'Star Trek: Discovery': Logic and Emotion Have Failed Spock in Season 2

The second season of Star Trek: Discovery will see Ethan Peck play Spock years before he becomes [...]

The second season of Star Trek: Discovery will see Ethan Peck play Spock years before he becomes Capt. Kirk's first officer aboard the Enterprise. In fact, based on comments from the show's executive producers, fans may be seeing Spock at his lowest point.

ComicBook.com and other members of the press spoke to Discovery executive producers Alex Kurtzman and Heather Kadin. The producers discussed Spock's state of mind when he's reunited with his foster sister, Cmdr. Michael Burnham.

"Well, obviously there was a lot of questions from the last season, right?" Kurtzman said. "How come Spock doesn't ever mention his half-sister to Michael Burnham? And we owe the audience an answer to that. And one of the things that I'm most excited about with this season is that this is the untold chapter of Spock. So, this is Spock pre-TOS. He's not actualized as the character you know from The Original Series yet. He has seen something that his logical brain and logical training cannot make sense of, and he's emotionally ill-equipped to deal with it. So logic and emotion have failed Spock and he is trying to figure out who he is and what the signals mean and the red angel means. And it is through his relationship, his very complicated and broken relationship with Michael, that he's able to actualize himself as the Spock we know from TOS, and that's a big part of what the season's about."

Discovery flips the script when it comes to what's expected from a Vulcan-human relationship in Star Trek. Humans tend to turn to Vulcans for logic-based advice. Kirk and Spock in The Original Series is the most famous example of this, but also Capt. Janeway and Lt. Cmdr. Tuvok in Star Trek: Voyager.

In Discovery, Spock learns logic from Michael Burnham, a human raised on Vulcan. Burnham, in turn, reconnects with her human emotions through dealing with Spock.

"Well, it's funny because we pitched this season in some ways as, 'This is the season about a human who learns emotion from a Vulcan and a Vulcan who learns logic from a human," Kurtzman explained. "So, it was an interesting barometer for how we wanted to gauge our relationship between the brother and sister."

Kadin added, "But also we had to earn that right. You had to see Burnham go through her own journey last season as short of shedding a lot of her Vulcan ways, which is also what makes her human teaching with Spock so beautiful."

Are you excited to see more of Spock's early days in Star Trek: Discovery? Let us know in the comments!

Star Trek: Discovery returns to CBS All Access on January 17th.

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