SPOILER ALERT: Do not keep reading if you have not seen “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” Season 3, Episode 8 titled “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans”
This week’s episode of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” gets into all things Vulcan in some hilarious and unexpected ways.
To kick things off, the Enterprise is due for shore leave, during which Number One (Rebecca Romijn) plans to stay on the ship — more on that later. But before they can reach the planet where shore leave is to occur, they get pulled into an emergency situation.
Long story short, the Vulcans aided a pre-warp society prior to the establishment of the Federation. Now, that society is in dire need of technical support or they will face a cataclysmic disaster. As Vulcans are the only aliens this society will recognize without violating the Prime Directive, Spock (Ethan Peck) agrees to lead a team consisting of Pike (Anson Mount), La’An (Christina Chong), Chapel (Jess Bush), and Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding).
The plan is to use an alien formula to turn the other four temporarily into Vulcans, during which time they decide to keep reminding Spock that he is only half Vulcan. But when the time comes for the four newly-minted Vulcans to change back, things don’t quite work out and they decide to stay Vulcans permanently.
As their new logical approach begins to wear on the crew, Spock and the others determine that if they can access their compatriots human katra (the Vulcan equivalent to the soul), they can convince them to return to normal. It turns out, the reason Number One wanted to avoid shore leave is because the shore leave planet was very close to the home of her ex-lover, a Vulcan who is an expert in katras.
Enter Patton Oswalt as Doug, a Vulcan with an artistic side. He and Number One share some kind of insane, irresistible chemistry that makes it so they can’t keep their hands off each other. In an interview with Variety, Oswalt spoke about what it was like getting to play against both Peck and Romijn on camera.
“Ethan is such an amazing actor, and Rebecca is just so loose and real in the scenes,” he said. “It was really fun to play off because I am a very stiff, controlled Vulcan, and she is very passionate. So that was really fun.”
Oswalt, who got to keep his Vulcan ears from the set, admits he is not the biggest “Star Trek” fan in the world, but relished the chance to get to appear onscreen in the franchise.
“‘Star Trek’ was always this thing that was on in the background for me,” he said. “I saw ‘Star Wars’ when I was seven, and that kind of fritzed my brain out, so ‘Star Trek’ didn’t really land with me the way that until I saw the movies. It wasn’t until ‘Wrath of Khan’ that I really, really got into it.”
“And the set is a 360 degree practical set,” Oswalt continued. “You can walk around in it. You can go down the passageways, the corridors, into the other rooms. It’s pretty amazing. It feels like the overwhelming awe you would feel on a starship.”
At its core, “Star Trek” has always been a drama about humanity’s interactions with other species and dangerous situations among the stars. But some of the best moments/episodes in “Star Trek” history are without question the ones that lean more comedic.
As an accomplished comedian himself, Oswalt broke down why he feels that the comedy in “Star Trek” has endured as well as it has.
“Humans will still always be making mistakes and doing goofy stuff and having to apologize for it, so they didn’t shy away from that,” he said. “They very much understood that mankind is fallible and does silly things all the time. And I think that’s probably one of the reasons it ties people into the show and captivates them as much as it is, You’re watching how humans will act in the future and, in some ways, they won’t act much different than the way we act. And that’s kind of comforting.”
