this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
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Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 3x08 "Four-and-a-Half-Vulcans"
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Great episode. Extremely cringe but it works for me.
God, the amount of bullying Spock must have put up with as a kid. It's no wonder he joined Starfleet. We even see it in one of the movies where he kicked the shit out of another Vulcan kid.
And incase someone needs a reminder on how Pike and La'An knew what Romulans are. La'An ran in to one in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. And Pike runs into them in A Quality of Mercy. Both dealing with wacky time displacement nonsense and conanically Romulans aren't revealed until TOS's Balance of Terror (which A Quality of Mercy is a remake of).
La'An is a terrible Romulan. She should have kept her plotting closer to the chest. Also funny how Pike saw through her behavior but didn't do anything about it. Does show Vulcan's are inherently bias towards other Vulcans. Which we even saw brought up when Batel calls out Pasalk.
This was a very fun episode, and does show off the complete bullshit logical fallacies that make up Vulcan society without having to deal with Vulcan society.
Extremely cringe says it right. Why wouldn't doctor m'benga challenge their decision to remain Vulcan without checking, testing, verifying their capacity? How the hell do they fix the nuclear systems in 10s? With no story? Off the rails & feeling like it was written by a 4th grader. Or a drunk pair of nimrods.
Had to fast forward through most of the episode. Shituational bad drama & procedure, non-comedy. With fancy dress! Fun & ridiculous (but fancy!) Patton Oswald appearance. Overdone, over the top terrible interactions between actors I highly respect.
Full throttle into idiocy land. With fancy dress! Look how much we can spend on costumes while our writers are drunk off their asses!
It's been established as far back as TOS that M'Benga specializes in Vulcan medicine, so it's surprising they didn't even mention it in this episode
I totally thought that too. Clearly, their judgement has been impaired and what they want is irrelevant. But you know...sometimes you just need stuff to happen to get the plot moving.
So La'An became Romulan; Spock said her case was different because of her augmented heritage. Does that imply that Romulans augmented themselves? And that's what distinguishes them physiologically from Vulcans, and is what makes them kinda evil?
I guess why wouldn't Romulans augment themselves? And they got the bad Khan Singh kind of augmentation, instead of the good Illyrian kind.
I love the swift eyebrow raises when La'An and Pike say the thing they cannot discuss together!
La’an didn’t become Romulan.
That was just the inference that she and Pike made as they both had awareness that Romulans existed.
In fact, it was a misdirection and further evidence that Vulcans can be blind in their prejudices.
The two of them locked onto the explanation that they knew and never considered that La’an’s heritage of altered DNA might lead to manipulative and territorially conquering behaviour like her ancestor Khan.
It was turning off the impact of the balancing unaltered human DNA and augmenting her brain function that let the Khan-like behaviour dominate.
I thought it was a fairly deft look at the risks of emphasizing different elements of brain function through intervention.
I'm too sleepy to stop this train of thought. Could Bashir have been augmented by an Illyrian doctor? Or a doctor whose work was informed by Illyrian methods?
I guess it makes some sense. They never got the teachings of Surak. So to control their emotions maybe they looked in to genetic augmentation, and it turns out, they turned evil. Which to be fair, a very common theme in Star Trek (exect when it's not).