the thing that drives me craziest about the depiction of vulcan ‘logic’ on star trek is that ‘logic’ almost always denotes an ideological position and almost never a thought process. the answer to the question ‘what is logical?’ pre-exists any given scenario, and it is the vulcan character’s job in any given scene to point to that answer. it is almost never the answer one would arrive at by process of dialectical reasoning.
in one of the very best scenes in all of disco to date, michael burnham argues the shenzhou’s computer into letting her out of her cell in the brig by presenting it with a reasoned argument that its ethical programming accepts as valid. the scene works because it’s funny—everything outside the cell is going to hell very rapidly and the woman inside it, protected from the vacuum of space only by forcefields that are about to fail, is having a calm conversation with an automated system—but also because michael out-computing a computer is a brilliant demonstration of something essential about michael’s character that we have been told repeatedly but so far not actually shown: that she is a human who has mastered vulcan mental discipline and vulcan ways of approaching knowledge.
it’s a depiction of logic that works on several levels precisely because it’s functioning as dialectic rather than as ideology. i love it. i love it! if star trek systematically did the work to commit to portraying vulcan logic like this all the time, it could get so rich and complex. i want that version so bad! so bad.