Consider this a reminder for people currently watching Star Trek, old and new.
Logic and controlled emotion aren’t inherent to being a Vulcan. Somehow gaining Vulcan traits, or biologically transforming into a Vulcan, will not make you logical and emotionless. In fact, quite the opposite would happen.
Vulcans used to be warlike, barbaric (as Spock would describe them) and nearly wiped themselves out. It was the teaching of Surak in the philosophy of pure logic, after centuries of war, that made Vulcans what they are today. Vulcans do this by training logic and emotional control throughout their childhood and teenage years. Ultimately culminating in Kolinahr, the final stage to “purge emotion”. But Vulcans still experience emotion, and their state of control is something that requires constant maintenance through meditation and practice.
Vulcans are far more emotional and passionate than even Humans. If a Human so much as houses a portion of a Vulcan’s Katra (the mind/spirit), said Human would struggle immensely to keep their feeling under control.
I’m writing all this because I’m getting the feeling that this very important part about Vulcans is being forgotten (perhaps more-so by the current writers of Star Trek).
On the contrary; none of the episodes in all of Trek, up until your Voyager episode, states that a Vulcan’s logic and emotional suppression comes from biology. They do the opposite; Vulcans are biologically incredibly emotional and passionate. The Voyager episode doesn’t even go into detail what that biology is either.
It’s just a brain centre, like any other brain centre, that regulates emotion (humans have one too), and through training the Vulcans use to it suppress their emotions. Unless you explicitly choose to ignore all canon that comes before it.
Even within Voyager it is clear that a Vulcan achieves logic and emotional control through years of training, and that before logic and emotional control became part of Vulcan culture, Vulcans were passionate and violent. Do you deny this well established canon?
I see no reason that both things cannot be true.
Vulcans do go through extensive training to achieve kolinar; they also possess unique genetic traits that make it possible.
We poses the traits to become athletic. Does that mean that someone getting a part of a human makes them instantly athletic?
Yes, extensive training is required for either. Exactly. Thank you. You’ve just made my point.
Building on that VS, DNA was barely discovered by Watson and Crick when TOS fan, so we should be able to work the implications of the growing body of knowledge of genetics into what we have done before.
We don’t hold Star Trek back from incorporating advances in real life scientific and technological knowledge.
For example, growing understanding in nanotechnology informed many elements of 1990s Trek. We didn’t say that nanotechnology shouldn’t be referenced just because it wasn’t referenced in TOS.
In fact, Roddenberry insisted that Star Trek always be a possible future for the viewers and insisted on changes and corrections to address changes in knowledge.
In the case of what we saw in this episode, knowledge of epigenetics, an entire domain of understanding that has developed in this century, informed the situation.
Epigenetics can be defined as “The study of the processes involved in the genetic development of an organism, especially the activation and deactivation of genes.”
We were told by Una that, because the Karkovian serum was derived from Spock’s DNA it reflected Spock’s experience. This means certain Vulcan genetic traits were already ‘switched on’ by environmental factors, that could include experiences like meditation, that would lead to ‘switching on’ the genes that enable functioning of the specific Vulcan brain structures noted in Voyager.