Feeling Seen and Understood

For a while now I've thought that our most impacting encounters with art and culture occur when we are most receptive to the ideas they present. I have often felt like a latecomer to a lot of things I or others feel I should know more about, but sometimes we're not ready or interested enough to engage with. As I've written on this blog a few times over the last year or so, coming to Star Trek after ignoring the franchise for 35 years keeps inspiring revelations in me and it has gone far beyond being just a set of television shows I enjoy. It strikes me that in exploring 'the final frontier' it is really confronting humans with the first frontier: understanding and knowing ourselves in all our complexity.

I wrote before about feeling an affinity with Klingon anger, but with their relative absence in Enterprise - which I've been watching for the last few months - I have gradually felt even more of a connection with the Vulcans. More than ever before in Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and Tuvok (Tim Russ), I feel this series gets to the crux of what it means to be Vulcan in T'Pol (Jolene Blalock). Her being a woman and quite young for her long-living species (in her 60s), and so is experienced but with a lot still to learn, perhaps makes her more relatable to me than the others. As Blalock herself acknowledged, T'Pol was this series's 'catsuit' with little skin showing but everything on display in the skin-tight one-piece outifts. Yet across the four seasons (they really hit their stride just as they got cancelled in 2005) T'Pol's character development alongside Vulcan story-arcs spanning the whole series are rooted in confrontations with the Vulcan way of life (based a fair bit on buddhism), which turns out to have become corrupt and hypocritical. She becomes instrumental in exposing and disrupting poisonous hierarchies, which go right up to the megalomaniac emperor, and is key to the Vulcans finally making meaningful connections with their galactic neighbours, as well as with each other.

T'Pol's road is not an easy one. She is all but ostracised when she helps expose a Vulcan listening station targeted at Andoria and concealed within a sacred monastery. When she is expected to return to Vulcan for an arranged marriage against her will, she stays aboard Enterprise. We gradually find that she has been increasingly drawn to humans and human culture, and faces inner conflict with her growing loyalties to and fondness of her human colleagues. A true introvert, she gains strength from her own company, using meditation to keep check on the extreme emotions Vulcans harbour until she loses control altogether from exposure and addiction to a substance that obliterates her emotional control. We learn once and for all that it is inaccurate to understand that Vulcans are unemotional; rather, they undergo years of training to rein in their emotions. This is where I most relate to T'Pol. For as long as I can remember others have described me as aloof or unfeeling when the problem is the opposite - I feel too much too deeply and the control needed to keep that inside comes across to others as me seeming uninterested. That's why in public I can often be found in a corner trying not to be overwhelmed and why it's a shock when someone's actions or a situation push me too far and the valve bursts (it never just happens spontaneously). Perhaps the shock comes in being shown that someone being quiet and calm doesn't necessarily indicate that they are a pushover as assumed.

 

T'Pol also performs an intense amount of emotional labour without anyone realising, usually concerning chief engineer 'Trip' Tucker (Connor Trineer). These two begin as adversaries who slowly develop a friendship and then a sexual and romantic attraction. Theirs is an allegory of race relations; someone has to go first, and in the Star Trek universe their tortured relationship is chronolgically the first known mixed humanoid union that produces hybrid offspring (in true sci-fi fashion this occurs naturally in an alternate timeline and then in the prime timeline as a result of their stolen genetic material). Trip had got around a bit before, and his pregnancy in the first season did not involve his DNA, but his body became a vessel for the offspring after an experience he did not know was sexual - a whole other area we could get into! It is his longer-term and even psychic connection with T'Pol that is used by Terra Prime - a group who turn to terrorism to enforce their purist ideals (a future/space equivalent of the KKK) - to drive all non-human humanoids out of the Sol system. Their grief and pain, we find, paves the way for human-alien hybrids in the chronologically later years such as Spock, Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) and B'Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson). 

In many ways, T'Pol is a quiet revolutionary and advocate for integrity. I really enjoyed seeing that more on the surface in the mirror universe episodes where the others are evil and Vulcans have been enslaved by the Terran Empire. It's left ambiguous whether or not she and some others were killed, I'm sure with the intention of continuing the mirror universe saga in a fifth season as Deep Space Nine had done. I suppose we must turn to the novels and fan-fiction for those (that'd make a fun podcast or audio drama, especially if the actors would participate). She also faces stigma in an AIDS allegory when she develops a neurological affliction following a forced mind-meld (read rape) by a rogue Vulcan untrained in the banned practice. Her story becoming known - even against her will because she recognises that the act of melding should not be a source of shame, but that it was non-consensual - contributes to Vulcans later reclaiming this ability, which is a way of being internally intimate and sharing experiences with someone else. It is also a way of discovering the truth of a situation. Even though T'Pol proves that the notion 'Vulcans don't lie' is false - they can lie but mostly choose not to as it often lacks logic - she eventually, in relation to Trip, confronts her own truths, and sets an example to other Vulcans who are ready to do the same. That's where I aspire to be more like her and am thankful that this character reached a great deal of potential even if she and her chosen family were cut short so abruptly.