The Legacy Collection/THA/ShutterstockWhen Captain Pike is transformed into a Vulcan in the latest Strange New Worlds Season 3 episode, he suddenly becomes a man who shouts. Indeed, the opening narration of “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” features Pike, as his new Vulcan self, speaking in a halted, shouty voice. Is this what Vulcans sound like? Are Vulcans, as Spock admits in the new episode, sometimes pushy, arrogant “jerks”? While the overall tone of “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” falls into the category of one of SNW’s sillier episodes, at its core, the story is asking a question that Star Trek has been posing since before the series was even on the air. What the hell is a Vulcan anyway? Spoilers ahead.Back in 1964, before cameras rolled in December of that year on the pilot episode “The Cage,” Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was still dabbling with the basic concept of whatever kind of alien Spock was supposed to become. In some early memos and outlines from Roddenberry, Spock was described as “so satanic you might also expect him to have a forked tail.” And, as fans will note, in “The Cage,” Spock shouts quite a bit. These rough drafts of Spock, and by extension, the Vulcans as a whole, were retconned in The Original Series, but not as quickly as one might assume. Spock still grins in “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the second series pilot, and even in “The Corbomite Maneuver” — the first regular episode filmed (not aired) — there’s some remnants of the more aggressive Spock, at least in his tone of voice. Clearly, Anson Mount studied this performance in his creepy, over-the-top Vulcan take in Strange New Worlds. Captain Pike (Anson Mount), Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), La’an (Christina Chong), and Chapel (Jess Buss) all transformed into Vulcans. | Paramount+In “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans,” Pike, Uhura, Chapel, and La’an are all transformed into Vulcans for the purposes of a quick undercover mission, but then get stuck in that way and start behaving badly. Using extreme logic and reason, these newly minted Vulcans cut ties with their friends, implement annoying work habits, and generally operate without a filter. La’an, channeling some of the more aggressive tendencies of ancient Vulcans (I.E., Romulans), even tries to take over the Enterprise and start a huge interstellar conflict.In the end, when everything is put right and everyone is back to normal, Pike asks Spock, “Are Vulcans monsters?” Spock’s response is measured, but honest: “Vulcans feel even more deeply than humans. Logic is all that protects us.”This is certainly not a new assertion from the Trek franchise. Episodes in which Vulcans lose their minds (“Amok Time,” “Sarek,” “Blood Fever,” to name just a few) are often the most popular stories to feature the fictional aliens. While Vulcans are broadly defined by their robotic, cold sense of reason, as a species, their shared temperament is closer to the passionate, but rude Sherlock Holmes, if he agreed to take antidepressants. Though Vulcans promote peace and are the aliens who created Trek’s “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations” slogan, they’re also the alien race in Trek that is the closest to becoming villains at any moment. Back in the prequel series Enterprise, the Vulcans were revealed to be deeply manipulative and extremely close-minded about any deviations within their own culture. In Discovery Season 1 — the series which preceded Strange New Worlds — there were even logic-driven Vulcan terrorists, who wanted the planet Vulcan to become more isolationist, and shake off its associations with messy humans. Joanne Linville as Romulan Commander in the 1968 Star Trek episode “The Enterprise Incident.” | CBS Photo Archive/CBS/Getty ImagesOn top of all of this, you’ve got the basic canonical truth that Vulcans, in a hereditary sense, are also Romulans. In the 1966 episode “Balance of Terror,” Star Trek pulled one of its first, brilliant twists: An unseen enemy was actually a species of aliens who all looked exactly like an ally. Over the years, the idea that the Romulans were truly a separate species from Vulcans all but vanished. By Star Trek’s third season, in “The Enterprise Incident,” one Romulan Commander (Joanne Linville) even tries to get Spock to switch sides. As firmly established in The Next Generation, in the ancient past, a group of Vulcans left their main planet and eventually started calling themselves Romulans. So, “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” makes it clear that if you turn some random humans into Vulcans, you’re also, on some level, turning those people into hypothetical Romulans.Because Strange New Worlds takes place before The Original Series, the Federation, and maybe even Spock himself, don’t yet know that Romulans look like Vulcans. However, because Pike time-traveled to an alternate version of “Balance of Terror” back in the finale of SNW Season 1, and La’an encountered a Romulan agent in the time travel episode “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” in Season 2, these two characters do know about Romulans, which gives us the hilarious moment in which Pike and La’an both say “Romulans!” at the same time.Again, it's a jokey moment in a mostly light episode. But, more seriously, Spock assesses La’an’s Vulcan transformation as a “peculiar and concerning evolution.” The episode tries to chalk up La’an’s more Romulan-ish Vulcan persona to the fact that she’s a descendant of humans known as Augments, the same genetically modified group of which Khan was a member. But, oddly enough, the episode didn’t even need to take that extra step. And that’s because what’s interesting about all Vulcans is that they each have the capability to become Romulans, or, again, as Pike and Spock put it in this episode at different points, “monsters” and “jerks.” Sure, there’s a nice bit of canon dot-connecting with La’an becoming one of the four temporary Vulcans to go full Romulan, but again, the larger point of the episode is highlighting a different Star Trek philosophical hobby horse.Time and again, particularly in The Original Series, Star Trek’s greatest argument for future-tense optimism comes with a compromise. In “A Taste of Armageddon,” Captain Kirk famously asserted that it’s acceptable if human beings are instinctively savage, as long as we make good choices. “We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it.”Kirk was talking about humans, but within Star Trek, the Vulcans are largely analogous to humanity. We, too, feel deeply and can only stop ourselves from being jerks or monsters through reason. From a science fiction perspective, the biological evolution of the Vulcans and the Romulans — or any of the other humanoid aliens in Trek — is largely unrealistic. Meaning, any of the commentary about how easy it is for any of us to suddenly become horrible is about how humans can live better. Or as Kirk put it much later, in The Undiscovered Country: “Everybody's human.” Even Vulcans. And especially Romulans. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Star Trek: The Original Series stream on Paramount+.Phasers on Stun!: How the Making — and Remaking — of Star Trek Changed the WorldAmazon -