T'Pol's Un-Vulcan Like Behavior

[Silverbullet]

Flawed or not or immoral. Archer had to make a judgement call. He had a misson and could not complete it without that Warp coil.

Billions of lives were at stake as far as he was cpncerned.

Remember he said that it was getting easier for him to make calls like that each one made the next easier.

That is the one time I felt that Archer showed the leadership that the writers claimed he had but Inever saw.

In wartme and in battle leaders must make choices and decisons that may cost thel lives of those under them but do. Sometimes they are right and at other they foul up badly. still the next time a decison has to be mde they weil do it.

ARcher made his decision and acted on it.

Trip later on said that he thought ARcher had made the right decison. He may have simply been trying to buck up Archer and to ease his miind about what he had done.

Think that the writers purposely put in this episode to get the audience thinking about what they might do in that situation.

They had t-Pol take the moral high ground and ARcher the pregmatic view.

[WarpGirl]

But they didn't have T'Pol take the moral high-ground, they had her in a withdrawel haze shout that it was wrong, bang a desk, and retract her statement. THAT got me mad.

[Escriba]

I get what WarpGirl is implying here, I think. What T'Pol says is true: "Once you rationalise the first mis-step, it's easy to fall into a pattern of behaviour." It is, because once you have decided to steal the warp coil, then nothing can stop you. Imagine they would have had more obstacles than what they actually did. Imagine that they'd had to kill the entire crew of the other ship. They would do it because they needed the warp coil. Once you begin, you can't stop.

[WarpGirl]

THANK YOU!!!!!! And that IS NOT the Vulcan way, logic or no logic.

[pdsldl]

But they didn't have T'Pol take the moral high-ground, they had her in a withdrawel haze shout that it was wrong, bang a desk, and retract her statement. THAT got me mad.

That was pathetic I see but it was also the lead up to the TD addiction angle. That to me was the ultimate in what a Vulcan would not do. The only justification I could come up with is all the mind altering crap she'd already been through but even then she had to know her mental control was weakened and TD would only make that worse.

And if you were faced with the same choice you'd let billions die because you might step over the line in the future. I'd hope his officers would be there to intervene if he did go off the deep end.

[Silverbullet]

I think that Archer did say that. Once he did something like stealing the warp coil it would be easy for him to do something like that in future and even easier after the second time.

I thought that T-Pol was sayiing that it was wrong and that she would not let him do it. I don't recall her saying that it would become easier for him to do something like that in future.

Have to watch the episode again.

[WarpGirl]

Have you read my rant on the whole Trellium thing? Believe me I agree with you. But I have no hope that the officers would intervene, the only time they did was in Hatchery. Ironically, I agreed with Archer's reasoning there, I just didn't agree with how he handled it. Of course, he wouldn't have reacted that way without alien influence.

If T'Pol had been a male Vulcan Trellium and mind rape would have never come up. But sexism is part of life and always in sci-fi, but ST is MUCH better than SW.

[Asso]

But she's a female. Thank goodness!

[pdsldl]

I agree Asso. I would never have watched the entire 4 seasons if it hadn't been for TnT. I may have watched the ones that featured CT but that would be it. And without T'Pol there would only have been Hoshi as a romantic partner with somebody and it would have been Archer or Trip I'd guess and I never saw that working at all. No sparks.

[WarpGirl]

I also love TnT and believe me even with the drugs, angst, and jerkish moments I want to see them succeed in a manner that respects both thier simlilarites and differences. But It's crazy to think that they would use the same plot devices if the Vulcan character was male and the human character is female.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Now I've found since I joined here that the very witty and nice Mr. KTR Has a knack for expressing my ideas better than I do. I like to think this is because he has more experience writing professionally and not because I'm a moron but that is a possibility. People seem to think that I want T'Pol to be an emotionaless paragon of pure logic. Ummm NO! So I went scouting on his site, hoping for inspiration. Fortunately I found it in his wonderful review of Fusion. Instead of trying to paraphrase, I'm just going to quote. Not a single word is mine...

Now you're making me blush again...

Thanks for the kind words!

[WarpGirl]

Hey I might not agree with every opinion but you do know how to make a point. I just wanted you to know I didn't steal.

[WarpGirl]

Sorry for the double, I just wanted to expand my points I made earlier from KTR's Review. I wrote this in another thread but some of the new people around here haven't seen it.

Well I expected T'Pol to behave like a Vulcan, Sarek and Spock were my basis for determining proper Vulcans so I was devastated from "Broken Bow" onward. However B-B destroyed all Vulcans not just her. Honestly in the beginning I thought she was quite rude and not because of culture differences. Vulcans as a society value courtesy and none of the Vulcans showed even the slightest bit of it to anyone. To be fair I thought both Archer and Trip behaved abominably for so-called "enlightened" human beings. But Trip had the decency to recognize his behavior need changing after "Breaking The Ice," and that's when I started wanting a romance. I knew that it would happen in "Broken Bow" but I wasn't thrilled about it at first. I thought after a while T'Pol would get better and Trip would grow up. Unfortunately I gave up watching during the second season because I hated Archer so badly. So low and behold I start reading about drug addictions one-night-stands and other horrific UnVulcan behavior and I nearly went crazy. But I discovered HoT and decided this was much better. After I found TriS I decided to try and watch again. Now I'm writing here, isn't life strange.

Sarek and Spock were both logical orderly and held high principles. While T'Pol gets points for intelligence and critical thinking skills, she doesn't seem to know herself at all. In the first season she's put into a quandary, between human and Vulcan prejudices. Vulcans as a whole are deceitful, arrogant, and downright dishonorable. Therefore T'Pol finds herself ostracized because she supported the humans. All of this was ridiculous and the beginning of her humanization. The whole idea is preposterous. If B-B wanted to do the whole thing with Surak's true teachings they could have written T'Pol as a proper Vulcan like Sarek or Spock and left the other Vulcans as they were.

The problem is that when Vulcans say they "do not experience emotions," they don't mean it literally. What they're saying is they don't experience them in the same way as humans. Vulcans do have emotions, if they didn't they wouldn't need logic. B-B's mistake with T'Pol's emotions is that they wanted her to experience them in the "human way." It ruined T'Pol's character and almost completely destroyed the TnT romance for me. I think it would have been so much more compelling had she been allowed to truly be herself. A real IDIC. If they had written her in the same vein as Sarek in "Search For Spock" it would have been so much better. That was the behavior I expected for T'Pol.

[Asso]

WarpGirl, do not you think it has been nice, for once, to see a Vulcan woman on the screen, as a part of the bridge's people? And do not you think that a woman, Human or Vulcan, has to feel differently from men? And also perceived differently from men and by men? And I don't think this is sexism. I think God or, for those who don't believe in Him, the Someone or Something everything came from, did a great thing, when two sexes were made. And even if you are so convinced that T'Pol had to be "more Vulcan", on the contrary I love her just because she is so un-Vulcan. But the reasons which push me to think like this, these reasons are resting in the depth of myself, of what I am, owing to impressions and sensations I took during my life. And whatever I can hear and assimilate from the others, the depth of myself will be still the depth of myself. And I think this fact is true for everyone.
Also for T'Pol, I believe.

[pdsldl]

I do appreciate the fact that T'Pol is a woman in the position she was in one the firsr starship. And while I agree with the humanization of T'Pol I also see what the B's were doing with Vulcans and T'Pol.

If they had made T'Pol a Vulcan like Spock we would have had a boring retread of TOS. I liked TOS but one Kirk/Spock was enough. If they made the Vulcans in the same vein as SArek then as a people they would have been stagnant, no growth, no V'Las (they wouldn';t have tolerated him), and no need to find the Kir'Shara. Boring old Vulcans.

Allowing T'Pol to be confused and immature was fine it's the way they tried to force her growth that bothered me. They could have skipped the addiction and had consequences from the Pa'Nar. It would have been more dramatic and said more about the whole idea of what happens when people are stigmatized like she was, especially when she finds out it was all unnecessary because all she needed was for someone to preform a mind meld and stop it. I would have found it much easier to accept her emotional outbursts from damage caused by that than TD. And while I don't like all the fake angst they threw in I do believe the romance would have hit some snags trying to blend their two cultures and beliefs together and trying to learn how to be bonded.