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I had a thought: if you control the emotions, as Vulcans are said that they are capable of doing, does that mean - really - that you are not controlled by them?

It is my understanding that Vulcans supress them, not that they control them. At least that's what T'Pol says in "Impulse." That they must be supressed or they overwhelm. The Vosh Koutur (sp?) attempt to control them rather than supress them.

...and off we go!

Honestly I prefer to think Vulcans want to "control" them, because the "suppression" is virtually impossible and "ABSOLUTELY" dangerous.
Anyway, that doesn't change my musing: suppressing doesn't mean that emotions are not there, ready to "suppress" you.

Asso wrote:Honestly I prefer to think Vulcans want to "control" them, because the "suppression" is virtually impossible and "ABSOLUTELY" dangerous.
Anyway, that doesn't change my musing: suppressing doesn't mean that emotions are not there, ready to "suppress" you.

I agree.

I believe that T-Pol's lack of outward show of emotion was what often led to misunderstanding. Humans get much information from body language and the show of Emotions on the face. I mean T-Pol might have been a Hell of a Poker Player. but when she wanted to give Trip a signal of how she felt he got none. The face often reveals what the words conceal. It takes a lot of practice to be able to lie with a straight Face. So I think that the vulcan surpressing their emotions was just as harmful as showing them

At the heart of this question is really the fundamental debate between TOS purists and latter-day Trek fans. I'm good friends with a VERY devoutly purist TOS fan who absolutely positively will not entertain or suffer the idea that Vulcans can be emotional. In their minds, Gene specifically wrote Vulcans to be non-emotional. Many of them like my friend are not even open to the fact that literarily, they're totally boring when they adhere absolutely to this 1-dimensional characteristic. One of my arguments for why Vulcans on Star Trek are sometimes emotional (T'Pol, Tuvok, etc), was that basically, if you were to immerse yourself in this Universe, and ask yourself WHY we're being shown these Vulcans in particular, it's probably because there's something unique about them, something different, something worth seeing. If they were no different than any one of 200 million other Vulcans, why would we care? There would be no reason whatsoever, in a '4th wall' kind of analysis of why they were chosen. That's one way I've always seen it.

Another way is that it was obvious from the beginning that Vulcans just resist emotional expression, and to some degree even control how strongly their emotions affect their moods and their state of mind... that goes a little further than expression. To some degree they are actually training their brains not to experience certain emotions.

I think when you portray an entire society in a way that Star Trek has where different shows take place at different times in history... first of all, no culture on Earth has ever behaved statically. It's just the nature of a society, a social species, to change and evolve over time, and I mean culturally, not physically. If, at around the year 2250, Vulcans have attained level X of emotional resistance or control, it stands to reason that this is a discipline they have learned over time, or learned at some point, and have not always practiced. It'd just not possible they were always that way. It stands to reason that even 200 years earlier, they'd have done it differently, or had not perfected it to the same level.

Really, I don't think even TOS purists have much to stand on for the no-emotion view. Spock could, if he chose, show a bit of emotion. ("You have been...and always will be...my friend.) Wasn't there an episode where some pollen or something stripped his control? I don't think it was so much that it implanted emotions as suppressed their control. And then there was his grief when he though he killed Kirk.

And yeah, Spock was 1/2 human, but he was clearly identifying with his Vulcan heritage. And Sarek was dimensional enough that you could see him as being more than an emotionless cardboard cutout.

Elessar, I totally agree with the point about cultural change. It doesn't stand to reason that nothing will change. That was one of the interesting things about the Vulcan arc in season 4. We see how Vulcan culture had swung towards an extreme interpretation, and things were starting to swing back the other way. Of course things never just revert to the way they were, so you end up with a new set of conditions. And those too will change over time. Interspecies relationships, particularly those which produce children, are bound to alter Vulcan society a bit.

Didn't T-Pol tell Paxton that civilizations and species change and evolve over centuries? that nothing remains the same.

Elessar wrote:Another way is that it was obvious from the beginning that Vulcans just resist emotional expression, and to some degree even control how strongly their emotions affect their moods and their state of mind... that goes a little further than expression. To some degree they are actually training their brains not to experience certain emotions.

This is pretty much how I always saw it, even when TOS was the only thing on TV.

JadziaKathryn wrote:And yeah, Spock was 1/2 human, but he was clearly identifying with his Vulcan heritage. And Sarek was dimensional enough that you could see him as being more than an emotionless cardboard cutout.

Yes, and this is especially apparent in ST III. The loss of his son clearly affected him emotionally. And hell, it was clear he was in love with Amanda. And he teased her, so he also obviously had a sense of humor.

I remember reading an interview with Nimoy quite a a long time ago...he was talking about the inherent difficulties of playing an outwardly emotionless being, but still having to emote to a point, because human audiences still need to relate to him. It was a fascinating point...and with that in mind, since he seemed to indicate that this was direction he'd received in terms of how to play the character, it's doubtful that Roddenberry intended for Vulcans to be totally emotionally void.