The three-part Vulcan saga in Star Trek: Enterprise season 4 explained why the 22nd century era Vulcans feared humans. The Enterprise season 4 episodes "The Forge," "Awakening," and "Kir'Shara," introduced the younger version of Star Trek: The Original Series icon T'Pau (Kara Zediker). With the help of Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) and T'Pol (Jolene Blalock), T'Pau was able to restore the teachings of Surak and expose a conspiracy between the Vulcan High Command and the Romulan Star Empire.
In Star Trek's timeline, Enterprise picks up less than a century after the events of Star Trek: First Contact, when Dr. Zephram Cochrane (James Cromwell) achieved Mankind's first successful warp flight, which brought the curious Vulcans to Earth. In Enterprise's mid-22nd century, however, relations between humans and Vulcans were far from idyllic. United Earth's Starfleet, and Captain Archer in particular, were hostile toward Vulcans, who they felt were restricting human ambition to explore the galaxy. In turn, the Vulcans were arrogant and condescending to humans. Enterprise's Vulcans behaved differently from how Star Trek fans expected, and there was an undercurrent of racism present from both cultures. This is something T'Pol, Archer, and the NX-01 Enterprise crew overcame over their years serving together.
Why Vulcans Feared Humans In Star Trek: Enterprise's Era
Star Trek: Enterprise season 4's episode, "The Forge," began by facing how Vulcans really feel about humans head-on. When Admiral Maxwell Forrest (Vaughn Armstrong) met with Ambassador Soval (Gary Graham) at the United Earth Embassy on Vulcan, Soval outright confessed the reasons why Vulcans fear humans: "We don't know what to do about humans. Of all the species we've made contact with, yours is the only one we can't define. You have the arrogance of Andorians, the stubborn pride of Tellarites. One moment you're as driven by your emotions as Klingons, and the next, you confound us by suddenly embracing logic."
Admiral Forrest noted that every culture contains contradictory emotions, but Soval noted that humans possess a "confusing abundance." Finally, Forrest gleaned that the true reason that Vulcans are afraid of humans because they remind the Vulcans of themselves thousands of years ago, when they were an emotional, violent race before Vulcan culture based itself on the logic of Surak. However, this confession was just a part of what made Star Trek: Enterprise's Vulcans different as Archer, T'Pol, and T'Pau eventually exposed the Vulcan High Command's corruption and alliance with the Romulans to turn Vulcan into a vassal state.
How Enterprise's Retcons Changed & Explained Vulcans
Star Trek: Enterprise owned the fact that their depiction of Vulcans as more xenophobic and even insidious differed from how Vulcans are portrayed in Star Trek: The Original Series and thereafter. Enterprise's Vulcan three-parter revealed that the Vulcan High Command's leader, Administrator V'Las (Robert Foxworth), was part of a far-reaching conspiracy with Talok (Todd Stashwick), a Romulan deep cover agent posing as a Vulcan. Their ultimate goal was to subjugate Vulcan to the Romulan Empire. It was this same Vulcan High Command who built a secret listening station on P'Jem to spy on Andoria, and who T'Pol rebelled against when she opted to formally join Starfleet.
Overthrowing V'Las allowed T'Pau to reinstate the teachings of Surak, which paved the way for the Vulcan culture as they've been depicted in the rest of Star Trek. Star Trek: Enterprise's Vulcans are indeed an aberration, and correcting them to set Spock's (Leonard Nimoy) people on the proper path was part of the prequel's game plan. In later Star Trek series, humans and Vulcans would still occasionally irritate each other, as Spock and Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForrest Kelley) would show. And even Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) had a rivalry with Vulcans that was settled by a baseball game in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. But the truth of how Vulcans actually felt about human beings was laid bare in Star Trek: Enterprise.