Talk: Vulcan

Age of #nset of Pon Farr[]

The section on Pon farr implies Vulcans go through it starting in their teens or twenties, and Spock, going through it in his thirties was an aberration (and that in Genesis, going through it in his teens was more normal). However, evidence of every other Vulcan in the series would suggest the opposite. Sarek was in his 50s-60s for his first Pon Farr with Sybok's mother, T'Pol has not married or undergone her first Pon Farr before 'Bounty' when she is around 60 (and doesn't marry Koss, who has not undergone pon farr either by season 4). Tuvok married in his 40s. Tuvok's eldest son had a child from his first Pon Farr, and likely was around 60, assuming he was born before Tuvok rejoined Starfleet.

We don't know the age Vorik was on Voyager, but it is unlikely he is younger than 25 based on his rank and experience, but could be older.

My guess is that 35 is early (but not unusually so) which is why Spock (and likely T'Pring and Stonn) are caught by surprise. Genesis, showing Pon Farr in teen years, is likely the aberration. --71.233.244.224 07:47, February 7, 2015 (UTC)

Vulcan makeup (orange pigmentation)[]

I have noticed that around 1998 Vulcans have started to be portrayed differently. Actors now wear some makeup of yellowish-orange hue, like for example Solok (and the other non-speaking Vulcans of DS9: "Take Me Out to the Holosuite") as well as the replicant Vulcans of VOY: "In the Flesh" like Kinis. The actor who portrays Sturek (β) in the cutscenes of the video game Starfleet Academy (also from 1998), also wears this makeup.

It's possible that these two episodes mark the very first appearances of these orange-colored Vulcans, although I am not certain if they appeared already in immediately preceding episodes. What I am sure about is that no such makeup was used in previous seasons of DS9 and VOY, nor in other Star Trek incarnation. Notably, this make up is not used again in ENT, either.

This seems to be a change similar to that of the Romulans between TOS and TNG eras, where they wear ridges. Unlike in the case of Romulans however, this noticeable change is not addressed in any article. Therefore I plan to add this information into the article so that you can develop it accordingly, hoping it's not trivial.

For the record, I speculate that this new makeup is supposed perhaps to portray the greenish hue Vulcans are supposed to have (which however is never confirmed visually on-screen), but resulted to a yellow rather than green effect in practice. Tiki Mo'ai (talk) 12:44, May 21, 2015 (UTC)

Warp tech.[]

Is it stated or inferred why 1. Vulcans had such early warp technology (before the BORG!?) and 2. Why they didn't achieve warp (like) 4000 by the 20th century if they had exposure to warp technology for so long. If there is any logical answer to inquiry please give me one. – The preceding unsigned comment was added by CaptainAlphaWiki22 (talk • contribs).

Removed[]

I've removed a reference to the Vulcans as "culturally one of the most fascinating species in the Federation," as that's probably too emotive and non-encyclopedic for our purposes. --Defiant (talk) 12:31, September 19, 2016 (UTC)

I've also now removed a speculation which stated, "T'Pol probably just cited the scientific theory of her time." --Defiant (talk) 18:25, June 24, 2017 (UTC)

I have also removed the following, which have lacked citations for over 2 years:

--Cleanse ^{( talk )} 08:21, October 10, 2017 (UTC)

Vulcans stray, and then embrace reform[]

I have revised the paragraph that originally said that in the era of ENT, Vulcans chose to act in the role of being beneficent "big brothers" to Humans, as Humans tried to develop their early warp-drive program. Please forgive the length of this comment, but the edit that I justify here reflects a major shift in this page's understanding of the Vulcans in the time of ENT, and so therefore the explanation shared here needs to be substantive.

This revision of the text is based on a thread that can be seen in many ENT episodes, most notably in ENT: "The Forge" -- specifically as seen in the private conversation that took place between Vulcan Ambassador Soval and Earth's Admiral Forrest in the first few minutes of that episode, which showed that something very different from altruism was motivating how the Vulcans related to Humans. Soval indicated to Forrest that Vulcans were deeply envious of Earth's rapid progress on all fronts, and were concerned about what that might portend for the future of Vulcans.

Throughout the early ENT episodes, Jonathan Archer and other Humans had long been chafing about the Vulcans constantly putting the breaks on Earth's progress. Now the comments from Vulcan Ambassador Soval had at last revealed the truth as to why this was so. Our Memory Alpha account of this history needs to reflect what was shown in these ENT episodes.

We all know that Rick Berman strove to use ENT's final year to tidy up several loose ends of the Star Trek saga. One loose end that Berman was apparently addressing in these ENT stories was about the Vulcans. In TOS, the Vulcans are seen to be superior to Humans in virtually every way. And yet every time Spock and Kirk disagree about something, Spock defers to Kirk -- and Spock does not do so out of a blind adherence to the chain of command, but out of a true personal admiration for Kirk's judgments. What backstory could possibly explain that?

To address this, Rick Berman apparently took some stories from TOS, and from them he wove an elaborate backstory, to be portrayed in ENT. The clue that can be found in TOS is in a particular classic pattern we've often seen in that series.

In several instances when advice is needed about a possible course of action, Mr. Spock makes a recommendation that stays close to cold, soul-less facts. Then Dr. McCoy insists on an action based only upon his own Human emotional reactions. And then when Capt. Kirk makes his own assessment, he gives some consideration to McCoy's emotional component, which adds humane insight, but he also recognizes Spock's logic, and Kirk reaches a conclusion that is more balanced and sensible than what either Spock or McCoy had offered separately.

The take home lesson here for Vulcans is that while, granted, it is not good to be completely governed by untamed emotions, nevertheless seasoned Earth leaders are apparently better at finding the most suitable line to be drawn between how much weight to give logic vs. how much weight to give emotion and intuition. Such better judgments were being made by seasoned Earth leaders such as James Kirk -- as Mr. Spock and other Vulcans could see. And as seen earlier in ENT by Jonathan Archer, as T'Pol came to discover.

In Berman's telling as seen in ENT, over several centuries the Vulcans drifted away from the original message of Surak the wisdom-giver. Vulcans became prideful, and they were apt to rationalize the actions they might take to achieve their ambitions, rather than basing their decisions on truly objective logic.

The re-discovery of the Kir'Shara gave the Vulcans the words they needed to study Surak's true message. And the practical, living example of balanced judgments shown by the Earth leader Jonathan Archer -- whose judgments were not as distant from Surak's judgments as were the judgments of the flawed, mainstream Vulcan culture of Archer's time -- were witnessed by T'Pol and Soval and T'Pau, who could then help share this new wisdom with the entire Vulcan culture. The value of Jonathan Archer's example was surely bolstered by the fact that Surak's katra choose Archer rather than any contemporary, flawed Vulcan, to in effect initiate the Vulcan Reformation. As stated in the Vulcan trilogy, one major reason for this was that the Human leader Archer was untainted by the current, flawed Vulcan culture.

In our real world, I have an impression that a number of TOS loyalists were resentful when the early episodes of ENT showed the Vulcans as being anything other than perfectly and perpetually virtuous and ethically selfless throughout their entire history. These fans didn't anticipate that the unfolding backstory from Rick Berman would lead us to understand how the Vulcans of Archer's time who were portrayed as being flawed would, with difficulty but with certainty, evolve to become the genuinely virtuous Vulcans that we would see in Spock's time. And unexpectedly, as the ENT series tells it, the Vulcans needed the Humans in order to work through that evolution of theirs. This all goes a long way to explain the Spock/Kirk relationship -- the precursor to which was the T'Pol and Archer relationship.

If the hardcore TOS loyalists were correct, that the Vulcan rationalizations seen in ENT: "Broken Bow" and thereafter were in fact the truth, then at some later point in the ENT series we would have eventually seen Archer admit that the Vulcans were right all along, and that he would no longer press against the Vulcans' 'wise' constraints upon the Earth leaders. But clearly that's not what unfolded in the episodes of ENT.

And plainly that was not what the ENT series was trying to convey. In ENT: "Awakening", Jonathan Archer is told the following by Surak's katra: "You don't trust Vulcans, captain. And given your experiences with them, I can't say I blame you. The culture you've come to know isn't the one I helped to create. My people have strayed . . ."

Spock loyalists need not have feared. In ENT, Rick Berman brought the Vulcan story around to the point where the Vulcans of Spock's time would be just as we have known them from the days of TOS.

At the end of ENT: "Kir'Shara", the new Vulcan planetary leader T'Pau declares that it is time for Earth to stand on its own. And she does not say this because the Earth leadership had reached a higher stage of maturity that was new for Humans, as was demanded by the previous, deeply flawed Vulcans -- a scenario that was never shown in any of the ENT episodes -- but rather T'Pau says this because the new, reformed Vulcan leadership was belatedly acknowledging that the Humans' readiness for space travel had been there all along. The element that was new was the acknowledgment of the Vulcans (after their own Reformation had begun) of what had been true about the Humans all along.

Given all of this, I have made the following edit. On the "Vulcan" page, in the History section's paragraph that describes Vulcans as being beneficent "big brothers", I've deleted that portrayal of the Vulcans as being perpetually virtuous, and I've replaced that paragraph with an acknowledgment that in the time of ENT the Vulcans had some issues to work through, and that their work on wrestling through those issues was seen throughout the various episodes of ENT.

Syrrok (talk) 18:35, August 8, 2019 (UTC)

I agree with the article edit, but I question or quibble with one aspect of this comment. You credit Rick Berman with a sort of “Vulcan masterplan.” Is there any documentary evidence of this intention? My understanding was that Berman and Brannon Braga set up a paternalistic relationship between Vulcan and Earth as part of their backstory for ENT, with Vulcans occasionally in an antagonistic position as a controlling authority against which our heroes would occasionally rebel. But this portrayal, somewhat at odds with the Vulcans seen in TOS (especially Spock), was unpopular with fans, and when Manny Coto became showrunner it was one of the elements he decided to “correct.” Thus, we had the three-part Syrranite/Vulcan Reformation story.

I’m sure Berman was happy to go along with this “course correction,” but I’ve never before seen it suggested that this was his intention from the inception of ENT. —Josiah Rowe (talk) 20:05, August 8, 2019 (UTC)

Josiah Rowe wrote:

> You credit Rick Berman with a sort of “Vulcan masterplan.” > Is there any documentary evidence of this intention?

Ah! No, this was no more than a naive surmise on my part.

> Manny Coto . . . decided to “correct.”

Alas, I am disappointed to learn that Berman was so oblivious to the consequences of his actions.

Syrrok (talk) 02:04, August 9, 2019 (UTC)

Well, even if it was more serendipitous than planned, I like your analysis of how Enterprise's treatment of the Vulcans sets the stage for Spock. —Josiah Rowe (talk) 03:57, August 9, 2019 (UTC)

Well, here's something unexpected. It turns out that we may both be right, more or less.

I'm listening to the DVD audio commentary for ENT: "Broken Bow" which features a conversation between Brannon Braga and Rick Berman. They both agree that it was good to show Humans such as Archer evolving from where we, in the real world, are today, to the very confident, future leaders of Kirk and Picard. However, Braga and Berman seem to disagree on the best role for Vulcans to play in ENT.

I have transcribed the following, that took place between 05:58 and 08:41 during their commentary:

Brannon Braga: We also made a conscious decision early on, for better or worse, that this would be a much more character-driven show. We felt that we had done many years and many episodes of more plot-driven, science-fictiony Star Trek shows, and we wanted to focus more on the people, and their reactions to things.

Rick Berman: And people who were not tried-and-true space heroes, like Jean-Luc Picard, or any of our other characters from previous shows. These were people who were taking the first steps out into space, and were unsure of themselves, and a different kind of hero.

Brannon Braga: You know, you see the Vulcans here [visible on the screen as Braga speaks], and we very quickly introduced what we thought of as our continuing antagonists on the show. We're very happy with the way Vulcans evolved as part of the Enterprise series. Oh -- there were some fans, very vocal fans, who were not happy with the way the Vulcans were depicted, these are not Vulcans that we're familiar with. Some people would say that they're too antagonistic, are not like Spock. And that's our point really, when you set a show a hundred years before the Kirk show, you want to do things differently, you want to revamp the Vulcans a little bit and show that they evolved as well. And there was one of my favorite aspects of the pilot, in the show, was the Vulcan element, personally.

Rick Berman: We knew that from the film "First Contact" -- which took place about a hundred before this pilot -- that Earth, a very troubled Earth made its first contact with aliens, with Vulcans, and we knew that a hundred years later you'd have Kirk and Spock, and the United Federation of Planets, and people flying around and feeling very comfortable in space. So we wanted to go halfway in between, and basically show a Humanity who had not yet developed the kind of warp power that could get them way out into space, and that they were having to rely on the Vulcans, and that the Vulcans were meting out information to Humanity in a very slow basis. They felt that Humans were not in fact really ready to go out into space, so we gave a very specific attitude to the Vulcans in this series.

Fascinating. While Berman doesn't explicitly say that Braga's idea about the Vulcans is wrong, he does seem to make clear that he's content with leaving the Vulcans as being antagonistic as they were in the early ENT episodes. Whereas Braga posits an evolution for the Vulcans that ought to lead them up to the Vulcans we're familiar with by the time of TOS.

Elsewhere in this commentary they say they are recording their conversation at a time when they are well into the production of the 4th season. Various clues make clear they had not yet gotten their notice of the series cancellation. But I'd be intrigued to know whether this conversation took place before they had settled on the story lines for the Vulcan trilogy of the 4th season.

So I'm still disappointed with Berman. But I see that Braga had some sort of master concept for the Vulcans to evolve, regardless of whether at this point he'd had a master plan for them that had specific details.

Syrrok (talk) 18:18, August 10, 2019 (UTC)