Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Fusion

** (2 stars out of 5)
After all these years, is there anything that screams DEVIANT like a smiling Vulcan? Enterprise meets a space van loaded with elf hippies. These guys smirk, too. AND eat chicken. It probably tastes like chicken. But if it walks like a Romulan, and quacks like a Romulan...

"V'tosh ka'tur" means "Vulcans without logic". They didn't stop being smarty pants and stuffed shirts, they just like LIKING things. They don't consider themselves madmen or heretics like Sybok. No beardy weirdies. Well, no beardies.

Nearly a third of the Enterprise crew are womenfolk, which appeals to portly engineer Kov. He responds eagerly and loudly to Trip's Vulcan sex questions. True to form, the word S-E-X summons Malcolm out of nowhere to hear all about the Seven Year Itch. Somehow, impossibly, this gossip never becomes common knowledge to humans by Captain Kirk's time! You'd think if anyone would know a juicy Vulcan sex tidbit, it would be Jim Kirk.

T'Pol sees this experimentation as dangerous- still, she is drawn to these bad boys, with their arched eyebrows and their JAZZ music. Tolaris (rhymes with Solaris and he IS almost as dull as that Russian sci-fi classic) wants to show her a little something. It's an ancient technique abandoned by mainstream Vulcans centuries ago. T'Pol hasn't heard of it: a mind-meld. He only wants to fondle your brains- what could go wrong?

"Fusion" seems like a fusion of some other tales. "The Way To Eden" and "Violations", mainly. It was, coin a phrase, 'fascinating' to contemplate why Vulcan culture of this era is even more puritanical than any we've seen. The private but fairly normal mind-touching of the future is here practiced only by deeply closeted fringe elements. Worse yet, under the heading "MASSIVE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY FAIL" despite the assault on T'Pol, NOBODY punishes Tolaris or even WARNS the other hippies. Who are still travelling with him! I don't know about you, but I'd like to have some advance notice if I'm going to spend years in a tiny metal box with a date rapist.

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