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sshbpodcast · 15 days ago

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I’ll Spock the world and meld with you, Pt 3

By Ames

If in The Original Series, the mind meld was mostly used as a Vulcan superpower get-out-of-jail free card (sometimes literally), and in Voyager, it served as a tool in Tuvok’s security chief belt to aid in investigations quite a lot, then Enterprise goes an entirely different direction with it. The show uses its prequel nature to explore the troubling history of melding, retconning something that frankly didn’t need retconning, and then course correcting perhaps a little too hard. Like all of Enterprise, it’s pretty messy.

But that’s why your A Star to Steer Her By hosts are here to dissect these chronologically early instances of the Vulcan mind touch in Enterprise and in the Kelvin movies. Did the writers really need to make the practice taboo during this time period? We already know that by the following century, Spock is melding with a different entity nearly every other week, so what gives? And what does JJ Trek have to say about the practice? Follow along below and listen to this week’s episode of the podcast (wend your way to 49:34) to touch our minds and find out!

[Images © CBS/Paramount]

“Fusion” We’re already starting off on the wrong foot with an episode that we here all loathe. Whatever point the writers are trying to make gets lost in the extremely uncomfortable mind rape scenes and the wholly unnecessary retconning of the mind meld to be illegal in Vulcan society. Like, why? Watching Tolaris acting as a sexual predator the whole episode long is disgusting. I don’t want it in my Star Trek. It’s not even good social commentary because nothing comes out of it, except T’Pol getting Pa’Nar Syndrome as we learn later in “Stigma.” We still have no idea why the writers did this to us.

“The Forge” Interestingly, we don’t get any more mind melds until season four, when Enterprise had basically morphed into an entirely different kind of show. You could tell Manny Coto was trying to bridge that gap between Enterprise and The Original Series. First up was fixing that massive problem with mind melds being taboo. So in “The Forge,” we learn that Soval (of all people!) can mind meld when he probes the mind of a comatose Corporal Askwith to learn what happened during the bombing. Not only do we get the meld used as an exposition machine again like old times, but the added layer of the series’s most anal retentive Vulcan being a melder creates a new character dynamic.

We get another mind meld in “The Forge” later when that weirdo Syrran (whom Archer knows as “Arev”) is on the verge of death and dumps a katra into Archer. So we’re basically hearkening back to The Wrath of Khan when Spock downloaded his own katra into McCoy. It’s another moment of deliberately paralleling TOS in order to get the show more aligned with what fans know of what was to come. I do still find it a crappy idea to have Archer be the vessel for the katra over T’Pol, who would have had a more meaningful and introspective experience as someone who doesn’t initially believe in katras, but what are you gonna do?

“Awakening” In this Vulcan story arc, we get even more mind melds to make up for the several seasons free of them! After Syrran has passed a katra over the Archer last episode, T’Pau melds her way in to double check whose katra is in there, and determines that it is indeed Surak, their logic hero. It’s mostly one of those expository mind melds to get characters the information they need to fulfill their scene, but we’re also reminded that this band of Vulcans is perfectly okay doing mind melds all over the place, contrary to the rest of Vulcan society. This is why T’Pau is the bomb.

Later that episode, we also see T’Pau make an attempt to get Surak out of Archer. But apparently the father of Vulcan logic likes it in Archer’s noodle and opts to stay in there instead. Who knew that was an option? Why couldn’t Spock’s katra in McCoy have been a little more comfortable in there instead of driving the doctor insane in The Search for Spock? What’s with all the superfluous new Vulcan lore that retcons all our existing superfluous Vulcan lore, huh Enterprise? Does this count as yet another Vulcan superpower? Does a sehlat shit in the woods?

“Kir’Shara” While wrapping up this three-parter story arc, T’Pau also fixes a big problem Enterprise had saddled itself with when the writers gave T’Pol a neural disease in “Stigma.” What a terrible mistake that whole idea was. Lucky for us, they fix it now and save T’Pol’s life when T’Pau melds with her to remove the Pa’Nar Syndrome so easily it’s almost laughable. The Vulcan badass goes on to shit on those V’tosh ka’tur weirdos when she tells T’Pol that melding is safe if you’re properly trained, and also that the High Command has been perpetuating myths that there’s no cure to Pa’Nar Syndrome when there is. It’s a lot of retconning, but we’ll allow it because it fixes this stupid plot. Oh, and presumably T’Pau shares some memories of T’Les too, which is nice.

We also get a super quick denouement scene in which some unnamed Vulcan priest takes Surak’s katra out of Archer, just to tie up that loose end before we finish off this big three-part bonanza. It would have been much more interesting if it’d been T’Pau who gets the katra of the founder of Vulcan logic, since she’s an established character and everything, but whatever. We can close the book on this Vulcan nonsense for now knowing that we’ve paved the way for melders in the future, I guess.

“Affliction” You know how I just said that melding is safe if you’re an experienced melder who knows what you’re doing? Well, does it strike anyone else as counterintuitive when a few episodes later T’Pol is mind melding Hoshi to figure out who kidnapped Phlox? T’Pol has no idea what she’s doing (and knows that doing it wrong can have dangerous results), but don’t worry, Archer is apparently an expert on the subject and talks her through it. It all feels kind of cultural appropriationy to have the human white dude do this, which is why I maintain that putting Surak’s katra into T’Pol would have been a better idea from the get go.

“In a Mirror, Darkly (Part 1)” We have one final mind meld from Enterprise, and it’s another meld-as-a-weapon sort of moment. I forgot that we do get to see this meld because there’s a flashback scene in “In a Mirror, Darkly (Part 1)” that depicts Mirror T’Pol forcibly mind melding with a struggling Mirror Tucker to get him to do her bidding and then mindwipe him at the end. It all sounds very par for the course for Vulcan mirrorfolk to use their superpowers with such evil intentions, so this one works for us. Plus they’re just so hot together.

Star Trek (2009) Need to info dump a whole series of context onto a character in under a minute? Well the mind meld is perfect for that! Prime-timeline Spock needs to get Kelvin-timeline Kirk up to speed, and talking to this guy would be a) boring to watch and b) fruitless because he knows young, brash Kirk won’t listen anyway. So Spock mind melds the guy to give him all the exposition on the Romulan backstory, the time travel weirdness, their friendship from another timeline, all that stuff, all in one memory montage that he still has to narrate over for some reason. It makes for a pretty generic film device, but it’s better than a boardroom scene for sure.

Later in the 2009 film, we also see Quinto Spock mind meld some unconscious Romulan just to pry information from him about where everything is on the Narada. That ship does look like it’d be impossible to navigate even if you did know the layout already. So we’re basically back to using melds to get information to characters when they need it because looking it up on the computer would not make for a very dynamic scene, and torturing a random Romulan (as was apparently in the original script) wouldn’t be very in character. Yikes.

Star Trek Into Darkness Pike’s having yet another rough day when his conference is attacked and he’s dying all over the place, and for some reason Spock mind melds with him. The SSHB hosts haven’t settled on exactly why Spock does this. If it’s to alleviate some of Pike’s pain while he’s dying, that’s not clear in the scene. If it’s to gain any intel that Pike has on the situation, it never comes up. If it’s just to connect with his friend one final time, that seems a little invasive and non consensual. He does bring up during his fight with Uhura that Pike’s final emotions remind him of his emotions when Vulcan was destroyed, but that doesn’t really doesn’t get significantly explored aside from that one line. We’re just kinda uncertain why this was here…

We totally forgot to bring this one up in our discussion on the podcast! I didn’t even remember this happening until I was literally Control-F’ing around in the Into Darkness transcript. To get Khan to stop crushing his head for a hot second during their fight scene, Spock reaches over and tries to mind meld with that limey bastard. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, and it’s not even clear that that’s what Spock is doing unless you’re well versed on mind melds. Nothing comes of it because Khan fights it off anyway, but it’s there.

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That’s gonna be it for mind melds for a while. One of these days, when we’re through some more of the streaming Trek, we may circle back to cover the mind melds we see in Discovery and Strange New Worlds and the rest. Which means you should not only keep your eyes on this blog for that, but also keep following along with our episode watch-through over on SoundCloud or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also probe our thoughts over on Facebook and BlueSky, and never meld on an empty stomach.

#star trek #star trek podcast #podcast #mind melds #enterprise #star trek enterprise #fusion #stigma #the forge #awakening #kir'shara #affliction #in a mirror darkly #star trek 2009 #star trek into darkness #t'pol #spock #kelvin timeline #vulcans

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