Introduction
It’s an old tale that just happens to be true. After network executives screened the original pilot episode ofStar Trek, they told the producers to get rid of the guy with the pointed ears. Their concern, from a business perspective, seemed logical: They feared that the viewing public might regard the character as “demonic” and refuse to watch the show.
Luckily, cooler heads prevailed. The show’s producers successfully argued to retain the character as he’d been conceived. On September 8, 1966, they introduced Mister Spock, played by actor Leonard Nimoy, to the viewing public (which, incidentally, actuallyliked the pointed ears). In subsequent episodes they introduced Spock’s world, as well as his Vulcan father, Sarek, and his human mother, Amanda. Viewers learned about Vulcan practices, history, and traditions, and discovered their remarkable physical and mental abilities, which proved to be much more impressive than mere pointed ears. We became familiar withPon farr. And the mind-meld. And the incapacitating nerve pinch.
Nearly four decades have passed since that infamous moment in television history when an entire alien culture was almost undone by executive whim. Today, of course, Mister Spock is a beloved entertainment icon, and Vulcans are an integral part of what makesStar Trek special. Spock has had many successors in the variousStar Trek incarnations. For the most part, the writers and actors behind those characters have kept one great rule in mind: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It’s a good rule, one that just about any Vulcan would deem logical.
“We patterned Tuvok’s basic physical characteristics on Spock,” actor Tim Russ says of his character onStar Trek: Voyager. “The way he walked, the way he talked. But Tuvok is different from his predecessor. Spock was half-human and had to really work on keeping his Vulcan focus. Tuvok is one hundred percent Vulcan. We made him very straightforward and Vulcan-like.”
Since he was the only Vulcan in the Delta quadrant, with no opportunity to relate to others of his kind, theVoyager creative team generally concentrated on Tuvok as an individual, rather than as a representative of his species. Nevertheless, they did reveal some previously unknown elements of Vulcan physiology. For example, in an episode titled “Meld,” Russ recalls, “We discovered that there’s a psychosuppression system in their brains that helps Vulcans to control their violence and their emotions. But that control still doesn’t come easily,” Russ stresses. “They still have to meditate and go through a process. We made a point of saying, ‘They have to work at this all the time.’”
The writers also enhanced some established Vulcan lore with new explanations. “They tried to figure out how the mating ritual works,” Russ notes. Fans of theStar Trek episode “Amok Time” may recall that Spock’s explanation of the mating drive was rather metaphorical—something about Regulan eel-birds and Earth salmon. And Doctor McCoy didn’t have a much better handle on Spock’s malady, other than to note that something seemed to be generating huge quantities of adrenaline in his system. In theVoyager episode “Blood Fever,” however, writers clarified those rather vague statements by explaining that a telepathic mating bond draws betrothed Vulcan couples together—and that not acting on this causes a dangerous, even deadly, neurochemical imbalance in the brain. And we thoughthuman love was a battlefield!
Even that explanation leaves Russ a little perplexed when he reflects upon the relationship between Spock’s parents. “Sarek was married to a human woman,” he observes. “How the hell did that happen? Did he still go throughPon farr ?” The answer may not be onscreen, but it is without doubt found in innumerable fictional efforts that grace the printed page.
The producers ofStar Trek: Enterprise chose to take a fresh look at Vulcan/human relations on their show, since it is a prequel toStar Trek. The somewhat antagonistic nature of the partnership between the two species may have caught some viewers ofEnterprise by surprise—but it doesn’t stray all that far from the core concept.
Actor Gary Graham, who plays the recurring Vulcan character Ambassador Soval, talked to producer Rick Berman before filming began. “Rick said that people think Vulcans have no emotions, but that’s not true at all. In fact, they are so emotional and so passionate that they had to learn early on to control their emotions lest they destroy themselves,” Graham says. “That bears out their highly disciplined state. So I gave Soval a sort of Asian inscrutability. Oriental cultures pride themselves on not letting you know what they think all the time. The people are very polite, but I wouldn’t like playing poker with them. That’s the knowledge I used to frame Soval.”
Graham’s character bears more than a bit of condescension toward the human species, and an anger that has been “born out of resentment,” the actor says. “When viewers first met Soval, he’d been on Earth for too long, around all these humans who have been expressing their emotions freely and openly and it’s sort of gotten to him.” That explains why, in the pilot episode, Soval raises his voice when confronting Jonathan Archer. Three seasons later, however, in the episode “Home,” Graham notes that Soval is beginning to “get” the humans, to understand them. “We finally can see a chink in Soval’s armor,” he says, and perhaps a precursor to the way Vulcans will come to feel about humans a hundred years hence.
“By the time Spock comes on the scene,” Graham says, “he’s traveling with humans, and the relationship has settled into a nice symbiosis. OnEnterprise, the female Vulcan, T’Pol, has been taking her relationship with the crew in that direction, but it hasn’t rebounded to the rest of the Vulcan species yet.” While speaking, Graham slips into character, letting his thought be completed by his Vulcan persona: “It’s an intellectual decision. I deal with humans only out of necessity, because clearly, Vulcans are superior in every way.”
Perhaps. They certainly outwitted those network executives. The tales in this book, two intimate looks at the planet and the people, allow us to find out for ourselves. It’s another reason, in addition to the wonderfully entertaining reading, to study these tales: We should know as much about Vulcans as we possibly can, because, obviously, we’ll never “get rid of the guy with the pointed ears.”