Welcome, Methinkus!
Pardon me if I ramble a bit about a thing or two...
ColonelHardisson said:
Every version of Trek since TOS has been rampant with episodes where the crew won't ever remember what happened - almost all of them had to do with time travel.
It's true they didn't treat time travel the same way in TOS, but they had their episodes also. I think most people, when they say they dislike time travel episodes (and don't include TOS time travel episodes) are really taking a dislike to how they are treated.
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Here's a link to a nice little summary site, though people may disagree with the author's "grades" of the episodes-
http://science.csustan.edu/JTB/GUIDES/TREK/trek-index.htm )
First Season: Tomorrow is Yesterday - In the past by accident, air force pilot is picked up, must be returned.
First Season: City On The Edge of Forever - Thru a time portal after McCoy to a woman on histories turning point.
Second Season: Assignment Earth - In the past, the crew almost stops Gary Seven from preventing war.
Third Season: All Our Yesterdays - Thru a portal go, Kirk to a 'Salem', and Bones & Spock to ice an age.
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I think that ColH is making the distinction as being the treatment, and not time travel in general, as being what he dislikes but let's strive onward.
I'm of a mind that the "alternate
possible pasts" of later (than TOS) series were trying to deal with things in what they wished to be perceived as a more realistic treatment of the cause and effect relationship time travel suggests and the theory of many, if not infinite, threads in time.
Perhaps it will turn out that the current relationship that Earth has with the Vulcans will not be the actual one if it is effected by the Temporal Cold War story arc?
Reagrding this latest new episode of Enterprise...
I like the way they are portraying Vulcans and think it is in keeping with all of the series and movies. I think it is probably not good to use Spock examples since he is of mixed heritage, but there are other Vulcans to cite as less than paragons of emotional control. In TOS, Sarek had a human wife, not very logical. His arrogance when visiting the Enterprise as an ambassador certainly shows his emotional attempts of emotional detachment regarding his relationship with his half-human son (Spock).
I'll squeeze some examples from the movies in here because they deal primarily with the original cast. Kirsty Alley often showed frustration while trying to learn the ropes and her substitute in The Search for Spock might have been a tad less emotional. Spock's brother, anyone? There's a fine example of what happens when a Vulcan embraces his emotion to the point of abandoning reasoning and grasp of reality.
TNG replaced the Vulcan "concept" with Data, obviously to distance themselves from TOS, but had some episodes with Vulcans. Sarek arrogantly and stubbornly held a long standing alienation of his half-human son (Spock), which is emotional. The madness Sarek goes through in old age, is another example of the emotion/logic struggle that is part of the Vulcan "make up".
DSN seemed to be going even further to avoid any relationship with past episode's plots, and notably in how they avoided Vulcans as characters. The only time Vulcans were used, IIRC, was in the Baseball episode and that was in a holodeck. I can't recall if the Vulcans were a program or real but I believe the former. No real examples here, then.
VOY has Tuvok, and while some will dismiss all of Voyager as the worst of all Trek, I'm not so quick to say so myself. Regardless, it had both good and bad things about it just like any of the series, IMO. For the purposes of this post, it is a wealth of Vulcan examples of the struggle with emotion. To my mind they are too numerous to recount but, I think anyone with a familiarity of Voyager will agree, it was sprinkled with Tuvok episodes and most of those dealt with his Vulcan problems with that struggle.
All in all I'd have to say that the real problem is that they may not have established, at any time in the history of Star Trek, that Vulcans are the epitome of logic. They have always asserted it in the scripted word but more often than not appearances of Vulcans usually deal with their tenuous grasp of their emotional control rather than their supreme ability to hold those emotions in check.
