2x16 Meld

[7.9/10] The tired take on Vulcans is that they simply have no emotions. They’ve purged them in the Kolinahr or their centuries of emotional repression as a culture. But the more interesting take, and the one that has the deepest roots in The Original Series, is that they experience wild, primal emotions just below the surface, and it takes incredible control and discipline to maintain their trademark stoic exterior. As Tuvok himself once put it, “Do not mistake composure for ease.”

So what I love about “Meld” is that it brings that idea to full bloom. One of the TOS trademarks was episodes where some set of spores or other weird sci-fi phenomenon of the week would lead Spock to drop the veil, and the audience could see how passionate, haunted, or downright scary he truly could be. This episode plays the same trick with Tuvok, when a mind meld with a Betazoid sociopath renders the mental edifice he’s put up to keep those tumultuous emotions at bay utterly crumbling.

This is the point where I should admit that Brad Dourif, who plays the sociopathic Crewman Suder, literally haunted my nightmares as a kid. In addition to his award-worthy performances in cinema classics like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and modern day miracles like Deadwood, he voiced Chucky, the murderous doll come to life in the Child’s Play films. I saw the first one while in kindergarten, not long after my grandparents had gave me the “My Buddy” doll Child’s Play is spoofing for my birthday. I had bad dreams about Chucky trying to kill me for literal months.

Suffice it to say, Dourif has a leg-up on creeping me out when he plays another murderous character, this time one devoid of emotions who’s ready to kill a man for looking at him wrong in order to feed a seemingly innate need for violence. But I think the performance soars regardless of whether you happen to instinctively recoil from Dourif’s lilt.

Whether it’s a choice of lighting or prosthetics, his pupils seem blank, representing the emotional emptiness behind them. More to the point, there is an unnerving calm to Dourif’s performance as Suder, a clinical account of terrible acts and blank motivations, that makes him all the scarier. In a post-Silence of the Lambs world, cerebral psychopaths were a dime a dozen in T.V. and film, but Dourif manages to find some unique notes to stand out from the crowd.

That's important, because the crux of “Meld” is Tuvok having to tangle with something and someone so sui generis, so incomprehensible to him, that it nearly unravels him. The episode starts out like a murder mystery, with a crewman’s remains found in the bulkheads and a search on for who could have done it. But the answer, and a confession, comes quickly. Suder offed a colleague he had “no relationship” with, more out of a need to sate his own lust for violence than any grievance or need for vengeance.

Tuvok doesn’t understand that. I love the way the episode sets up the conflict between the logic and order that define Tuvok’s existence, and the senselessness of this crime that goes against everything he believes in and understands. The Vulcan is used to fitting everything he encounters, even the improbable, into a comprehensible framework. But someone who kills without reason, confounds Tuvok in a way that leaves something gnawing at him. The irony is that it’s a murder from someone who seems to represent the Vulcan ideal of being purged of emotion, which only adds to the sense of a problem that Tuvok must solve.

So he stares into the abyss and the abyss stares back. Holy hell, from the minute he performs a mind meld under the guise of helping to treat Suder, whilst truly only trying to understand his crime, you can tell things will go off the rails. The conversation the pair have in the brig is both extraordinary and chilling. You know instantly that this is a bad idea, but you know exactly why Tuvok nonetheless pursues it, which is a sign of good writing.

Then the mask comes off. Or more accurately, the emotions Tuvok’s been able to suppress all this time come raging out once he’s been unzipped by contact with Suder’s mind. I appreciate how Tuvok clocks this as soon as it’s happened, setting up security fields around his quarters and deleting his security access codes immediately, because he senses that he soon won’t be able to control himself.

As chilling a performance as Brad Dourif gives here, Tim Russ matches him in unnerving energy once Tuvok lets the rage flow through him. Director and Star Trek vet Cliff Bole (the namesake of the Bolians) frames him nicely in the darkness, contemplating the ways he could kill a man. The scene in sick bay where Tuvok goes off is electric. His sense of wanting to kill Suder as a form of justice, of debasing Janeway’s devotion to rehabilitation, of trying to use his psychic powers to force Kes to let him out, all show off that more primal side of Vulcans that helps us understand why they worked so hard to control that part of them. As when Spock would fly off the handle, there’s something scary about all this power unleashed, which only underscores how impressive it is that Tuvok can normally keep it all in check.

My only beef is that the technobabble side of it doesn’t really work. The idea that Vulcan emotional suppression (and psychic power) is so rotely biological takes away from the majesty of it. It ceases to become a personal challenge and starts to become a mechanical thing The Doctor can ratchet up or down at will.

That said, I like that what ultimately “cures” Tuvok is not the Doctor’s ministrations, but rather what he said the Vulcan needed in a different form. Basically, Doc says that Tuvok might go so far that the shock to his system gets his inhibitions to kick in again. The medical treatment doesn’t prompt that, but a visit to Suder does.

In essence, Tuvok tries to go all the way. He tries to quench the same thirst for violence that Suder had, with the poetry of it coming at the expense of Suder’s own life. And yet, when he attempts it, when he tries to, as Suder himself suggests, kill a fellow being through a mindmeld, it’s too much for him. Those defenses kick in. The part of him that strives for discipline and justice cannot be suppressed anymore than those primal instincts can in the face of the inexplicable. Tuvok may now be able to understand Suder better, and the gaping maw inside of him, but he cannot kill him. Sympathy does not beget empathy. Comprehension does not provoke action.
It’s a nice capper to what amounts to a philosophical debate here, between a retributivist sense of justice and a more rehabilitative one. The Manichean good versus evil commentary here is a little overblown, and part of what holds “Meld” back from full greatness. But in essence, Tuvok’s unrestrained side represents man’s own atavistic desire to wreak vengeance upon the wicked, with Janeway standing her ground with a sense of valuing the humane and curative over the easy and punitive.

The presence of someone who seems incurable, not right, challenges both of those sensibilities, stretches each of their limitations. But in the end, Star Trek sides with the idea of compassion, as the aspirational franchise ought to.

At the same time, though, this is also a story of Tuvok personally wrestling with those two forces inside him. There is one that wants to rage and act on impulse. And there is one that wants to hold himself in check and act with thought and discernment. A soul that makes no sense to him, who defies his logic, and forces him to confront the limits of his reason in a random, unknowable universe, reveals the raging cauldron within every Vulcan, and the quiet strength that Tuvok exhibits in his ability to hold it at bay.

(I just realized that I completely forgot the B-plot, which is fine because it’s forgettable. Tom Paris starts a betting pool where he skims off the top and gets dinged for it. It’s a giant waste of time and makes Paris look like an ass, like most of his storylines in these early seasons. The threadbare subplot takes up valuable real estate that could have been turned over to more of the Russ/Dourif showcase.)