“Blood Fever”
Written by Lisa Klink
Directed by Andrew Robinson
Season 3, Episode 16
Production episode 157
Original air date: February 5, 1997
Stardate: 50537.2
Captain’s log. Voyager has found a source of gallacite, which can be used to refit the warp coils. The planet has a long-abandoned colony on it, so Janeway lays a claim. Torres and Vorik plan out how to set up a gallacite mine, and then Vorik surprises Torres by proposing to marry her.
Vorik has a lengthy, detailed, very logical explanation for his actions, but a stunned Torres turns him down. Vorik then becomes insistent, going so far as to grab her face. Torres then punches him out.
She takes Vorik to sickbay, but the EMH will only discuss Vorik’s condition in private. After Torres and Kes depart, the EMH states that he assumes Vorik is going through pon farr. It’s his first one, and he obviously can’t return home to Vulcan. He had hoped that Torres would accept his proposal, but in the sober light of sickbay, he realizes that that’s foolish. The EMH takes him off duty, and he will confine himself to quarters. The EMH puts a cortical monitor on him.
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The EMH consults the only person he can on the matter: Tuvok. However, the security chief is less than helpful. He feels it is not his place to involve himself in Vorik’s struggle, and he also confirms that there are only three possibilities for him to get past pon farr in one piece: mating, fighting for a mate (as we saw in “Amok Time“), or intense meditation.
Torres, Paris, and Neelix beam down to the planet to scout out the gallacite. The colony appears to have been abandoned for some time. They climb down into the mine, but one of the pitons fails, and they all fall to the ground. Neelix is badly injured—and Torres, who has already been acting weird, goes completely batshit. She blows Neelix’s injuries off, and when Paris tries to keep her from wandering off, she bites him.
Paris contacts Voyager, and everyone is now disturbed by Torres’s behavior. Janeway sends Chakotay and Tuvok to the surface, but Tuvok says he needs to make a stop first, as Torres’s behavior is very familiar.
Tuvok stops by Vorik’s quarters to ask exactly what happened when he proposed marriage to Torres. They soon realize that when he grabbed Torres’s face, he instigated a mind-meld with her, and now she’s going through pon farr.
They beam down and Neelix is brought up to the surface to be transported. Chakotay, Tuvok, and Paris search for and eventually find Torres. They try to convince her that she’s ill and needs to return to the ship, but she resists, as it’s her away team, dammit.
And then they’re ambushed by the Sakari, who are native to the planet. Apparently the colony is still active, it’s just moved deep underground, where they’re hiding from the people who invaded them years ago. Chakotay assures them that they didn’t know the Sakari were there, and they’ll not follow through on mining the gallacite—what’s more, they’re willing to help them camouflage themselves better.
The Sakari try to warn them that a wall is unstable, but Torres punches one of them out, and then the wall collapses.
Paris and Torres are separated from the others by a collapsed wall. They try to find their way out, but Torres is being overcome by the urge to mate, and she wants Paris to help her with that. Paris, however, refuses, because it would be for the wrong reasons, he says.
The EMH prescribes the holodeck for Vorik. He creates a holographic Vulcan woman for Vorik to mate with. It’s not a real Vulcan, but it’s worth a shot. Later, the EMH returns to a calmer Vorik who says it worked beautifully.
The away team gets to the surface, but they can’t contact Voyager for some reason. Tuvok urges Paris to accede to Torres’s implorations to mate—if he doesn’t, she’ll die. Paris reluctantly agrees, but then Vorik shows up and demands that he mate with Torres, claiming the koon-ut kal-if-fee. (Vorik faked his calm with the EMH, and then sabotaged Voyager‘s communications, transporters, and shuttles to keep everyone else off the planet and the away team on it.)
Chakotay reluctantly agrees to let them fight it out, and Torres chooses to fight for herself, and so she and Vorik beat each other up a lot. The fight burns out the blood fever in both of them, and Torres renders Vorik unconscious.
They beam back to Voyager. The Sakari take up Chakotay’s offer for assistance in better camouflaging themselves, and in return the Sakari let them have some gallacite.
But then Chakotay summons Janeway to the surface. They found an old corpse in the ruins of the colony: it’s a Borg. They were the invaders who destroyed the Sakari colony.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently, Vorik—while suffering from the effects of pon farr—can sabotage Voyager’s communications, transporters, and shuttles so thoroughly that it completely cuts the away team off. Neat trick!
Mr. Vulcan. Good Vulcan that he is, Tuvok is initially of very little help when the EMH asks him to assist in treating Vorik, but when Torres starts to show symptoms, he breaks Vulcan protocol because now another of the crew is in danger.
Half and half. The pon farr makes Torres much more passionate even than normal.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix apparently was a miner in the past. Along with all the other things he’s done. How skilled he actually is at it remains a mystery, as he’s hurt before they get to the gallacite.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH is frustrated by the paucity of information in the Starfleet medical database about pon farr, as it makes it extremely difficult to treat.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Torres goes for Paris when the mating urge overcomes her, but Paris begs off because he thinks she doesn’t really feel that way about him, he’s just convenient, and he doesn’t want her that way. But then after it’s all over, she opens the door the possibility of her wanting him that way for realsies, which surprises the crap out of him.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. The EMH tries giving Vorik a holographic blow-up doll to mate with as a substitute for a real Vulcan, but apparently the needs of the pon farr require flesh and blood rather than photons.
Do it.
“For such an intellectually enlightened race, Vulcans have a remarkably Victorian attitude about sex.”
“That is a very human judgment, Doctor.”
“Then here’s a Vulcan one: I fail to see the logic in perpetuating ignorance about a basic biological function.”
–The EMH and Tuvok discussing pon farr
Welcome aboard. Alexander Enberg is back as Vorik, in the episode for which he was originally created. He will continue to recur throughout the run of the show.
Trivial matters: Pon farr was first established on the original series episode “Amok Time,” and referenced again in “The Cloud Minders” and, after a fashion, in the movie The Search for Spock.
The original plan was to do an episode where Tuvok underwent pon farr, but they didn’t wish to put him in a position where he would be forced to commit adultery, since he was established as being happily married. (Well, the Vulcan version of happily married, anyhow.) How-some-ever, Tuvok will undergo his own pon farr in the seventh-season episode “Body and Soul.”
This episode sets up Voyager’s inevitable encountering of the Borg with the final shot of a Borg corpse. They’ll be seen in the very next episode, “Unity,” and become recurring antagonists for Voyager (and also provide a new cast member) starting in the “Scorpion” two-parter that will straddle seasons three and four and continue through to the end of the series. The producers deliberately waited until the movie First Contact had been in theatres for a few months before having the Borg show up on Voyager.
This is the first mention of Neelix’s past working at a mining colony, though it will come up again.
This is the first of two episodes directed by Andrew Robinson, best known for playing Garak across the lot on DS9. Robinson had previously directed “Looking for par’Mach in All the Wrong Places” on DS9, which made him the first recurring actor to direct a Trek episode. He’ll be back on Voyager to direct “Unforgettable” in the fourth season.
Set a course for home. “If anyone is going to smash your arrogant little face in, I will!” One of the things that made me absolutely crazy about a lot of Star Trek tie-in fiction that I read over the decades, starting in the 1980s when I devoured the early Pocket Books novels and tracked down the older Bantam ones, was that so often the stories were written in such a way that pon farr was public knowledge. Not just Kirk, McCoy, and Chapel knowing about it thanks to the events of “Amok Time,” but people all over the Trek universe knowing all about the fact that Vulcans swim home to spawn every seven years.
Now to be fair, this was a time before things like home video and wikipedias and such, but still, the fact that Vulcans keep the pon farr extremely secret was a major plot point of the episode, so to see it suddenly be treated as common knowledge was maddening. (Of course, it didn’t help that Spock blabbed all about it to Droxine in “The Cloud Minders,” but still…)
So it was a huge relief to watch this episode and see that Lisa Klink actually watched “Amok Time” and paid attention to everything that happened in it, including the fact that Spock practically had to be put into a headlock before he would admit to his best friends what he was going through.
This means that the EMH waits until he is alone with Vorik to discuss his condition, and the only other person he can even consider talking to about it is Tuvok—who is not only another Vulcan, but one with several children and who has gone through pon farr before, while also serving a couple of tours in Starfleet.
Klink also caught something that was only implied by “Amok Time” rather than outwardly stated: the ritual combat burns out the plak-tow, as evidenced by the fact that Spock underwent the ritual combat and then no longer had the urge to mate.
Still, I found myself watching Paris manfully restrain himself from having sex with Torres, and all I could do was ask myself, why? Tuvok has already broken with Vulcan tradition by telling him and Chakotay about pon farr in order to try to help Torres, so he already knows that the urge to mate is overwhelming. And once they’re trapped in the caverns, the likelihood of help on Voyager becomes slim, and even then, it’s not like the EMH has had a helluva lot of luck with Vorik there.
So why does Paris resist? Yes, it’s not the ideal circumstance, but why are you saving yourself for a theoretical future friendship/relationship/whatever when the present is that she’s dying and there won’t be a future anything unless you stop being a puritanical schmuck and mate with her!
I mean, I get why, in 1967, Star Trek did an entire episode about a mating ritual at the end of which nobody actually had sex with anyone because, well, it was 1967. But thirty years later, there’s no excuse for repeating themselves. This was the chance to do a pon farr episode in which actual mating happened, and they blew it, mostly by using the same out they used three decades previous. And it’s not like Star Trek as a franchise has ever been against the notion of characters having sex, as both TNG (“Justice,” “The Price,” etc.) and DS9 (“Looking for parMach in All the Wrong Places,” “A Simple Investigation,” etc.) were full of plenty of instances. Hell, “Elogium” had a lengthy conversation on the subject between Janeway and Chakotay. So why avoid it here?
Having said all that, the episode is still fun. Alexander Enberg does decently with the role of the seriously messed-up Vorik, Roxann Dawson is having a great time as the pon farr-riddled Torres, and for all that I dislike the story choice, Robert Duncan McNeill does a very good job with a Paris who is trying really hard to do what he thinks is the right thing.
But the episode belongs to Robert Picardo and Tim Russ. Picardo beautifully shows the EMH’s frustration and inspiration as he finds himself in a situation where his expansive database of Federation medical knowledge fails him because Vulcans refuse to talk about this most basic of biological functions. And Russ plays the elder Vulcan statesman beautifully, trying very hard to balance the needs of his culture versus the safety of the ship. It’s worth mentioning that Tuvok’s duties as security chief are never compromised: the moment it becomes clear that Vorik has put Torres in danger, he has to break the sanctity of pon farr in order to save her.
Still, it’s frustrating when the only sex that anyone has in an episode about mating is with a holographic character…
EDITED TO ADD: Several people in the comments and on Facebook have rightfully pointed out that Paris’s reluctance shows a sensitivity to the fact that Torres isn’t really on a position to give informed rational consent, which is an important and valid point. It’s not as cut and dried given the stakes, but it’s something I should have considered in my review and I apologize for not doing so.
Warp factor rating: 6
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I never mention the trailers, which were often awful but I understand not really the show’s fault, but this is one of the few times where it significantly detracted from the episode. The script does a beautiful job of obscuring that the invaders were the Borg, so the last shot is a great twist that makes sense in retrospect and really sets up anticipation.
Or it would have been, had the trailer that played after Coda not spoiled it! So at the time I kept waiting for the Borg to show up and it being a two second shot at the end was a let-down instead of a teaser. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNX-IyexgfU
Apparently, Vorik—while suffering from the effects of pon farr—can sabotage Voyager’s communications, transporters, and shuttles so thoroughly that it completely cuts the away team off. Neat trick!
Must have also disabled the landing gear, in that once Voyager realized something was up they could have just landed on this not particularly dangerous planet and lowered the ramp. This ship is hopeless.
With both Paris and Chakotay already on the surface, I doubt there was anybody available who was qualified to land that tub.
I felt we never got a good explanation for how a mind meld with a non-Vulcan could make that person also get pon farr. This episode depends on that as a plot point and it seemed pretty weak to me.
Another instance of a holographic blow-up doll. I’m not sure if this is ever answered—maybe in tie-in fiction—but what does a holographic projection feel like when you touch them? Does their clothes feel like cloth? Does their skin feel like skin? Does…uh…other stuff feel like the real thing?
Riker rhapsodizes quite a bit about all the sensory details of Minuet — at least the ones he can sense from a close dance: scent, touch, etc. So, I’m guessing it’s real as can be.
That exchange between Tuvok and the EMH over the Vulcan attitude toward pon farr is one of my favorite moments in the whole series. It absolutely makes sense that the EMH, as an AI, can seamlessly shift between “human mode” and “Vulcan mode,” and the script and Robert Picardo’s performance execute it perfectly.
Despite the circumstances, I’m right there with Paris about not having sex with Torres while she was like that. Her ability to consent/not consent is seriously impaired, and I think he felt like he’d be taking advantage of her, which would be majorly forked up. So I’m with him on resisting. Otherwise we get into some very shady territory.
And considering how she acted towards him at the end, he clearly made the right call.
I think I see what’s worrying Paris. Torres is not in her right mind at the moment and how will she feel about them having had sex after she’s herself again? How will it impact their working relationship? Will she accept ‘I only did it to save your life’ ? Will she be insulted if you claim it was only out of duty? Assuming she’ll be all ‘you did what you had to do, no problem’ is a bit of a stretch.
Considering Tuvok is Chief of security, and a Vulcan, one would have expected him to have a Pon Farr plan in place for when the inevitable happens. Or is the matter so extremely sensitive not even the senior Vulcan Officer on board can possibly discuss the matter with fellow Vulcans? Do they all have to pretend the issue doesn’t exist until it blows up in their faces? Where the heck is the logic in that??
As for the issue of how widespread knowledge of pon farr is, I would think that would be dependent upon the number of Vulcans in Starfleet, and how much they interacted with other species. During the original series, Spock was unique since he served with a crew of humans, while the majority of Vulcans in Starfleet served on the Intrepid.
That obviously changed sometime after the original series, and I can see it becoming common knowledge by the Next Gen era (and the source of a lot of lurid Ferengi holosuite programs)
I really liked the way the scene between Tuvok and Vorik was played and staged. They were forced to talk to each other about the thing Vulcans just Do Not Discuss, and they were facing away from each other and speaking really stiffly and tensely, and you could see what a struggle it was for them both.
I always felt it was a copout, though, that the combat didn’t have to be lethal to do the job. If that’s the case, if the winner doesn’t have to go all the way to, err, consummating the combat with a mortal strike, doesn’t that render the whole “Dis combat iz to de deat” business in “Amok Time” entirely gratuitous? Why would the normally pacifistic Vulcans keep the most horrible part of the ritual if they didn’t absolutely have to? So it just didn’t make sense. I’ve always handwaved it by assuming that the holographic sex was partially effective for Vorik, so he didn’t have to go all the way with the fight.
@3/Austin: The whole idea of holodecks is that the illusions are entirely convincing to all five senses. As for how convincing a sex simulation is, surely that depends on the skill of the programmer, as with any other CGI erotica.
@5/Robb: I agree B’Elanna wasn’t in a position to give true consent. On the other hand, her life was at stake. So that’s quite a conundrum.
Starfleet would have to a have a procedure for pon farr, preferably one that gets Vulcans back home or at least laid before they attack their crew mates.
jay042: Please cite your evidence to support your theory that the majority of Vulcans in Starfleet served on the Intrepid in the 23rd century, because I don’t recall anything anywhere on screen that even hinted at that.
Robb & princessroxana: Fair point about consent, but Torres’s life is literally at stake here. That muddies the waters considerably.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Yeah, no, Paris absolutely made the right call, and the writers made the right call in having him make the right call and having it stick, because otherwise they’ve written an episode where they make an excuse for what would be, functionally, two rapes (Torres isn’t in her right mind, and Paris is under coercion). Trek’s track record on consent is, uh, mixed at best, but that decision was correct.
As a woman, I was glad that Paris kept putting Torres off until there was absolutely no other choice. There were serious issues with consent and it was nice to see a show made the ’90’s even half way addressing that. Also saying that Paris should have just had sex with her immediately ignores his right to consent as well. And yes, she was dying, but until they reached the surface & realized they couldn’t contact Voyager, there was still the chance (though dwindling) of an alternative.
I remember that after seeing the episode, I asked myself the same question: Why does the episode present Paris’ restrain as somewhat heroic and moral, while in reality this puts Torres in discomfort and, if prolonged, even a lethal risk? The answer I found was that Americans (especially American TV network managers) and Vulcans resemble each other more with respect to attitudes about sex than either of them would like to admit.
A few years later the infamous nipplegate would happen, the fallout of which seemed to Europeans as alien as any Star Trek planet of the week. Actually, in my home country, a feminist celebrity once demonstraded some masturbation techniques in a live discussion populated mostly with elderly gentlemen. No one complained, the camera did not fade away, and most viewers found it eccentric at most. Because it was 1980, there was sure some discussion afterwards, but no real consequence (I think she was never invited to that late evening talk show again, though).
There is, however, another reason why the the producers might have chosen the “fight instead of f*ck” copout: What to do with Vorik? To find him another partner would have been to problematic, and a post-coitally weakened Paris as the most natural fight partner would have stood no real chance.
For a simple story about a crewmember having Pon Farr, this episode turned out to be a major turning point for the series. Not only it kicks off Torres/Paris as a couple, it also reintroduces the Borg to the franchise (and in a quite nicely understated way also).
I really appreciate the cave-in scene with Torres and Paris. Sure, he could have granted her wishes and done the deed. But then again, that scene works beautifully because of the claustrophobic tension between them. You see in Paris’ eyes he wants to do it. But he makes an herculean effort holding back from doing so. That to me is McNeill’s best performance as Paris in the first three seasons of the show. Dawson is also stellar throughout. No wonder they became a couple soon afterwards. The energy is all there. It helps when you have Elim Garak behind the camera, just fresh from directing DS9’s Parmach episode. Theatrical and capable of bringing out the best in the cast.
Nepotism issues aside, I enjoy Emberg’s performance as Vorik quite a bit. Very Vulcan, and very complicated. And Klink’s script not only respects what was established in Amok Time, but it makes superlative use of the EMH in dealing with the issue.
My only problem with the episode is that it seems to ignore and somewhat excuse Vorik’s early actions. By that I mean his grabbing her face*. I get it that Pon Farr is a private issue, but it’s still a case of a junior officer assaulting his superior. More than that, it’s a case of a male Vulcan sexually assaulting a half-human woman. On upcoming episodes that Vorik appears, we don’t see any consequences. Did he get a note on his track record? Did he face any restrictions? This might not play so well in the current age of @MeToo.
*P.S. @krad: A typo in the recap. They soon realize that when she grabbed Torres’s face
The one time Paris isn’t a skeevy dude and he still gets criticized for it. Guy can’t catch a break.
@10 – I got this. “The Immunity Syndrome” from TOS, posted on IMDB;
The Enterprise is sent to investigate the disruption of the Gamma VII-A solar system and the destruction of the U.S.S. Intrepid, staffed solely by Vulcans. When they arrive they find a large dark mass floating in space that is draining energy from everything around it, including the Enterprise. Drawn into the mass, they find a huge amoeba-like creature and Kirk must decide which of his two friends, McCoy or Spock, to send into it aboard a shuttle craft on a mission of no return. Written by garykmcd
I’ve added this paragraph to the end of the entry:
Several people in the comments and on Facebook have rightfully pointed out that Paris’s reluctance shows a sensitivity to the fact that Torres isn’t really on a position to give informed rational consent, which is an important and valid point. It’s not as cut and dried given the stakes, but it’s something I should have considered in my review and I apologize for not doing so.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Vorik was not in his right mind, so there were extenuating circumstances. Not that they have a lot of options to punish him. Torres might have been satisfied with the option of beating the snot out of him.
@13 Torres had been psychically roofied and the latest Paris knew what that she wasn’t interested in him. It’d have been one thing if they were already in a relationship or even if she hadn’t given him an answer one way or another but since her last sober word on the topic was “no” Paris was obligated to refrain. At want point it changes from assault to a live saving treatment* is hard to say, though the show say it hadn’t gone that far when they were in the cave.
* i.e. a mugger and a surgeon may make the same cut but the surgeon can presume consent in order to save your life.
@1/Rick: Ah, yes. Those UPN promos were the worst what with their giving away moments from the episodes that were big spoilers.
@3/Austin: Apparently the holograms were real and fleshy enough enough to keep Riker, Geordi, Barclay, and Paris happy, not to mention all of Quark’s holosuite customers.
@5/Robb: I agree with you in that I always saw it as Paris being the good guy in not taking advantage of a compromised Torres. But I also get the other side of it in that if it’s going to save her life, then he needs to just do the dirty deed and Torres would understand that because hey, at least she’d be alive to thank him!
I thought Borg corpses disintegrate when they die?
I personally felt Taurik and Torres would have made for a more interesting pairing: the volatile personality with the emotionally-restrained character.
Overall, I thought this was a good episode. I found myself surprised that the story actually went there with the Doctor pimping out the holographic blowup doll to Taurik and then Tuvok insisting to Paris that he had to boff Torres for her own good so Tuvok and Chakotay saunter off to give them some privacy. Wah-hey indeed!
I liked this episode when it aired ,I thought it was an interesting subject to visit although kinda wished they’d focused on Tuvok. I REALLY liked the Borg reveal at the end, which made me jump. I thought it was handled very well.
I’m glad others have raised the issues about you giving Paris a hard time for his choices, I’ve seen the paragraph you’ve added so fair enough.
One thing that really bugged me about this episode, though, is that it must have been one hell of a mind-meld to give B’Elanna Pon Farr. Wouldn’t there need to be SOME biological compatibility for this to be even feasible??
@14 – yes, agreed, what Vorik did gets blipped over which is annoying. Whatever the excuse, that’s assault and I’m sure there are strict laws for Vulcans governing the issue of consent when mind-melding. Indeed, the whole Spock/Valeris scene in ST:VI drew a lot of ire for exactly this reason.
glasself: that doesn’t answer my question. I know that the Intrepid was staffed entirely by Vulcans. But jay042’s statement was that most of all the Vulcans in Starfleet served on that ship, and I see no evidence to support that.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Garreth, don’t be too sure B’Elanna would have been all right with it afterward. Rationally she might know he saved her life but emotionally? At the very least she’d be creeped out and want to keep far away from him. And he’d probably be creeped out too. B’Elanna is a fellow officer, a friend and a woman he finds attractive having sex with her while she’s literally possessed would poison all that for him too. IMO both would need counseling afterward to deal with feelings of violation and guilt on both sides!
Garreth, don’t be too sure B’Elanna would have been all right with it afterward. Rationally she might know he saved her life but emotionally? At the very least she’d be creeped out and want to keep far away from him. And he’d probably be creeped out too. B’Elanna is a fellow officer, a friend and a woman he finds attractive having sex with her while she’s literally possessed would poison all that for him too. IMO both would need counseling afterward to deal with feelings of violation and guilt on both sides!
I’m on the bandwagon of thinking Paris did the right thing. Not only is it dubious as to if she can give consent or not, but for all his bravado, Paris *genuinely* likes Torres, and he is right that she would likely hate (or at least be extremely awkward around him) after if they had sex under these circumstances. B’Elanna has some issues with trusting and getting close to people to begin with, and isn’t always inclined to think the best of Tom in particular. He’s probably right in thinking that something like this would kill whatever chance he had of having an actual relationship with her. I think McNeil plays this really well, showing us a Paris who is genuinely upset at the idea of getting what he wants in the worst possible way. He also makes clear that, if it is between her dying and them having sex, he’ll do it, but he tries his best to make sure they take every other option available to them, first.
I like that this episode didn’t take the easy way out when it came to pon farr by making it a Tuvok story, but I do like that it was addressed, as this is something that Vulcans stranded 70 years from home really would have to deal with. Although at least 1 future episode features a female Vulcan (who is credited as such), so it makes you wonder why Vorik and her didn’t get together.
I knew I liked this one for a reason!
Also, re: the holocharacter not working, it has been stated before that mental intimacy is as important to Vulcans as the physical act, so I image a holocharacter wouldn’t work for that, even if it could work for the physical needs.
The consent issue raised is a good one. It entered my mind as I watched the episode. Since Torres was not in her right mind and couldn’t consent, I view it as a life-saving procedure. In the medical field, at least in America that I know of, there is a concept called implied consent in regards to life saving medical care of an unconscious/impaired person. Basically, medical care can be applied to save someone’s life if that person is not conscious/lucid enough to give their consent. I’m 99% sure a lucid Torres would consent retroactively for Tom to have sex with her if she was about to die. But hat tip to the writers for having Tom refuse until it became imperative.
Whether intentional or not and despite it revolving around pon farr, this is not an episode about sex, but about consent featuring 3 people (Paris, Torres and Vorik) put into a situation where none of them could give true consent for various reasons. Maybe the ep ended up with no sex because of ’90s and/or American hang ups, but for me, ending with Torres gaining back her ability to make a choice and choosing to kick the crap out of Vorik was very satisfying.
And considering how uncomfortable Paris & Torres where in the final scene without having sex, I’m not so sure she would have been ‘it’s cool, it’s cool’ if they did while she was impaired.
I’m also definitely on the side of Tom did the right thing by not having sex with Torres when she clearly was impaired and not really able to consent, and I’m also okay with him being willing to have sex with her when it was clear that it was necessary to save her life.
I appreciate your rethinking the consent issue and adding that paragraph @krad, but I’m still kind of baffled, and bothered, by the way you framed the discussion about Paris’ refusal to have sex with Torres as being dated and “puritanical.” I see it as being very progressive, both for Star Trek and for the 1990s. People having sex under any chemical or alien influence, body swapping episodes that include sex, any “mate or die” type trope, these are all horribly problematic in terms of consent, often casually violating the characters in so many ways, and to my mind are actually more a result of an overly puritanical culture, setting up scenarios where characters have sex without allowing the characters to be honestly sexual and freely able to choose to have (or not have) sex without being “bad” people.
I just think that this episode actually did a pretty good job of considering consent, and Star Trek historically was not always so good at that.
@14/Eduardo: While it’s true that Vorik essentially assaulted Torres, he wasn’t really in his right mind when he did it. He was overwhelmed with intense drives he’d never experienced before and couldn’t control. That doesn’t excuse what he did, of course, but altered mental states have often been a get-out-of-consequences card for Trek characters who do bad things, e.g. Data hijacking the Enterprise.
@19/garreth: “I thought Borg corpses disintegrate when they die?”
Not automatically. What we saw in “Q Who” was fallen Borg drones having components salvaged by other drones and then dematerializing. I always figured the other drones were triggering that, perhaps beaming their bodies back for recycling.
@20/lesleyk: What Tuvok said was, “Even a brief moment of bonding may have been enough to disrupt her self-control, as the Pon farr does in us. In a half-Klingon, the effects may be even more extreme.” So it wasn’t actual pon farr, it was a state of intensified arousal and loss of impulse control analogous to pon farr. Note that the mating instincts she acted on were Klingon in nature, i.e. biting Paris.
@21 KRAD,
The impression that I always got from TOS was that TOS-era Star Fleet had a NATO-like structure. There’s a unified high command, but Star Fleet is organized along “national” lines. Hence,there are separate Vulcan, Andorian, and Human divisions. Spock’s presence on the ENTERPRISE can be explained as some kind of dual-citizenship thing (Earthling mother, Vulcan father).
Love the reviews. I know you’ve already added an extra paragraph but I just had to swing by to join the chorus of people saying that Tom was definitely in the right to refuse as long as possible – I haven’t seen the episode recently, but the way I remember it, she was definitely in no mental state to make any kind of informed choice, even if everyone involved viewed the whole thing as a life-saving medical procedure.
It’s a great episode for Tom because it really goes a long way to redeeming a lot of his earlier skeeviness, and makes him a very, very unexpected role model by the standards of 90s TV. One of McNeill’s best performances too, and I think he’s underrated on Voyager in general.
Lynn: You’re right, and that was a really bad choice of words. However, I fucked up, and I should own it, so I’m not going to edit the post beyond the paragraph I added at the end.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I agree that this turns out to be an example of restraint due to lack of informed consent, though I think the storytelling reasoning behind Paris’s refusal was to establish UST between the characters. It’s not the best will they/won’t they relationship I’ve ever seen (for me, that honor will always go to Lee Adama/Kara Thrace on BSG, and I’m still angry about how that ended so don’t get me started). But the actors’ chemistry is decent here and I didn’t hate it, which I sometimes can with UST.
“I’m your friend. That means it’s my job to look out for you when your judgement’s impaired.”
Hmm. I must admit some elements of this episode are extremely problematic and were so at the time. Whilst I find it reductive to view everything in human terms as some analyses of the episode have done (painting Vorik as a rapist and the Doctor as a pimp), the characters do seem to get humiliated for no good reason other than titilation. Paris does his best to be the better person in all this (and I agree with everyone who’s said that he was right to not just say “Yeah, let’s go” straightaway), but the result is Torres reduced to begging him for sex and then Tuvok pretty much orders him to give her a good seeing to. Given that the show was obviously planning to pair them up by this point, this seems a pretty big hurdle for them to get over, although to be fair that final turbolift scene does do a good job of portraying the relationship with tenderness and humour.
(Notable too that no-one suggests Chakotay step up. I guess that scene from “Persistance of Vision” has been well and truly put it in the Pretend It Never Happened file by now.)
The crew are torn between respecting Vulcan traditions and trying not to get anyone killed unnecessarily, with the Doctor well and truly having his hands tied. Even Tuvok can’t offer a better solution. At least it seems the Vulcan ritual combat isn’t to the death anymore. (And I agree that it’s nice the episode finally explains the pat ending to “Amok Time”.) It’s long been a problem with Star Trek that the Federation is so technically advanced that several situations should have been resolved in about five seconds. There are ways to work around this successfully. Having Vorik turn up for the climax and announce he’s disabled Voyager’s communications, transporter and shuttles off screen (while still somehow managing to get to the surface himself) feels like someone isn’t taking it seriously.
First of three appearances by Ensign Lang, manning Ops in this episode. (Her most prominent appearance is in “Displaced” later in the season.) It’s nice to see Starfleet officers having a tailor-made uniform for a job rather than wearing the same duty uniforms for everything. And then there’s that ending, signalling the start of the closest thing this season’s got to a story arc. Even though I knew what the next episode was, I had no idea it was coming when I first watched this…
The pedant in me feels obliged to point out that at no point is what Vorik did to Torres called a mind meld. Tuvok refers to it as a “telepathic mating bond”. Possibly that’s just a type of mind meld but…
@33/cap-mjb: Nobody here has called Vorik a “rapist.” We’ve simply pointed out, correctly, that he forced the telepathic contact on Torres without her consent. There are many levels of consent violation short of rape.
@24/wildfyrewarning: Maybe Vaurik didn’t get together with the female Vulcan because she is a lesbian or maybe simply has no attraction to him. So regardless she won’t consent to mating even if they are both opposite sex Vulcans.
@22/princessroxanna: I didn’t mean to imply that Torres would feel 100% fine with the fact she hooked up with Paris while she was under some alien influence beyond her control. What I’m saying is hypothetically post-sex act with him she would on an intellectual level know he did it to save her life. However, that in no way would negate the probable uncomfortable and awkward feelings she would have for him and being around him after that. So again, I thought the writing for Tom’s character was great in that it shows his intentions were always honorable and he wasn’t just jumping to get into B’Elanna’s pants.
Whilst I agree completely on the consent issue and the problems that Paris faces re saving a life or functional rape.
However, are we sure he was completely non-self-interested? We’ve seen the damage Klingon mating can do to each other Klingons and non-Klingons (mainly from DS9).
What sort of damage would B’Elanna do to him in a state of pon farr? Penile fracture could be the least of his problems!
@34/CLB: Apologies if I didn’t make myself clear. I meant that it was a view I’d seen expressed elsewhere. If you want me to name names, selection of the review from unofficial guidebook Delta Quadrant: “The most offensive episode ever…nothing is made of the fact that Vorik did the Vulcan equivalent of starting to rape B’Elanna (and he tries the human version later) with no comebacks whatsoever. The verdict seems to be that in the twenty-fourth century it’s OK to rape someone who turns you down, and try to beat her to death if you’re too horny to control yourself!”
That struck me as incredibly reductive and I’m glad to see that no-one on here has been that myopic about it.
@37/cap-mjb: Well, to be fair, “the Vulcan equivalent of starting to rape B’Elanna” sounds accurate to me. It seemed as if he would have continued the mating act if she hadn’t stopped him. So that part is valid even though the rest is not. It’s tantamount to, say, a drunk teenager trying to force himself on his date and getting punched out for it. It is attempted rape, but it doesn’t succeed, so the teenager hasn’t become a rapist. He might sincerely regret his attempt afterward, as Vorik certainly did.
Of course, the folly of those arguments you quote is that they’re ignoring that different species have different biology, so a story about Vulcan mating compulsions isn’t saying anything about human standards of behavior. Really, the whole idea of “Amok Time” is that the pon farr is an instinctual madness the Vulcans can’t help but endure no matter how much they hate it, how much it goes against their values the rest of the time. You could probably liken it to a form of schizophrenia, a behavioral change beyond the subject’s control, except that it’s normative for the species.
Just remembered a thought I had watching the episode. Does anyone else think Vorik’s eyebrows are too over-the-top? I mean, I know Vulcans have the diagonal eyebrows, but for some reason his seem raised way more than other Vulcans…I don’t know, I just found it very distracting.
I think it unconscionable and irresponsible that Tuvok as the senior Vulcan Officer on board and Chief of security yet! does not have a plan in place to deal with the inevitable seven year cycle without disrupting the whole ship and endangering crew.
I also think that given the Pon Farr is hormonal in nature a medical treatment should be possible.
I realize that the seven year cycle is an incredibly sensitive subject, and probably wrapped up in all kinds of dysfunctional superstitions and false information given the secrecy around it, but these people are supposed to be logical!
@39/Austin: I never really noticed Vorik’s eyebrows being so diagonal before and comparing them against Tuvok they are more angled for sure, but I can’t say it bothered me. I’ve actually always found Tuvok’s hairline to be a bit extreme. I know Tim Russ purposely did it that way to make it more Vulcan-like and the shape does make it one smooth line all the way down to his sideburns. But I still find it distracting because the hairline is still a bit far up compared to the lower hairline bowl-style of all other Vulcans.
@40/roxana: “Supposed to be logical” is the key. Logic is their ideal; that doesn’t mean they achieve it. I mean, Christians are supposed to love their neighbors, be humble, and take care of the poor, but you’d never know it from looking at the American religious right.
@39 – It’s not only hormonal but also psionic. Sure, you could probably come up with a treatment for it but you’re also dealing with the brain as well as the hormonal system.
SPOCK: The birds and the bees are not Vulcans, Captain. If they were, if any creature as proudly logical as us were to have their logic ripped from them as this time does to us. How do Vulcans choose their mates? Haven’t you wondered?
KIRK: I guess the rest of us assume that it’s done quite logically.
SPOCK: No. No. It is not. We shield it with ritual and customs shrouded in antiquity. You humans have no conception. It strips our minds from us. It brings a madness which rips away our veneer of civilisation. It is the pon farr. The time of mating. There are precedents in nature, Captain. The giant eelbirds of Regulus Five, once each eleven years they must return to the caverns where they hatched. On your Earth, the salmon. They must return to that one stream where they were born, to spawn or die in trying.
KIRK: But you’re not a fish, Mister Spock. You’re
SPOCK: No. Nor am I a man. I’m a Vulcan.
Based on what Spock is saying about “We shield it with ritual and customs shrouded in antiquity.”, it appears that it predates the Vulcan adoption of logic. Rather, logic seems to be at least part of a response to the mating drive.
I assumed that since Vulcan’s are telepathic, and connecting this way seems to be part of the Pon-Farr, that that’s why the holographic blow up doll didn’t work for Vorik.
@42,CLB, Oh yeah! As I’ve said before Vulcans aren’t logical they’re just terribly good at rationalizing their emotional biases. However it is painful to see that their supposed commitment to logic folds under pressure and they can’t even see it! Avoidance and denial seems to be the only way they can deal with their sexuality. No matter how much that head in the sand attitude endangers themselves and others
@44, Ben, the problem is the holodeck did work Tuvok later on. Possibly because his ‘blow up doll’ was based on his wife with whom he had a deep bond and was thus able to project somehow a shadow of their usual union? T’Pel was a presence in his mind though she was so far away. Vorik had no bondmate and was alone in his head.
FWIW the name Droxine always sounded to me like the name of an over-the-counter nasal decongestant or some kind of eye drops.
@45 Tuvok is also a lot older, has experienced pon farr before, and seems to have a lot more self control than Vorik does. Paired with Tuvok’s loyalty to his wife, I imagine the hologram and some very intense meditation were far more effective for him than it ever would have been for the younger, more inexperienced, less mature Vorik, who has no mate waiting for him at home, and who has a seemingly genuine crush on B’Elanna that likely made taking the Vulcan equivalent of a cold shower a much less appealing option.
First of all, let me express my agreement with those who pointed out how badly UPN handled the commercials for episodes. They really dropped the ball on this one in particular, not only revealing the ending but misleading viewers as to what the actual plot was all about. I still remember when it first aired I felt impatient throughout the episode, wondering, “When are the Borg going to show up?” In retrospect that last scene plays much better if you go into the episode with no expectations.
Otherwise, “Blood Fever” is a reasonably enjoyable episode, building up on what “Amok Time” established. I do think it stands to reason that since then, the Vulcans having established contact with more and more races, the secret of pon farr would inevitably be revealed to the larger galaxy whether they like it or not. Surely there are at least some who would agree with the Doctor’s statement that it’s foolish and illogical to impose such a rigid taboo on a simple fact of biology? I’d like to see this explored in a future episode. (I also recall that there was an excellent article in one of these Best of Trek books which explored the larger implications of the events of “Amok Time.”)
I also agree that as regards Paris and Torres, the situation was morally ambiguous, and that Paris ultimately made the correct choice in not giving in unless there was absolutely no alternative. Otherwise I have little to add on this.
This is the first of two Voyager episodes directed by Andrew Robinson. I realize this is rather off-topic, but has anyone else here watched the horror film Hellraiser for the first time and had difficulty separating Larry/Frank Cotton from Elim Garak? At least for me it was a weird experience when he first appeared onscreen. (And what happens to him at the end would absolutely not be approved for any Star Trek production!)
I appreciate the added paragraph as well, because when reading the rewatch I thought you weren’t being fair to Paris, and you still don’t give him credit for being willing to do it after Tuvok tells him to (before they are interrupted by Vorik), although you do acknowledge that it happened in the recap.
CLB, I said to the screen while watching, “But the fight has to be to the death!” so you’re not the only one. And since the holo solution works for Tuvok later, I just assumed that Vorik didn’t even try it, and just said he’d consider it to get the Doctor off his back.
I don’t have much more to say about this episode that hasn’t already been discussed. I think Paris made a good decision, the Borg corpse is cool, and UPN’s promos sucked! I specifically remember the promo for Death Wish back in the day. It seemed to suggest Janeway and Riker had a past, but in reality there was nothing of the sort suggested in the aired episode…
@39/Austin: I actually thought Vorik’s eyebrows looked cool, but beyond that, it didn’t distract me. I just figured that was simply the way they were for him in universe.
@41/garreth: I always really liked Tuvok’s hairline. Similar to Vorik’s eyebrows, I thought it looked cool.
@46/owlly72: Haha, you know, it does sound like some kind of nasal spray or eyedrops!
I recall being surprised at the end the first time I watched this episode. Obviously, I dodged the preview commercials.
On rewatch I appreciate the clues regarding the nature of the invaders. The invasion was over in less than an hour, and the Sakari were particularly interested in Tuvok’s elbow, which we find out is an artificial replacement.
The pon farr is steeped in ritual and tradition. Of course the fight in Amok Time had to be to the death – nobody had yet proven otherwise. In this episode, we have the fight stripped of its ritual trappings, with nobody telling the participants that the fight had to be to the death, and Vorik was actually fighting his psychically bonded mate rather than a champion. Either or both may be enough to make the difference.
@51/lerris: “Of course the fight in Amok Time had to be to the death – nobody had yet proven otherwise.”
That’s a huge assumption. In thousands of years, for much of which the battles to the death were a routine practice, there was never an exception to the normal outcome? Never a time when something interrupted the ritual before the fatal blow, or where both parties were too injured to keep fighting but still alive, or whatever? That’s vanishingly improbable.
For that matter, post-Surak once Vulcans embraced pacifism, there must have been attempts to abandon the fights to the death, to find a nonlethal alternative. It’s contradictory to think they wouldn’t have tried. The only reason a society of pacifists — let alone a society of rationalists who would never accept an unquestioned assumption without testing it — would’ve kept a lethal ritual is if they’d tried and failed to find another option.
Pon Farr’s first symptom was first described as a neurochemical imbalance, one that would turn lethal. It isn’t a stretch that Vorik simply triggered that imbalance in Torres via a screwy incomplete mind meld. Something Enterprise took and ran with later.
@52/ChristopherLBennett, I’ve always imagined that the Vulcans have tried everything they could to suppress and eliminate Pon Farr, but everything always catastrophically failed. No medicines, no ritual exercises.Drugs that try to rebalance the hormonal load end up being fatal or making it worse, an implant to force the body into compliance ends up making that Vulcan sterile. Emotional control through logic just makes the effects more intense (I base that on McCoy’s speculation that it’s the price they pay for being emotionless normally).
It’s entirely possible that in the ancient times the Pon Farr was much worse, rather than an organized one on one, groups of males fighting to the death until only one man was left standing, the female not having any choice in the matter once all was said and done. Things that were organized and codified to avoid a senseless loss of life. So instead of any Schmock stepping in to try and take a bride, there’s the prearranged groom and bride and if she disapproves she can select one challenger and win or lose she abides by the decision.
I’m also curious how Romulans handle it. Is it lessened by their emotional freedom? Did Romulans just evolve for societal sexual freedom and people take whatever partner is available and then get on with their lives?
@53/Mr. D: “I’ve always imagined that the Vulcans have tried everything they could to suppress and eliminate Pon Farr, but everything always catastrophically failed.”
Yes, exactly. That’s why it feels like such a cheat here that Vorik is able to survive it without anyone dying (or at least without him thinking he’s killed someone, as Spock did — I assume it’s the emotional release of killing that “consummates” the experience and tames the blood fever). If that were possible, then the Vulcans would’ve found out long ago and dropped the whole “fight to the death” angle from the ritual.
@54/ChristopherLBennett
There’s also the option of extreme meditation, which to me seems like something that would involve extensive deep meditation fasting, something that forces the body into a life or death situation on its own and would require intense suffering almost like a Klingon Ritual to trick the body into the same kind of near death survival situation-release that the normal combat would trigger.
Or conversely such complete mastery of mind and body that it’s something only Kolinahr masters can achieve.
In any event, it’s NOT actually something Vorik should be capable of.
Perhaps a battle with the aliens who were hiding on the planet would’ve had a fatal outcome breaking the Plak Tow and then the Doctor saves the life of the alien that died or Vorik. Or not, Vorik kills the alien and that’s another obstacle to peace between the survivors and the crew.
On the subject of the “Can’t we reverse the Polarity“, Spock did order the course change of the Enterprise without remembering it. I think Pon Farr gives err in the words of Bullet Tooth Tony, “Drive and Clarity of Vision” but I don’t think it actually removes cleverness. A Vulcan in this state would had focus on their goal and likely able to accomplish a great many things in pursuit of that goal.
55/Mr. D: I’m reminded of TNG’s “Code of Honor,” which for all its deep, deep problems of racial stereotyping and generally cliched storytelling, did have one pretty good idea that fell by the wayside in later Trek: The premise that 24th-century medical science makes death reversible if it’s caught promptly enough. In that one, they fulfilled the legal requirement of the “fight to the death” but were then able to revive the woman who died, so they followed the letter of the law without permanent harm. (Whereas later on they too often fell back on the lazy TV approach to death where the doctor takes one look at someone and writes them off as dead without any attempt at revival whatsoever.) It seems to me that that would be the key to a pon farr situation — let the person in plak tow experience the release of the sensation of killing someone, then revive the victim. It could become a pretty routine thing (in a sense, since of course the fights to the death are themselves very rare exceptions).
But I guess Trek writers were reluctant to do anything that would remind people of “Code of Honor.”
@56/CLB: Sorry, my intent is not to alter what you said, only pare it down for my comment.
I always found that annoying as hell when they didn’t even try. I think as much as it may have been a way to forget “Code of Honor”, perhaps they also realized that they opened a pandora’s box with that concept. However, I must say that I’m glad for one instance of the idea. For as bad a reputation as “Skin of Evil” had, the scene where they attempted and failed to revive Tasha Yar was one of my favorite scenes in all of Trek. Picard’s shocked reaction to what he knew deep down, was inevitable, was just so well acted by Sir Patrick Stewart. And I just realized now, ironically, both those scenes involved Yar…
Antother silly thing they did in an episode of DS9, “The Passenger”, was to have Bashir state that tricorders were good for scanning living lifeforms, but not so accurate in determining that someone is dead… This was a point that was never shown or mentioned ever again. It could have been fixed with one little adjustment: Just say that standard tricorders aren’t accurate in that area, which is why medical tricorders exist, but alas…
@57/Thierafhal: “perhaps they also realized that they opened a pandora’s box with that concept.”
It’s much less of one than the transporter, say. It’s just good futurism. Heck, even today, doctors don’t just look at someone without a pulse and say “He’s dead, Jim.” They start CPR and lifesaving measures and get them on a respirator or whatever. They recognize that it is often possible to revive someone even several minutes after clinical death, so they try their best before calling it. The way it was depicted in “Code of Honor” and “Skin of Evil” was actually more realistic by present-day standards than the one-scan-and-give-up approach too often used as a dramatic shortcut on TV. It’s nothing to do with a “Pandora’s Box,” it’s just not wanting to go to the trouble of showing lifesaving measures (even realistic present-day ones) when a death is just a plot device to deal with and move on to the next bit. It’s a symptom of how casually Trek and other shows tended to treat death — although one of the few things that Enterprise did better than other Trek shows was that it didn’t trivialize crew death, only using it when it mattered and giving it the weight it deserved.
Vulcans adherence to “logic,” is not logic as we know it; it is closer to what we would philosophically call stoicism. Being unwilling to show emotions and actively suppressing them, when they are natural and normal, even under the guise of “They are too intense,” is itself illogical.
@59 I disagree that it’s suppression of emotions. I like Diane Duane’s take it on in “Spock’s World” where it’s noted that it’s “mastery of emotions” rather than suppression. And in fact there will be a superb description of what it is to be Vulcan (one of the best Trek speeches) later in Voyager’s run, in Season 6’s “The Muse”.
Throwing in my very long two cents on this episode’s portrayal of pon farr: I think people are giving the Vulcans too much credit. Just because they act as though they’re the cleverest people in the room doesn’t mean that they are. And just because we all love Spock doesn’t mean he’s representative of Vulcans: He seems to be something of a rebel. Even in TOS and TAS, there’s indications that Vulcans are close-minded and bigoted. What we’ve see of their recentish history in Enterprise, Discovery and the Abramsverse movies is even less flattering. These are a people who 200 years previous saw those who practised mind-melds as deviants barred from certain occupations and made no attempt to save those who suffered brain damage as a result even though there was a known cure. Who 100 years previous viewed humans as automatically inferior: Not just the extremists who bombed a school with a human student but the board of the Vulcan Science Academy who looked down on mixed race or foreign applicants.
T’Pau describes the koon-ut-kal-if-fee with “What they are about to see comes down from the time of the beginning, without change.” This does not sound like something Vulcans have tried desperately to find an alternative to. This sounds like something that Surak came up with thousands of years earlier and which they consider a sacred ritual which is the right thing to do because they’ve always done it, when in fact it’s about as sophisticated as dunking witches.
Don’t forget, it’s only in this episode that the ritual combat is presented as an alternative to mating. “Amok Time” presents it as something Spock has to go through to claim his mate. His recovery afterwards without going through the mating bond seems to be as much a surprise to him as it is to everyone else. Vulcans don’t talk about the pon farr. They don’t sit around swapping stories about how their koon-ut-kal-if-fee went. It doesn’t seem at all impossible to me that, certainly at that time, even they don’t really understand how the pon farr works. That they even wouldn’t tell anyone if someone survived the ritual combat, because that’s not how the rituals work.
So, yes, I can well believe that in the century between the two episodes a more enlightened generation sat down and examined these rituals that everyone had followed without question for years, and found out that combat didn’t actually have to be to the death, or started inoculating babies with a vaccine that meant the plak-tow wasn’t as strong as it had been a century earlier and didn’t need bloodletting to resolve.
Do I think it’s a cheat to have Torres and Vorik recover just by hitting each other a few times? Absolutely. But no more so than having Spock recover when he thinks he’s killed Kirk when his dilemma has been presented as having to mate or die. It’s just we’ve had an extra thirty years to accept that as normal.
@61/cap-mjb: “Don’t forget, it’s only in this episode that the ritual combat is presented as an alternative to mating. “Amok Time” presents it as something Spock has to go through to claim his mate.”
No, it isn’t. It only happens because T’Pring challenges. Koon ut kal-if-fee means “marriage or challenge,” and T’Pring chose kal-if-fee, challenge, instead of koon, marriage. The crowd was rather surprised when she called out the challenge, so it’s clearly not typical.
http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/34.htm
@62: Okay, possibly poor phrasing on my part. I didn’t mean it was presented as something Vulcans always have to do to claim a mate, just that that was the outcome for the victor.
T’PAU: He will have to fight for her. It is her right. T’Pring, thee have chosen kal-if-fee, the challenge. Thee are prepared to become the property of the victor?
@63/cap-mjb: But “Amok Time” did present it as an alternative to mating, in practice if not in policy, because it did cure Spock’s pon farr. Presumably the same happens in every case where a Vulcan in pon farr kills an opponent. I never got the sense that anyone was surprised by his recovery. His own shock wasn’t “OMG I inexplicably recovered from my mating drive, how odd,” it was “OMG I murdered my best friend, how horrible.”
@64/CLB: In practise, I’ll give you, but as you say there was more to it than just killing an opponent. Spock’s actual explanation at the end is “Ah yes. The girl. Most interesting. It must have been the combat. When I thought I had killed the captain, I found I had lost interest in T’Pring. The madness was gone.” Which heavily implies that he didn’t know the combat would end the mating urge, and could be interpreted as meaning it was the shock at apparently killing a friend, rather than the act of killing anyone, that brought him out of it.
@65/cap-mjb: It’s one thing for Spock to be surprised by it. Vulcans are evasive about all this stuff in general, and a kal-if-fee situation is rare in modern times, so it’s understandable that he wouldn’t know the detials of what happens in such a situation. But it does not remotely make sense to assume from that single example that no Vulcan over thousands and thousands of years has ever had that same experience. I mean, come on, what are the odds that no Vulcan in the entire history of the planet ever fought a friend or loved one? Surely that would have been quite commonplace in pre-Surak times. Friends travel in the same social circles, and thus the odds of two friends competing for the same love interest would be quite high. And in the small communities that would have been common in pre-industrial or pre-urban times, it would’ve been even more likely that one’s competitors for a mate would be friends, cousins, possibly even siblings. It is just completely absurd to assume that Spock’s experience is the first one of its kind in all of history. Vulcans would already know it worked this way. They couldn’t not know it.
Female ferrets mate or die. Aliens may have biological drives that trouble us. Vulcans… are fictional, so responsibility does exist for what they do when they can’t not do it, because really a writer is making this happen. So I don’t blame Vorik, I suppose I blame Gene Roddenberry?
I think Trek novel “The Wounded Sky” mentions in back story a loving couple who decide together to have a fully traditional marriage, in that it ends with the wife eating the husband, they being spiders of hobbit-bothering size. She misses him.
Robert: Technically, you should blame Theodore Sturgeon…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@66/CLB: Well, I guess my response to that is…which Vulcans are you talking about? If we accept Spock didn’t know, then that means it’s not common knowledge. And just because some Vulcan thousands of years earlier did the same thing, that doesn’t mean that every subsequent Vulcan would know about it. And just because some Vulcans in a small village found out, that doesn’t mean the rest of the planet would know. And just because with modern Vulcans the emotional shock of killing someone is enough to bring them out of plak-tow, that doesn’t mean the same was the case with the more savage pre-Surak types to whom such emotions wouldn’t have been as alien.
@69/cap-mjb: “Well, I guess my response to that is…which Vulcans are you talking about? If we accept Spock didn’t know, then that means it’s not common knowledge.”
I’m talking about Vulcan medical practitioners and biologists, which Spock is not. Obviously the medical community would have information about this even if your average prudish layperson has never learned it, just like there’s a ton of stuff that doctors and biologists know about human sexuality that most Americans are clueless of because our prudish society keeps us from studying it. You’re trying to extrapolate a universal lack of expert knowledge from a single layperson’s lack of knowledge (and yes, Spock is a layperson when it comes to medicine), which makes absolutely no sense.
I wonder how the Federation feels about married Vulcan women being property of their husbands?
T’PAU: He will have to fight for her. It is her right. T’Pring, thee has chosen the kal-if-fee, the challenge. Thee are prepared to become the property of the victor?
T’PRING: I am prepared.
@70/CLB: Okay, so what do you think these theoretical Vulcan medical practitioners and biologists have done with their information? Nothing medical or biological, since the only “treatments” for pon farr are to have sex, beat someone up (possibly to death) or sit in a room alone and takes lots of deep breaths. Pon farr is shrouded in mysticism and ritual with very little sign of scientific analysis. Tuvok, another medical layman, states here that “It cannot be analysed by the rational mind or cured by conventional medicine.” This sounds less like a scientific statement and more like an unquestioned cultural choice. It seems culturally blind to just assume that Vulcans will behave exactly the same as 21st century Americans with regards their approach to sex as a biological function.
@72/cap-mjb: ” It seems culturally blind to just assume that Vulcans will behave exactly the same as 21st century Americans with regards their approach to sex as a biological function.”
Don’t blame me, blame the onscreen episodes that explicitly show the Vulcans behaving exactly that way!! Good grief, Keith directly quoted the part in this episode where the Doctor chided Tuvok for that very irrationality.
@73/CLB: “Don’t blame me, blame the onscreen episodes that explicitly show the Vulcans behaving exactly that way!! Good grief, Keith directly quoted the part in this episode where the Doctor chided Tuvok for that very irrationality.”
That’s not what he says at all. He doesn’t say Vulcan attitude to sex is in line with the 21st or even late 20th century of westernise humans, he says it’s the equivalent of 19th century puritans. It’s not that there’s doctors and scientist who know everything about Vulcan sexuality but don’t go spreading it around. It’s that no-one ever looks into it because it’s a cultural taboo. The Doctor even says that the only medical information on the pon farr is from observations by non-Vulcan doctors.
And I can’t help thinking we’ve gone off at a tangent and started arguing about minutae. So to go back to my original point:
1. T’Pau says the koon-ut-kal-if-fee has been unchanged since “the beginning”. Therefore, it has not been tweaked and revised over the centuries as knowledge and scientific understanding has developed.
2. Spock is surprised when the plak-tow ends when he thinks he’s killed Kirk. Therefore, the ritual combat is not a universally recognised way of resolving pon farr, not even informally.
@74/cap-mjb: “He doesn’t say Vulcan attitude to sex is in line with the 21st or even late 20th century of westernise humans, he says it’s the equivalent of 19th century puritans.”
Oh, good grief, don’t take an analogy so literally. I wasn’t saying it was exactly the same, I was saying that our situation is an example of the broader principle of laypeople’s prudishness making them unaware of things that are known to medical experts.
To point 1, what T’Pau said was a ritual assertion for a ceremony. It’s preposterous to mistake such a thing for an undisputable historical or scientific fact. To point 2, as I’ve already said, it’s blatantly ludicrous to mistake one person’s lack of knowledge of a subject for the entire civilization’s absolute lack of knowledge.
@75/CLB: Well, that’s your opinion. Some of us might think it’s ludicrous to repeatedly ignore on screen evidence and dialogue in favour of making Vulcans as much like us as possible.
@76/mjb: I can’t help but think one person saying that is pretty weak evidence though. Think about how many anti-gay-marriage demonstrators insisted that marriage had remained unchanged for [2000 years/forever] (delete depending on the person).
Or how many people in recent years are complaining about various states allowing things like X gender markers, Mx titles, etc on their various official forms and databases? They claim that our conception of gender is unchanging and 100% based on biology and that we’ve basically known this forever. Which is also painfully untrue, which looking back a few hundred years within our own societies easily disproves.
My own experience growing up and attending Church of England churches had a heck of a lot of “passed down to us by God directly through the hands of Jesus unto us via the Bible”-type talk, about various practices which are demonstrably far more modern.
She’s a Vulcan priestess. Very high ranking. She even turned down a Federation Council position, which one could wonder if she thinks poorly of that institution compared to her own. Of course she’d say the ritual words which assert their ritual is the pure, correct, accurate way of doing it!
Given no one else in the show discusses exactly how old, or accurate, or flexible, these things really are, then at best we can say that they are allegedly unchanged. Accepting that the lines we saw people speak were their characters genuine reactions is one thing, but we don’t immediately treat every person in real life as an expert on everything they talk about.
So, as amateur historians of this fictional future, the best we can say is that one person asserted this. Out of universe, we can surmise the author intended this to be accurate. But Star Trek is a lot bigger now than it was then, especially with things like Enterprise saying the government covered up the true words of Surak for many generations.
The implications there are enormous. Whether the rituals came from Surak or from before his time (and were consequently the sole element to survive the cultural transition); one has to wonder if that Vulcan regime messed with the Pon-farr at all. Surely they hid that it can be transmitted telepathically, that the bond was on a telepathic level as well – they were ideologically opposed to telepathy and treated it as a disease! That had to have had implications for the way Pon-farr was treated as well?
Thus, with very sparse detail around the subject despite the time spent on it over the decades, and implications that make certain assertions in the original series dubious, we have to overcome this tension by a number of ways. We can contort events so that anyone speaking is always correct, or we can decide that some characters were inaccurate narrators to one degree or another.
T’Pau’s status make her an obvious, dare I say logical, contender for being an unreliable source in this matter. Especially since Vulcans aren’t meant to talk about it – how can anyone involved know they have the whole picture, or that every aspect is accurate, if the conversations are anything like as stilted and awkward as Tuvok and Vorik’s in this episode?
So I don’t really think it has anything to do with wanting to make Vulcans more human, in this case anyway.
@77/kaitlyn: I get that the Church of England includes phrases from the Bible in services which have been modernised and translated into English, and presents things like Communion as “This is what Jesus told us to.” But I don’t think anyone really pretends that we didn’t break away from the Catholic Church in the 16th century with a corresponding revision of services, and Common Worship still has Copyright 2000 written on it.
And I do also take the point that one person’s word isn’t firm evidence, but I also don’t think we should automatically believe the opposite just because it seems more likely. Ironically, Enterprise also depicts T’Pau as one of the biggest opponents of the Vulcan government’s suppression of the truth about Surak: It would be curious (but far from impossible) for her to have become what she hated and started insisting that her way of doing things was how it had always been done.
Your penultimate paragraph seems to be making my point for me: Pon-farr is treated both as something that’s been couched in ritualism to make it more palatable and something intensely private that the individual is supposed to resolve without help. It’s not treated as something that undergoes rigorous scientific analysis on an ongoing basis, certainly not in T’Pau’s time and possibly not in the time period of this episode either. Which is why I’m reluctant to believe in a theoretical group of Vulcan doctors and scientists who know everything about pon-farr but don’t share it with laymen like Spock, Tuvok or T’Pau just because that’s the way our own society would handle it.
@77 – I didn’t get the feeling that T’Pau was a priestess. It doesn’t seem to be a religious ceremony. It is, however, so private that the participants friends are involved but not members of their families. The novels have postulated that T’Pau was the leader of Spock’s family but she could just as easily be a local official that’s in charge of weddings in the area.
@79/kkozoriz: That may have been at least partly because Spock was estranged from his father, as we learned later that season.
Imagining Spock’s wedding as the Vulcan equivalent of going to Las Vegas to be married by Elvis Presley… it would explain a lot. Such as his parents not attending. (If they even were on Vulcan at the time. Ambassadors spend most of their time in foreign places.) Are we looking there at Vulcan “culture” for tourists? Camping it up to score Federation credits seems pretty logical! They do say “Live long and PROSPER!”
Perhaps there is even NO SUCH THING as pon farr, it is all a big excuse??
@80 – We don’t see T’Pring’s parents either.
I don’t have the time to read through the 75 other thoughtful comments on this episode and its review, and based on the ETA it’s a dead horse, but … calling Paris as “puritanical schmuck” is mind-blowing to me. He saw the situation as equivalent to bedding a date who was two or three over the limit and wouldn’t be making the same decisions sober – and I was proud of him. He wasn’t right, as it turned out, but all he’d had was what had to be a pretty quick rundown of the situation before all communication with anyone who knew better was severed, and he did his best to be a good and decent human being. Neither puritanical, nor schmucky.
I remember liking this episode.
I understand that Vulcans are highly reserved people, but Tuvok’s attitude not helping the EMH and Vorik is quite unprofessional of him. There was a potential for Vorik to become more violent, and Tuvok is the security chief.
The Vulcan version of happily married is “efficiently and logically married”.
@krad: Beyond all everybody has pointed out about consent, you regularly berate Paris for being skeevy, and now when he behaves unskeevy, you berate him too. :)
@11 – foamy: It would be three rapes, or at least abuses, because Vorik forced a mind meld on Torres.
@28 – Chris: “While it’s true that Vorik essentially assaulted Torres, he wasn’t really in his right mind when he did it. He was overwhelmed with intense drives he’d never experienced before and couldn’t control.”
That actually takes us to the point that the Vulcan government/culture is responsible for not dealing with this dangerous issue that afflicts their people, and that potentially means danger for other sentients around Vulcans, because they cannot count on being able to mate (much less mate with their designated spouse) when it hits, Much less if they’re Starfleet officers assigned to exploring ships, which you can never be sure where they will be at a given time.
@55 – Mr. D: RE: clarity, yeah, the Vulcan mind can compartmentalize and do Savant-style stuff while still being incredibly, mortally horny.
@5 Everyone on Deck 9, section 12 knows he made the right call.
Why wasn’t there a guard in Sickbay after Vorik assaulted Torres? I’m not sure Vorik was faking out the Doctor – a holographic Vulcan mate was insufficient and that’s why Vorik failed to overcome Pon Farr (Delta Quadrant, the reference guide to Voyager also referred to her as a blowup doll and the EMH as a pimp). Would Torres have been alright with Paris afterwards if he had consented sooner if she weren’t secretly attracted to him? And it’s no surprise that Blood Fever would prove to be a very divisive VGR episode.
5: “Forked up” – you must be a fan of The Good Place. 7: Were the Vulcans in The Immunity Syndrome Starfleet officers? 18: To some Vorik haters, he is a snot. 19: Taurik was the Vulcan Enberg played (identically to Vorik) in the TNG episode Lower Decks. 22-23: Deja vu. 24: S1 Tom would no doubt have given in to Torres from jump. 33: Remember what Tasha said to Data at the end of The Naked Now – “It never happened!” Do they get a pass because they were both impaired? Maybe Vorik programmed the transporters to crash after beaming down?
35: Then there’s The Disease but that was an illicit affair that was consensual but it could have killed both Kim and Tal. 49: Then why did Vorik’s condition almost normalise? 53: I don’t think Romulans are afflicted with the Pon Farr because they don’t suppress their emotions. 58: Both Code of Honour and Skin of Evil have a death scene on a transporter pad involving Tasha. 83: 82 other characters.
83: Sorry, I meant 82 other comments.
@83 I do find it interesting when someone leaves a comment about not having time for reading the comments, then commenting on something that was addressed in the comments. Probably because I often get smacked for it on Twitter myself.
I appreciate both Krad’s addendum and his choice to keep the original article intact, because I agree that it’s neither as cut and dried as he makes it out to be originally, nor as simple as those who consider it just a simple violation of consent. Early on, Tom is right to doubt B’elanna’s ability to consent because she doesn’t seem like she’s rational; later on with her life in danger, it really is like they have to hope she was giving her consent, because they can’t administer the only treatment they know works otherwise.
See, I’m reading this through the filter of my recent experience, because I don’t see it as a consent to sex, but a consent to treatment. Though I understand that it’s actually taken on the complexities of both. (My recent experience being, dealing with my dad having a brain tumor. Informed consent to treatment was and is a challenge.)
I still don’t know how to justify not realizing that a challenge need not be to the death, though. I feel like the implication of “Amok Time” was that no challenges had been made in the post Surak logical era, and that prior to Surak, the challenges went to the death because nobody cared to stop mid-challenge to find out. That just does not feel right to someone who’s read “Spock’s World”, though, which presented Surak’s Vulcan as a fairly civilized society. I know it’s not canon of course, and I missed out on Enterprise covering what Vulcan really was like, or if they went into detail.
I was so disappointed that Chakotay did NOTHING. Not to intervene, not to help B’elanna. I am also so proud of how far Tom Paris has come. Vulcans are strange people.
@88 – I’m so sorry, I neglected for the sake of the pedantic to be explicit: I did not have time to read ALL the other comments. I’m devastated to have harrowed up your soul with my lack of clarity. I find it interesting when someone who is sad about something that has been done to them then turns around and does that thing to someone else… it’s a weird world.
As I was watching the scene in the cave, I thought Paris showed an incredible respect for consent (he was also saving his own feelings). Not only that, but it showed a true evolution of his character. I’d recently read Keith’s criticism of Paris in the pilot episode. Well, the reason to have him super skeezy in that episode is so that we can see that by season three he’s learned a thing or two about respecting women. First season Paris would have been all over that. While I really enjoy these rewatches, it sometimes bothers me that author and commenters all expect every character to be absolutely perfect human beings right out of the gate with no frailties to overcome. There’s a reason Han Solo is shown to be a money-grubbing bastard in the beginning of ANH — so we can see him change.
Anyway, it’s a rather good episode. I also enjoyed the callback to what Worf revealed about Klingon mating in TNG, that the female should be throwing heavy objects. But I guess we were all spared from hearing Paris’s love poetry.