Basically, 25 minutes of Chuck going:
It's deserved.
Enterprise - Stigma
Re: Enterprise - Stigma
Yeah if you've missed classic Chuck when he was angrier this is very much that and possibly even more so.
And again yes, very much deserved.
And again yes, very much deserved.
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CrypticMirror
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Re: Enterprise - Stigma
Since this episode raises the whole Vulcan douchebag characterisation point, lets put the blame where it belongs. On DS9. The whole Vulcans are racist douchebags thing can be traced back to a single DS9 episode, it never appeared in Trekdom previous to that motherfucking stupid baseball episode with the racist Vulcan captain, but after that it was just how all Trek writers took the characters. Prior to that Vulcans were at worst a little chilly and clinical, but mostly benevolent and actually had a very strong moral centre. After that episode, sneering douchebags all the way. Partly this is due to Trek nerds always being over fucking literal with zero understanding of nuance, but also because of the golden rep DS9 has been given as the arbiter of all Trek. DS9 gets a lot of praise, but it also introduced some of the worst parts of later Trek too. I come to bury DS9, not to praise it.
Re: Enterprise - Stigma
DS9's attitude to Vulcans was so dang weird. It's not just the baseball git (though seriously yes he's the worst), they also had the serial killer and that they wanted Vulcan to be conquered by the Dominion before they were told no.
Re: Enterprise - Stigma
I don't see the problem with the serial killer. And being conquered, I don't think that was some slight against Vulcans, just meant to be shocking and show how far they've advanced if some big known world as fallen. They went with Betazed instead. Which would make more sense. Vulcan's too close to Earth.
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CharlesPhipps
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Re: Enterprise - Stigma
I think part of it is the writers have never thought Vulcans were particularly awesome (Spock is but Spock is not all Vulcans) while the fans have always seemingly identified with the enlightened logical space elves.
Re: Enterprise - Stigma
I can definitely see writers becoming frustrated by "this character cannot have an emotional reaction to anything that happens".
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CharlesPhipps
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Re: Enterprise - Stigma
There's also some behind the scenes idiocy going on. Roddenberry's lawyer, basically serving as his Nazgul, had a lot of insane orders for TNG like the fact that you couldn't use any of the Star Trek races from TOS. It was a rule that they broke immediately when they added Worf and reintroduced the Romulans but note Vulcans are almost entirely absent until Mark Lenard comes back.
But by DS9, Vulcans had a very downplayed role in the setting.
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Lazerlike42
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Re: Enterprise - Stigma
I think this is the key: it's hard to write interesting characters and stories when your characters can't react to things with emotion. In a way, this is also part of why the earlier TNG episodes are also generally pretty lousy: Roddenberry's original vision of a perfected humanity gave us pretty stiff, boring characters.
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Lazerlike42
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Re: Enterprise - Stigma
I think it's worth cross examining the claim that DS9 gave us Vulcans that were jerks.
Depending on what exactly you count, there seem to be between 30-40 episodes across all series which featured non-primary cast Vulcans prior to Take Me Out to the Holosuite.
The very first were, of course, Amok Time and Journey to Babel, and I'd argue that this is where we get our first glimpse - indeed far more than a glimpse - of Vulcans who are not quite so perfect as they'd have us believe. In Journey to Babel, Sarek is not as bad as Solok is in that DS9 episode, but certainly he's kindof a jerk in that episode and clearly is not unaffected by emotions. Now I don't know that he's intended to actually be a nasty character, but rather the episode sets two precedents which I think follow Vulcans through the rest of the franchise and which Take me Out the the Holosuite eventually builds on, but does not create: one, that the cold, "emotionless" presentation of Vulcans in practice tends to come across as rude, short, "jerkish," and two, that for the race's reputation and claims to have mastered their emotions, they very much are still driven by their emotions under the surface. In Amok Time, the same themes are present in the characters of Stonn, T'Pring, and even T'Pau, though we don't see as much of it as we do with Sarek.
The next time a Vulcan plays much of a prominent role seems to require us to skip all the way ahead to Sarek. For obvious reasons, Sarek himself isn't a great candidate to review here but at least one of his assistants is certainly less than pleasant. Then we get to Unification, which is interesting because here even Spock has adopted to some degree that very standoffish Vulcan attitude.
The next Vulcan to play a prominent role is Tallera in Gambit, but she is hardly a representative of the average Vulcan. Still, this mercenary and isolationist is what the TNG writers gave us with this episode. She's not representative of all Vulcans, but she is certainly a step in the development of the idea that at least some Vulcans were essentially racists and that some movements among Vulcan pushed these ideas.
Finally we had Taurik in Lower Decks. I seem to recall his being a generally likable characer.
Voyager gave us Vorik, a recurring character who was everything from a bit colder to at one time a would-be rapist. Now that instance was canonically not exactly his fault, but looking at it out of universe we can nevertheless say that Voyager was definitely trying to take Vulcans to a darker place with that episode.
Across the series, TNG also has Selar, a recurring Vulcan. I think she comes across well.
I will give honorable mention to one other "appearance" from TNG, in Data's Day. The Vulcan ambassador in this episode turns out to be a Romulan Spy, and so I certainly don't consider it right to cite her as an example of a Vulcan. Nevertheless, she is intended to be believable as a Vulcan in universe and so to at least some degree she is an example of, long before Take Me Out to the Holosuite, the creative minds viewing Vulcans as a bit more abrupt, rude, even "jerky" at times.
On the whole, I agree that Take Me Out to the Holosuite takes Vulcans to a new level of being rather unpleasant, but I don't think it's all that far a jump. Up until that point, they had regularly - not always, but regularly - been portrayed as having at least some of this character trait.
Depending on what exactly you count, there seem to be between 30-40 episodes across all series which featured non-primary cast Vulcans prior to Take Me Out to the Holosuite.
The very first were, of course, Amok Time and Journey to Babel, and I'd argue that this is where we get our first glimpse - indeed far more than a glimpse - of Vulcans who are not quite so perfect as they'd have us believe. In Journey to Babel, Sarek is not as bad as Solok is in that DS9 episode, but certainly he's kindof a jerk in that episode and clearly is not unaffected by emotions. Now I don't know that he's intended to actually be a nasty character, but rather the episode sets two precedents which I think follow Vulcans through the rest of the franchise and which Take me Out the the Holosuite eventually builds on, but does not create: one, that the cold, "emotionless" presentation of Vulcans in practice tends to come across as rude, short, "jerkish," and two, that for the race's reputation and claims to have mastered their emotions, they very much are still driven by their emotions under the surface. In Amok Time, the same themes are present in the characters of Stonn, T'Pring, and even T'Pau, though we don't see as much of it as we do with Sarek.
The next time a Vulcan plays much of a prominent role seems to require us to skip all the way ahead to Sarek. For obvious reasons, Sarek himself isn't a great candidate to review here but at least one of his assistants is certainly less than pleasant. Then we get to Unification, which is interesting because here even Spock has adopted to some degree that very standoffish Vulcan attitude.
The next Vulcan to play a prominent role is Tallera in Gambit, but she is hardly a representative of the average Vulcan. Still, this mercenary and isolationist is what the TNG writers gave us with this episode. She's not representative of all Vulcans, but she is certainly a step in the development of the idea that at least some Vulcans were essentially racists and that some movements among Vulcan pushed these ideas.
Finally we had Taurik in Lower Decks. I seem to recall his being a generally likable characer.
Voyager gave us Vorik, a recurring character who was everything from a bit colder to at one time a would-be rapist. Now that instance was canonically not exactly his fault, but looking at it out of universe we can nevertheless say that Voyager was definitely trying to take Vulcans to a darker place with that episode.
Across the series, TNG also has Selar, a recurring Vulcan. I think she comes across well.
I will give honorable mention to one other "appearance" from TNG, in Data's Day. The Vulcan ambassador in this episode turns out to be a Romulan Spy, and so I certainly don't consider it right to cite her as an example of a Vulcan. Nevertheless, she is intended to be believable as a Vulcan in universe and so to at least some degree she is an example of, long before Take Me Out to the Holosuite, the creative minds viewing Vulcans as a bit more abrupt, rude, even "jerky" at times.
On the whole, I agree that Take Me Out to the Holosuite takes Vulcans to a new level of being rather unpleasant, but I don't think it's all that far a jump. Up until that point, they had regularly - not always, but regularly - been portrayed as having at least some of this character trait.
