******STRANGE NEW SPOILERS FOR SEASON 3******

After its electrifying debut two years ago, “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” (SNW) really had me. Coming five years after a lot of uneven, too-heavily serialized, and often less-than-satisfying Star Trek stories, the franchise got back on track with SNW returning to largely episodic storytelling, with some serialized elements; striking a sort of balance we hadn’t seen successfully executed on Star Trek since Deep Space Nine (DS9) or arguably Enterprise (ENT). 

With legacy character Captain Christopher Pike (now played by Anson Mount) reintroduced in Star Trek: Discovery’s (DSC) second season, it was clear the charismatic captain needed his own prequel series, as the Pike era of Star Trek (glimpsed in TOS’ “The Cage”/“The Menagerie,” and the Kelvinverse movies) was, at the time, a largely unexplored corner of the Trek multiverse.

Now SNW is coming up on its third season, which set to debut in 2025. Season 3 was previewed recently at San Diego Comic Con 2024 with a five-minute clip of a new episode that appears to be yet another Vulcan comedy episode (enough with the Vulcomedies, okay? It’s okay once or twice, but they’re not the Ferengi). During the convention, I saw the clip, which featured an Enterprise away team consisting of Captain Pike, Science Officer Spock (Ethan Peck), Ensign Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush), Security Chief La’an Singh (Christina Chong), and Chief Engineer Pelia (Carol Kane) preparing to beam down and make repairs to an unsafe site.

For reasons not yet made clear in the segment, the team has to pass for Vulcans on a genetic level. So, as we saw in SNW’s pilot (“Strange New Worlds” S1.E1), Nurse Chapel whips up a modified batch of her handy gene-rewriting elixir to transform the entire away team into Vulcans (except for Spock, of course). Unlike say, Klingons, or Romulans, Vulcans and humans are allies in Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets, so it’s difficult to imagine reasons why they’d have to pass as Vulcans for a complex repair job, but that’s the premise we’re given.  Okay, whatever…

Note: Mind you, Chapel’s still a nurse, and not yet a doctor (that would come in ST-TMP), yet she is wildly overqualified for her job if she can recreate DNA-rewriting formulae.

After their injections, Spock and Chief Medical Officer Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) observe the group for effects. The shot proves ineffective on hippy-dippy Pelia (as did her experiments with LSD), because Pelia is Lanthanite; a human-passing species with unusual genetic variations.  However, we see Pike, Uhura, La’an and Chapel all falling to the floor, writhing in the grip of ancient Vulcan emotions, which are considerably more intense than human emotions (this was established in Trek canon as well, with TNG’s “Sarek”).  

Then, one by one, they rise back into frame; each now fully composed, and with the characteristic upswept eyebrows and pointed ears of Vulcans. For some reason, the shot also sweeps Pike’s enviable locks into a Frankensteinian hairdo.  Yes, hilarious, but huh….?  The weirdest side effect is that the entire group now has Vulcan emotional control as well.  This is where my suspension of disbelief stopped cold, and I began to have all kinds of nagging questions…

Vulcan logic, as established in all prior incarnations of Star Trek going back nearly 58 years, is not genetic; it’s a discipline.  Vulcans don’t attain it with a hypo.  Spock, who’s only half-Vulcan, has struggled all of his life to suppress his emotions in order to conform to Vulcan social norms.  The beginning of 1979’s “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” sees Spock returning to Vulcan in order to complete his Kolinahr; the laborious ritual where all remaining emotions are finally shed, or fully suppressed, to be accurate. 

Aside from the ‘illogical’ idea of an away team attaining Vulcan emotional discipline from a hypo, I couldn’t quite articulate why the scene bothered me so much. Then I imagined the group having to pass as genetically Chinese in ancient China, and being given injections that suddenly gave them advanced skills in, say, kung fu.  It’s racist.  More accurately in SNW, it’s speciesist, but the idea that one could simply receive a shot that’d allow them to instantly acquire a species’ or race’s cultural traits is insulting.  That’s not how culture works. Culture comes after years of tradition and immersion (or months, if one is a quick study). It’s not delivered in a hypo to the neck.

The scene feels like something out of the 1986 movie “Soul Man,” where the protagonist, a white teenager, poses as Black to get a scholarship into Harvard.  The character overdoses on suntan pills (Jeezus, really?), gets an afro, and voila—he now passes for Black (insert facepalm here).  That insult is followed by several scenes of the character cosplaying through various dated stereotypes of Blacks, including a scene where he poses as a militant (à la Bobby Seale, circa 1969). Yes, it’s a terrible and embarrassing movie, which has been largely (and deservedly) forgotten, but watching that SNW season 3 clip brought it back to me.  

That clip also goes against the series’ own precedent.  When the away team first used Chapel’s DNA-resequencing shots to appear as natives of the planet Kiley 279 in the pilot of SNW, they still retained their own personalities. None of them “went native,” not even Spock, who retained his Vulcan mental disciplines until a painful rejection reaction forced him to scream in agony as the shot’s effects were instantly reversed. The point is that Spock remained Spock after the shot.  He didn’t adopt the natives’ culture, or lack of emotional control.  Chapel’s shots, now modified with Kerkhovian technology, can apparently rewrite cultural traits as well. This means they can potentially erase one’s cultural heritage in favor of another.  Wow.  That’s a very powerful and dangerous ‘treatment.’  Sounds more like something used in the Tantalus V penal colony from Star Trek TOS’ “Dagger of the Mind”…

When Captain Kirk (William Shatner) had to pass for Romulan in TOS’ “The Enterprise Incident,” his ears were surgically altered, but he was still a human Starfleet captain, and he was beaming right into the engineering section of a Romulan vessel, where one little scratch would’ve revealed his red human blood.  Wonder why Chapel didn’t whip up a shot of Romulan DNA-elixir for him?  They even had two Romulan captives in their brig to act as involuntary DNA donors too, just as Chapel and M’Benga stole DNA from an unconscious alien patient in the pilot of SNW.  

In Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), we see both Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Commander Data (Brent Spiner) having to pass as Romulans for a dangerous mission to find the missing Ambassador Spock (Leonard Nimoy) in “Unification, Parts 1 & 2.” They simply wore cosmetic appliances, wigs and makeup to pass.  Nothing deeper than that.  Even the Klingon captain (Stephen Root) warned Data not to let a Romulan beauty “lick that paint right off” of his face.  But once again, Picard wasn’t genetically altered in any way; he remained fully Picard. Data, of course, was an android, and had no genome to rewrite.  They prepared for that high-risk mission by study, disguise and their wits.

The end of the five-minute clip shows the returning away team unable to reverse the effects of their Vulcan DNA treatments, and facing the prospect of remaining Vulcans (which clearly doesn’t happen, as we see with legacy characters Pike, Chapel and Uhura).  Ignoring the fact the away team couldn’t retain their facial features if their genomes were fully rewritten (any more than I would still look human if I were genetically transformed into a crocodile), it doesn’t explain how Vulcan mental disciplines—which can take Vulcans a lifetime to master—are also (somehow) irreversible.  Can the Vulcan Kolinahr disciplines now be achieved through a shot from Chapel’s Kerkhovian hypospray? Could Vulcan mental hospitals administer such dangerous DNA-rewriting injections to all of their ‘nonconforming’ emotional patients to make them “more Vulcan”?  

Maybe this episode’s mission mishap is what leads to those DNA rewriting formulae never being used again in subsequent Star Treks.  Perhaps this screwup leads to a permanent ban on their use (which would be the only positive outcome of this absurd premise), just as Pike’s disdain for holo-communicators (“ghosts” as he once compared them) is the reason we don’t see them in Kirk’s Enterprise later on, only to have them ‘rediscovered’ a century later in DS9 (“For the Uniform”). 

As an entertainment franchise going back 58 years, Star Trek has long been pioneering in its inclusive casting (with race, gender, and at long last, sexuality), and to see it reverting to the insultingly backwards notion that genes pass on culture is very disappointing.  The release of this clip shows a tone-deaf Paramount+ playing down to those Star Trek fans who think “being Vulcan” is all about pointed ears, upswept eyebrows, and botox faces.  For a franchise that’s worked so hard to be inclusive and culturally aware, it’s painful to see the writers treat Trek’s own landmark Vulcans with such jaw-dropping insensitivity.  It’s greenface.

I truly miss the deft touch of the late Star Trek series’ writer Dorothy Fontana (1939-2019), whose brilliant scripts for “This Side of Paradise” (rewritten from Jerry Sohl’s original outline), “Journey to Babel” and The Animated Series’ “Yesteryear” established the inner torment of Vulcans, as they try (and sometimes fail) to fully repress the powerful ancient emotions that nearly led to the destruction of their species, centuries earlier.  Their logic disciplines were a solution that took concentration and control every waking moment of their lives. To slip up, even for a moment, was an utter humiliation for them.

Now, that noble practice of Vulcans (however overdone) has been reduced to a cheap gag by the showrunners and writers of SNW.  If this is another example of the franchise’s ongoing slide into comedy, then I’m grateful I have my Blu-Rays and DVDs of earlier Star Trek series to remember the dignity of Vulcans, before they become a permanent punchline.

Here’s hoping this new episode is not indicative of the entire third season, as SNW remains, on the whole, an enjoyable series with a strong cast. After all, every incarnation of Star Trek is entitled to the occasional “Spock’s Brain,” right?

Where to Watch

The first two seasons of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” are available to stream exclusively on Paramount+, with Season 3 expected to debut sometime in 2025. The first two seasons are also available for purchase on BluRay and DVD from CBS/Paramount, and is available for purchase wherever you can still buy physical media (Amazon, BestBuy, Barnes & Noble; prices vary).