Star Trek Social Club
r/startrek: The Next Generation
Star Trek news and discussion. No slash fic...
Maybe a little slash fic.
New to Star Trek and wondering where to start?
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It is important that everyone from newbies to OG Trekkers feel welcome, no matter their gender, sexual orientation, religion or race.
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Upcoming Episodes
| Date | Episode | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 08-21 | SNW 3x07 | "What Is Starfleet?" |
| 08-28 | SNW 3x08 | "Four-and-a-Half Vulcans" |
| 09-04 | SNW 3x09 | "Terrarium" |
| 09-11 | SNW 3x10 | "New Life and New Civilizations" |
| TBA | SFA 1x01 | TBA |
In Production
Strange New Worlds (2025-07-17)
Starfleet Academy (2026)
In Development
Untitled comedy series
Wondering where to stream a series? Check here.
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None of the episodes you cited stated that biology plays no role in the Vulcan capacity for emotional suppression.
So we have one episode that says it fits, and zero that say it doesn't.
On the contrary; none of the episodes in all of Trek, up until your Voyager episode, states that a Vulcan's logic and emotional suppression comes from biology. They do the opposite; Vulcans are biologically incredibly emotional and passionate. The Voyager episode doesn't even go into detail what that biology is either.
It's just a brain centre, like any other brain centre, that regulates emotion (humans have one too), and through training the Vulcans use to it suppress their emotions. Unless you explicitly choose to ignore all canon that comes before it.
Even within Voyager it is clear that a Vulcan achieves logic and emotional control through years of training, and that before logic and emotional control became part of Vulcan culture, Vulcans were passionate and violent. Do you deny this well established canon?
I see no reason that both things cannot be true.
Vulcans do go through extensive training to achieve kolinar; they also possess unique genetic traits that make it possible.
Building on that VS, DNA was barely discovered by Watson and Crick when TOS fan, so we should be able to work the implications of the growing body of knowledge of genetics into what we have done before.
We don’t hold Star Trek back from incorporating advances in real life scientific and technological knowledge.
For example, growing understanding in nanotechnology informed many elements of 1990s Trek. We didn’t say that nanotechnology shouldn’t be referenced just because it wasn’t referenced in TOS.
In fact, Roddenberry insisted that Star Trek always be a possible future for the viewers and insisted on changes and corrections to address changes in knowledge.
In the case of what we saw in this episode, knowledge of epigenetics, an entire domain of understanding that has developed in this century, informed the situation.
Epigenetics can be defined as “The study of the processes involved in the genetic development of an organism, especially the activation and deactivation of genes.”
We were told by Una that, because the Karkovian serum was derived from Spock’s DNA it reflected Spock’s experience. This means certain Vulcan genetic traits were already ‘switched on’ by environmental factors, that could include experiences like meditation, that would lead to ‘switching on’ the genes that enable functioning of the specific Vulcan brain structures noted in Voyager.