You know why T’pol is my favourite character? It’s the little nuances, it’s the way that when you start watching the show looking at this rigid Vulcan, who, if she shows any clear emotions, it is annoyance. And she seems to be so snarky and sassy sometimes. But as you get to know her beter as a character you start to be able to read her face like a language on its own. And now, watching Enterprise for a second time, I get to see it from the beginning. And all of the sudden you start to understand her like a friend that you’ve known for a very long time. There are few characters that start out as strange and foreign, but end up being the ones I can understand the most. Read the most.
Also this is the reason why I think T’pol and Hoshi work so well together. Hoshi’s expertise is reading foreign languages. In a way Vulcan emotion is a foreign language to us puny humans. Like when learning a new language, when speaking to a Vulcan we have to learn how to read them, when we change out tone of voice or our pitch to show our emotions, Vulcans instead use the tiniest changes in their faces, so small that most humans don’t recognise it as emotion. But Hoshi knows that the tiniest changes in pitch can matter. Most English speakers will not automatically recognise the different tones in Chinese, yet our ears can be trained to learn them (to a certain extent). It would only be a matter of time before Hoshi would realise that those tiny changes in the way T’pol blinks (for example) are an expression of emotion and language. And she is probably the one who most consistently is able to read them and know what T’pol is saying. Anyways, Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
