Why does ENT hate Vulcans so much?

[Gul Sengosts]

So the gist I got from earlier Trek shows is that Vulcans are very rational, very logical, very intellectual, sometimes to a fault. They could come across as arrogant, but to me it always felt like that wasn't the point. The message I believe I got from those times is that all this rationality could be admirable but at the same time had its limits when the "heart" is ignored. Spock used to make very good points, with a lot of wisdom behind his excessive rationality, but at the same time TOS tried to show the limits, most notably in that shuttle crash episode.

Fast forward to ENT. Aside from T'Pol, Vulcans are obstinate, arrogant, stubborn jerks. And that's all they are. There isn't much reason or logic behind their thoughts and actions, at least rarely is any logic behind it ever explained. Before the Xindi appeared, mankind's prime antagonists seemed to be the Vulcans.

ENT tries to make us sympathise with the Andorians, but it appears to insist on making us hate Vulcans. Vulcans appear? 100% chance they're being obstinate jerks. Mentioning Vulcans in the presence of Archer? 100% chance he makes sarcastic/annoyed remarks. It kind of reminds me of someone being bitter/vindictive about their ex and badmouthing them whenever given the chance.

There was that atypical Vulcan ambassador fleeing from the planet who seemingly was made to make us sympathise with her. Thing is, she wasn't just depicted as an atypical Vulcan, she was clearly depicted as someone being strikingly un-Vulcan. As if a good Vulcan was one that was as non-Vulcan as possible.

So where does ENT's hatred for Vulcans come from? I don't know what was going on behind the scenes, but it feels like someone made sure that whenever they appear, they're depicted as comic book condescending jerks. Did Berman/Braga hate Vulcans or something? If anyone can enlighten me on this, please do.

 

[The Wormhole]

Vulcans are supposed to be the dominant power and they view Earth as a jumpy upstart rocking the boat and disrupting their calm and ordered piece of the galaxy. Archer's going around tipping over the galactic fruitstand and starting fires and the Vulcans are always needing to step in and put the fires out and smooth the ruffled feathers.

 

[Christopher]

Vulcans were always arrogant jerks. T'Pau was openly prejudiced against humans. T'Pring was willing to manipulate Spock into murdering his best friend so she could have her boy toy on the side. Sarek, supposedly a master diplomat, tossed around casual racist slurs about Tellarites. Young Spock's classmates in "Yesteryear" called Sarek a race traitor for marrying a "savage" human. Solok in "Take Me Out to the Holosuite" spent decades pursuing a bigoted vendetta against Ben Sisko.

Fans like to project our fondness for Spock onto the species as a whole, but the truth is that there's always been plenty of precedent for Vulcans being jerks. Even Spock was an arrogant jerk a lot of the time, but he was an arrogant jerk to people who gave as good as they got in return.

I loved Enterprise's take on the Vulcans. It would've been lazy and implausible if they were the exact same culture in the 22nd century that they were in the 23rd or 24th; real societies are not that static. And I loved how it served as an allegory about benevolent cultural imperialism from the other side. In TOS, it was humans who were going around policing the galaxy and making decisions about other cultures for their own good -- but how would Kirk's idea of "good" decisions look to the Eminians or to the Neural villagers, say? The Vulcans in the ENT era were very much like the British Empire or the US in the age of colonialism, making paternalistic decisions that they believed were benevolent but that the younger, less powerful cultures they "protected" saw as arrogant, imperious, and harmful. Often who's the good guy or the bad guy is a matter of perspective. The main difference of ENT from the other series is that humans are the ones on the bottom instead of the top, and that makes for a very different point of view. As a student of history, I thought ENT's approach to the Vulcans and their relationship with humans was very well done.

And of course, in the fourth season, we got the Vulcan Civil War arc to show us how the Vulcans of the ENT era evolved into the Vulcans of the TOS era. So they allowed the culture to change over time and they showed us how it changed and why. Maybe they had the change happen a bit too abruptly, but at least they tied it together.


As for the whole "hate" thing, that's not how writers think. If we hate characters, we just avoid writing about them. Indeed, part of a writer's job is to find a way to love every character, even the villains. It's like being a method actor. We put ourselves in our characters' shoes, try to understand how they see things and what motivates them, so that we sympathize with their point of view and their reasons for what they do, even when it's awful. All characters are the good guys in their own point of view, and you have to get into a character's point of view to write them believably.

Heck, often the biggest jerks are the characters we enjoy writing the most, because it's liberating to get to write characters who just say what they think without any concern for politeness or propriety, and because the difficult characters are often the most complicated and interesting. I said writing is a lot like acting, and if you ask most any actor, they'll tell you that villains are their favorite characters to play. So "hate?" No. That's misunderstanding creativity to a profound degree.

Although in the case of Enterprise, the Vulcans were antagonistic because it made narrative sense in the context of the show. Stories are about characters dealing with challenges, with opposition to their goals. In the case of Enterprise, the goal of Jonathan Archer and his crew was to bring humanity into the larger galaxy and prove itself worthy to be there, so there had to be someone to present opposition, an elder civilization that questioned our worth. And First Contact had established Vulcans as an established starfaring civilization already when humanity made its first warp flight, so it made sense to use them as the obstacle. The fact that they had always been condescending, imperious jerks just made them more perfect for the role.

 

[mswood]

Actually Enterprise is the show that features the widest variety of personality to Vulcans out of all of the Trek shows. And while much of the High Command is seen to be wary of humans (especially in the first season), it's because they don't trust humans erratic emotional state and the fact that humanity has only recently started to have things like stable peace (after fairly recently getting out of a world war). While some of the humans, though clearly not all, felt the Vulcans were deliberately helping and hindering them in their development, and this is true. And I am sure that's pretty much how many countries feel when a nation that is more prosperous starts helping them out but also expect them to start running things in a manner that the helping country thinks is appropriate. And when they don't get. actions they agree with withhold money or future assistance.

In TOS there were several characters who showed racism and hostility to Spock, and that's a hundred years after Enterprise. And look at the Vulcans we get in TOS. Sarek, T'Pring, Stonn, and T'Pau. Not a lot of love for humans in this group (minus one). So it makes perfect logical and rational sense for relations between these two cultures would have some level of conflict, versus the level they had during TOS. And we see over the course of Enterprise attitudes from Soval changing greatly the more he saw how humanity handles themselves outside of their own sphere of influence. You mention how Ambassador V'Lar seemed atypical to you, by that same token I would assume that Sarek for his time was also atypical.

You mention that Andorians were portrayed better, yet really outside of a couple of characters that Andorians were portrayed as more hotheaded then humans. And the one solid relationship still took quite a long time to achieve, in fact Soval and Shran have very similar amounts of time to warm up to the humans. Soval takes a little longer, but Soval also had less first hand interactions with Humans out in the wild. Cease Fire is really Soval's first in depth interactions with the crew on in person in the trenches sort of encounter, and you can tell his opinion had changed. By that point Shran had three in the trenches encounters with the same humans.

 

[publiusr]

I dog-cuss whoever my guardian angel is every day

 

[C.E. Evans]

ENT doesn't hate Vulcans at all, but it did show that Vulcans weren't perfect and that being logical didn't mean their didn't stink too.

 

[The Realist]

Situating the Vulcans as antagonists was the best and most original idea Enterprise ever had.

 

[valkyrie013]

It show the Vulcans straying away from the teachings of Surak and how they were progressing towards a more militaristic a bit more emotional side to them like they used to be before Surak and when finding that item it reinforced surak teachings and they move to a more logical, benign/monkish way.
As said, you can twist logic to mean whatever you want. It's logical to hold humans back because there savage and emotional, and will cause problems.
It's logical to be xenophobic and speciest because we would loose our purity .. Etc etc.

And as said even if you have the most nicest understanding mother and father you still want to get out from under them. and you would still see them as overbearing abstinent uncaring sometimes about what you want and what you need

 

[Jayson1]

Mostly because of character. They wanted to give Archer a inner life so they made him dislike Vulcan for holding humans back and making it so his dad never got see his dream come true with his warp 5 engine. This in turn created character conflict between Archer and Trip with T'Pol. Since Vulcan see humans as irrational and to emotional. Vulcans are basically Republicans and humans are basically liberals thus some of the conflict with those personality clashes can be done with humans and Vulcans.

 

[at Quark's]

Well, in Enterprise earthlings are the inexperienced newbies, still struggling to get up to decent warp speeds, still working on getting first contact with other species right, and such. The Vulcans are established as having centuries of experience with this stuff. A century later -and certainly by the time of TNG-, humans seem to be the 'most equal' species in the Federation. Enterprise simply attempts to explain why basically all other species were seemingly OK with humans taking over the candle from the Vulcans

But without joking, I think a lot of good points have been made already. I myself like the idea of how 22nd century Vulcans had strayed from the true meaning of the teachings of Surak, having been in power and having gotten used to manipulating other races for so long, and how it almost took a revolution to restore them to their 'intended' track.

 

[DarKush]

I felt that the hostility for the Vulcans on ENT was part of a larger dismissive attitude towards them from the Berman era. I never liked how DS9 handled Vulcans, except for the Vulcan Maquis Sakonna who I wished we had seen more of.

It really rankled on ENT though because almost always the humans were depicted as right and the Vulcans were wrong, even though the Vulcans had spent centuries in space and it behooved Earth to listen to them more. I wish there had been more balance, with the Vulcans being right actually sometime and humans learning from them, instead of too often the Vulcans being depicted as duplicitous and paternalistic toward a righteously chafing humanity.

In Season 4, there was even a great setup for Archer, who I felt had an anti-Vulcan bias that was never fully addressed, questioned or challenged (enough), could've really evolved after carrying Surak's katra. On Trek, way too often it's the alien or outside character who has to learn to be more human or like humans instead of humans learning more from their encounters with aliens. Though I will give the ENT writers credit for having Trip make some of those attempts in his relationship with T'Pol. I wish that they had done more with Archer along this line as well.

Further, Archer's Surak experience was a missed opportunity for the Vulcans to change in their regard for him as well. I mean this man was a vessel, he's merged, with their greatest philosopher. Perhaps they might've started to revere him a bit afterwards. It would've been nice for his character to have had a life altering change there. Granted we didn't see much, or lingering personality changes due to mind melds on Trek, which is another missed opportunity. I wonder how much Picard might have gained by joining minds with Sarek? Then again, carrying a katra could, or perhaps should, be more life/personality affecting. We didn't really see that with McCoy and Spock in the films, but I wonder if Sarek sharing some of his katra with Burnham might have affected her in profound ways, it certainly gave them a deep bond.

I did like what Manny Coto and the Season 4 writing staff did to explain why the ENT Vulcans were so disagreeable. It was really neat to tie the Romulans into it. I really wished we had gotten a fifth season to see more of that.

 

[Mister Spock]

It shines a different light on them, meaning their logical approach and dispassionate behaviour comes off as patronising and arrogant. That they think they can tell Earth what to do because they know better, even though we learn that they don't exactly have their shit together and have a fair few skeletons in their closet.

 

[gblews]

Ent did what every Trek show has done with the Vulcans: make them interesting. The Vulcans are smarter than humans, more logical, live much longer, physically stronger, more experienced in space.

You have to find a way to mitigate all these advantages over humans, otherwise, we’re like their children. Ent did something really clever in letting us know that the Vulcans actually feared humans because we reminded them of themselves.

Has Ent not been cancelled, I think it was headed toward an exploration of the Vulcans similar to TNG’s exploration of the Klingons, Voy exploration of the Borg, and DS9’s exploration of the Kardis and Bajorans.

Thinking that Ent hated the Vulcans is an indication that yyouo may have missed some things along the way.

 

[Edgy Pumpkin]

Watching again and thought I would add (just head canon) but Sarak has been gone thousand of years, when in season 4 the reformation happened (or was happening) by season 5, so the Vulcans have diluted the teachings and by ent era the vulcans show slight emotion, slowly but doing away with practices, even in TOS there is a bit of that same arrogance, even in DS9 the ship Vulcan that hated sisko was simply a supremest. Where humans started acting like teenagers trying to break out on their own and Vulcans acting like the strict great aunt unwillingness to change their ways. Even spock in tos got a lot beef because he wanted to join starfleet, then by tng, it was basically the norm for Vulcans to serve starfleet.

they did in ent added (or thought it would be fun) to add Vulcan drama, but by the end of the reformation of Vulcan finding sarak true teachings did they kind of started stepping back and started during the human koolaid.

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

I like the idea that the writers were doing what Star Trek always did with its villains, except they did it backwards this time because it was a prequel.

Kirk fought Klingons, TNG had a Klingon on the bridge.
Picard was harassed by Ferengi, DS9 had a Ferengi on the station,.
Sisko's wife was killed by the Borg, Voyager had a Borg on the ship.
Archer was prejudiced against Vulcans, TOS had a Vulcan on the crew.

Of course it was Enterprise so it also had to spoil the pattern by having its own Vulcan on the crew, but hey it got it halfway right!

 

[dupersuper]

Watching again and thought I would add (just head canon) but Sarak has been gone thousand of years

...You mean Surak?

 

[FederationHistorian]

I like the idea that the writers were doing what Star Trek always did with its villains, except they did it backwards this time because it was a prequel.

Kirk fought Klingons, TNG had a Klingon on the bridge.
Picard was harassed by Ferengi, DS9 had a Ferengi on the station,.
Sisko's wife was killed by the Borg, Voyager had a Borg on the ship.
Archer was prejudiced against Vulcans, TOS had a Vulcan on the crew.

Of course it was Enterprise so it also had to spoil the pattern by having its own Vulcan on the crew, but hey it got it halfway right!

Janeway dealt with meddlesome time travelers, ENT worked with one.
Archer had trust issues with both Andorians and Vulcans, DIS & SNW has/will have Andorians and Vulcans present.

Not the best example with Archer. If it was confirmed that Archer had issues with Saurians, as the ENT novels suggest, then Discovery having a Saurian onboard would be more significant.

I get where you are coming from chronologically with you listing. But that would mean Denobulans would have had to have caused some issues for Earth for Enterprise having a Denobulan on their ship be significant.

 

[fireproof78]

...You mean Surak?

Que Surak Sarak.

 

[Richard S. Ta]

I don’t think Enterprise hated Vulcans, I just think it added a bit of colour to them. The Klingons went through the same process in TNG, then the Ferengi in DS9 and the Borg in Voyager.

Tuvok aside, we actually saw very little of Vulcans in Berman Trek before Enterprise. Even stuff like Unification dealt with familiar faces.

I’ve found Season 1 of Enterprise to be a struggle, but finding the Vulcans have more in common with their Romulan cousins than we thought has been one of the pluses of it.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Vulcans are obstinate, arrogant, stubborn jerks. And that's all they are

Have you seen "Amok Time"? Vulcans were jerks in TOS, but everyone remembers them as benevolent sanctuary from the classic movies.