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Six months after The Cage
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this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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Vulcans don't lack emotions. They've found ways to disassociate their actions and reactions from their emotions (with some pretty serious side effects). Also, Spock is half human.
Unfortunately, the writers often forget this. VOY waffles a lot on whether or not Tuvok is literally emotionless.
I thought it was clear? Tuvok is a rage addict that has a bare tenuous grasp on his desire to literally rip Neelix a new one. It's a constant theme through the series, even when they show him as a kid.
Depending on who's writing the episode, yeah, and it's a great concept that I felt was explored well. Other times, however, we have an episode where Tuvok talks at length about the training and conditioning he underwent to control his emotions, then in the very next episode, talk at length about how Vulcans are naturally emotionless and incapable of feeling emotion at all. This chronic lack of consistency in the writers' room is a big part of why Moore left the show to reboot BSG.
"Thank God Voyager's writing was so inconsistent!"
-Me, a BSG fan
I actually loved that Tuvok was simultaneously psychopathic, extremely unstable, as well as violent in terms of his emotions, and yet at the same time was an almost perfect Vulcan in his ability to suppress it.
It really solidified the feeling that maybe Vulcans were right to emotionally discipline themselves the way they did, and make them look like what they do, they do out of real necessity if they want to be a civilised society, as opposed to something they just decided to do because they're perfect space elves.
What will really fry your brain is when you think about how the Romulans are really just Vulcans that broke away during the Time Of Awakening. Romulans are suspicious, distrusting, and secretive...which makes sense when you're surrounded by unstable psychopaths that started a nuclear war. But they aren't as violent or ruthless as Vulcans use to be. So really, Romulans are just the sane stable Vulcans that decided to flee the psychopaths that threatened to kill them all. And now the psychopaths look down their noses at their emotional yet mentally stable cousins.
I don't think the Romulans are really any better, they just solved the problem with external control rather than internal control, that external control being an inescapable police state.
I think the inescapable police state is a side effect of a secret society living amongst highly emotional violent psychopaths. The need to make sure that kind of mindset and behaviour is kept under strict control would be pretty high, since there is always the possibility. Of course what they did to the Remans is pretty unforgivable, but inescapable police states do tend to lean towards strict caste systems and somebody needs to do the dirty work.
Tuvok is just an overachiever.
Tuvok is just your typical Rick Berman male that has bottled up his emotions so long he's convinced himself that he doesn't have any until he's nearly killed by his own unfulfilled lust.