#startrek

OK, I love Four and a Half Vulcans! Not many people out there seem to. And the humor isn't what I love it for, although that's fun. Three things make it a great episode for me: 1) they threw in a bit of technobabble about the serum being based on Spock's _experiences_, not just DNA. I don't care if that makes no sense, neither does anything medical in Trek. Because of that bit of technobabble, we get a really interesting episode about the racism Spock experienced on Vulcan. After all, we've seen with T'pring and her mother, as well as back during Enterprise, that there are plenty of judgmental, arrogant, close-minded Vulcans out there. Spock would have experienced a lot of criticism from them. Given that, he did a remarkably good job of keeping it together through this episode. It's not just that the 4 of them become Vulcan, it's that they become the kind of Vulcans who mistreated Spock in the past. We already know from TNG, Enterprise, Discovery, and the episodes with T'pring that some Vulcans are pretty bigoted. After all, there's a reason Spock chose not to live on Vulcan despite disappointing his father. 2) I love that they show the 4 newly Vulcans as all differing, a lot. I guess Pike is pretty much a traditional Vulcan. La'an is a Romulan from the first moment, in her speech. Chapel is as rigid as T'pring at her worst. I'm not sure what Uhura is up to. But despite the commonalities of acting superior and claiming that whatever they want is logical, all 4 are very different. And that's what we've seen before: that Vulcans are not as invariant as they claim to be, or as humans think they are. I love that. 3) A third thing I love: everything about Doug, including the post-credits sequence, which is hilarious. I love that the person Una finds irresistable is not physically attractive in the traditional sense, at all. I love his name. I love that he talks in a more human style most of the time, and that he's actively interested in humans, and wants to learn from Spock, who has a different kind of expertise than just living among humans. And again, I like that this shows us that Vulcans are not all the same. Interesting that Doug also doesn't live on Vulcan. #Startrek #SNW #StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds #StrangeNewWorlds