Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t seen “Four-half vulcans” entitled “Star Trek: Strange New World” Season 3, Episode 8, don’t continue reading
This week’s episode of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” enters everything in Vulcan in some hilarious and unexpected ways.
To get things started, Enterprise is planning on a coastal holiday, during which the No. 1 (Rebecca Romijn) will remain on the ship. However, before they reach the planet where coastal holidays occur, they are drawn into an emergency.
In short, the Balkans supported pre-war society before the establishment of the Federation. Now, the society will either desperately need technical support or face a severe disaster. The Vulcan is the only alien, so this association recognizes the Prime Directive without violating it. Spock (Ethan Peck) agrees to lead a team consisting of Pike (Anson Mount), Laan (Christina Chong), Chapel (Jessbush) and Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding).
The plan is to use the alien formula to temporarily turn the other four into Vulcans. Meanwhile, they decide to continue to remind Spock that he is half the Vulcan. However, when the time came for the four newly aged Vulcans to return, things didn’t go well and decided to keep the Vulcans forever.
As their new logical approach begins to wear on the crew, Spock and others decide that if they have access to their fellow human cutlas (the Vulcan equivalent of the soul), they can persuade them to return to normalcy. After all, the reason Number One wants to avoid coastal holidays is because the coastal vacation planet was very close to the home of the ex-lovers of the Vulcan, a cutlass expert.
Enter Patton Oswalt as Doug, the Vulcan of the artistic aspect. He and Number One share some kind of insane and charming chemistry. In an interview with Variety, Oswalt talked about how he began playing against both Peck and Romin on camera.
“Ethan is a really great actor and Rebecca is very loose and authentic in the scene,” he said. “I’m a very stiff, controlled Vulcan and she’s very passionate, so it was really fun to play. It was really fun.”
Oswalt, who was able to keep Vulcan ears from the set, admits that he is not the world’s biggest “Star Trek” fan, but enjoys the opportunity to appear on the screens of the franchise.
“Star Trek was something that was in the background for me,” he said. “I watched Star Wars when I was seven years old. Such a type of brain has taken away the brain. So Star Trek didn’t land with me until I saw the movie.
“And the set is a practical 360 degree set,” Oswalt continued. “You can roam through it. You can go down the corridor, the corridor and enter the other rooms. That’s pretty amazing. It feels like the overwhelming aura you feel on a spaceship.”
At its heart, Star Trek has always been a drama about human interaction with other species and dangerous situations between stars. However, some of the best moments/episodes in Star Trek history are undoubtedly more comedic.
As a skilled comedian himself, Oswalt unraveled why Star Trek comedy felt that it had endured more than that.
“They weren’t embarrassed by it because humans always have to make mistakes, do the wrong thing and apologize for it,” he said. “They really understood that humanity was false and always doing stupid things, and that’s probably one of the reasons why they connect people to the show and captivate them. You’re looking at the way humans act in the future.
