extraordinarily strong implication, only have sex once every seven years during pon farr. And with really old Vulcans, its implied pon farr only affects men (T'Pring does not go crazy). And if you want to count Roddenberry's odd fantasies as canon, it's pretty violent.
* Enterprise (if not before?) extends pon farr to women (because—just like us—men and women are supposed to have exactly the same kind of sexual desires).
* NuVulcans just have sex whenever—like us—in a way that's coded as typically romantic—like we're supposed to.
* Depending on what era you're in, Old Vulcans are straight-up sexist, and that's an interesting thing to explore.
* Vulcans since probably TNG have been written as sexually egalitarian (or that's the aim)—just like we try to be.
In a nutshell, the NuVulcans are mostly just like us, minus some superficial differences in dress and social presentation (not smiling), and an impressively high IQ. This rewrite has stripped them of just about everything interesting:
* The fierce battle to deny emotion. (This came back a little in the derelict ship episode.)
* The extremely complex and often very efficacious but also often illogical adherence to this thing called "logic."
* The tense (nigh) inescapability of social expectations.
* The weird sex—connected to the fierce battle to deny emotion.
* The strange fact that despite all these contradictions, denials, rigidity, and cold ferocity, they are, in fact, very ethical and conscientious—or rather because of. Because all this intense cultural weirdness has built up over millennia as a means of subduing their violent impulses into peace.
That's good worldbuilding, good cultural creation—and out of this crucible came arguably Star Trek's finest character, Spock.
It's mostly gone.
Now we have NuSpock chatting about this complicated journey he's on to synthesize his Vulcan and human halves. Just like we're supposed to feel positive about all the pieces of ourselves and nurture our healthy relationships with our friends and partner, and so on.
It's characteristic of NuTrek to display a desire to do good role modeling, as if in a series of "very special" episodes (though SNW has done this less). This rewrite of the Vulcans suggests the desire make Spock an exemplar of a mixed-race person going on a wonderful journey of self-discovery.
Thing is, Old Vulcan society never existed to be a morality play for how we should behave. No one ever said we should have rigid arranged marriages and not smile and deny all emotion and preach logic. They were a different culture, even in some ways a genuinely different species, with different physiology, sexuality, etc. If they existed to tell us anything (and they did), it was to respect different cultures. Sure, Kirk, McCoy, and company ribbed Spock about his Vulcanness (in some ways that look overtly racist today), but they never expected him to stop being Vulcan. They accepted him for who he was. TOS has McCoy bickering with Spock about his being a "green-blooded inhuman" So-and-So in a way that's clearly intended to show McCoy's bias, and Spock blows him off and stays himself. SNW, has a random character (Angel) ambush Spock and tell him to become the person they think he should be in a scene that might be intended to expose Angel's own bias but is played damn straight as "wasn't that good advice Spock should definitely listen to?" SNW has Spock being pushed into trusting a "hunch," doing so quickly and without complaint, and then being criticized for not doing so easily enough, as if the only way to be an acceptable person is to jump easily at hunches. (Again, one might argue the critic, Angel, here is biased—but nothing in the episode, not Spock himself, challenges their advice; rather, it's played as the gray outsider speaking the truth.) A later episode has Chapel telling Spock his extreme anger is human (and thus a thing he should embrace). I would argue its extremity is not human; it is Vulcan—and Vulcans suppress it because it is extreme, which makes her advice not only culturally disrespectful but dangerous.
Old Vulcan culture could be ugly, and it could be wrong about things. And it messed up Spock royally, yet to the day he died, he identified primarily as a Vulcan because they were his people (the people he grew up with) and there was much in them he valued. That's life. That's cultural complexity. And some specific duds across the years aside, that's good writing. And his life with his shipmates is a lesson in how to live with cultural diversity. And I feel it shows disregard for cultural diversity to simply stop representing it so that Spock, instead, can represent a psychologically healthy 21st century Western young adult.
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I'm also very not keen on the Gorn arc, loathing horror as a genre (so often other SF is actually horror). I want strange new worlds, like it says on the tin.
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A lot of people have loved Spock for his alienness, and I wonder if this new emphasis on how normatively human he's supposed to be will undermine the character as a point of identification for neurodivergent people. I gather a lot of people on the ASD spectrum have long identified with Spock, and I could imagine that the "show more normal emotion" badgering might be rather distressing for some of them.
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This was very interesting to read. I bounced off the Trek reboot series like two films in, so my perspective is limited to that, but I remember feeling even with the very first movie that it did not really understand Spock (despite new Spock being portrayed by an obviously talented actor), or the general fact that acting annoyed with everyone around you is not the same thing as acting with logic over emotion. And as for this:
And I feel it shows disregard for cultural diversity to simply stop representing it so that Spock, instead, can represent a psychologically healthy 21st century Western young adult.
I could not agree more.
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(A friend of mine linked me here because she knows I am all about the Vulcans, and I hope you don't mind a stranger coming by and jumping into this.)
While I haven't seen much NuTrek, from what I have seen, I agree with just about everything you said. I really do think they lost the thread on the Vulcans with some of the things they did in Enterprise, although at least in season 4 they tried to retcon some of it into the Vulcans of that time having become corrupt and needing to re-learn the Real Meaning of Logic or whatever.
Old Vulcan society never existed to be a morality play for how we should behave.
1000% this. I hate when people try to write Vulcans as some sort of Utopia. No! They're not better than us, they're different from us. Some of the stuff you mentioned, especially the rigid social expectations and the arranged marriages that aren't always easy and having to keep close hold on their emotions...that's the stuff I'm interested in.
I especially like playing with things that would be terrible for humans but, because Vulcans are aliens, with alien psychology, might actually be good for them. Is it a good idea to arrange marriages in childhood with basically no way to separate if it ends up not working out? Not for humans, but maybe for Vulcans the disadvantages are outweighed by the advantages. Or repression of emotion. I want a human character to tell a Vulcan character how bad it is to repress emotion and for the Vulcan to pull out fifteen hundred years of rigorous, well-designed longitudinal studies showing improved mental health in people who follow Surakian logic and just raise an eyebrow and say "our brains are not the same."
But I'm digressing. Basically, I completely agree, Vulcans are aliens and should be allowed to be alien, and parts of their culture should feel strange and maybe a little uncomfortable to us the viewer because they are not like us and we shouldn't expect them to be.
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