Star Trek: Enterprise did Vulcans better than any other show and Gary Graham was a reason for that

With the passing of Gary Graham, we've been looking back and reminiscing about Star Trek: Enterprise a lot. Graham, who played the Vulcan Soval in the series, stood out. Few actors can as a Vulcan, as the characters are largely emotionless, and thus giving them a personality is often hard to do. Krisitie Allie secured her status as a beloved Vuclan because she emotionlessly swore once.

Granted, there was a whole backstory there where she was part Romulan that never got explored, but still.

So when we say that Graham stood out as a regular Vulcan character on Enterprise, that's actually saying something. That's not all, however, as series star Jolene Blalock also stood out as a Vulcan, in this case, the second in command on the NX-01 Enterprise, T'Pol. T'Pol was often stoic but showed great admiration for her human colleagues and even showed the depth of her loyalty to the people she served with, namely in the episode "Twilight".

But the show went on further than that and highlighted how the Vulcans, an advanced race of aliens, were still bigoted. Not only against the humans but also the Andorians, who they raged a war with for years, at times needlessly so. We saw more Vulcans being less than perfect on Enterprise and saw that while their logic at times was sound, their lack of emotions made their logic terrifying and at times immoral.

Not to mention that Enterprise also showed the effects of deception in Vulcan culture, and how some are still claimed by the wave of emotions that they fight so hard to suppress. The entire T'Pol plot with her being mentally assaulted by another Vulcan showed not only the depths of the Vulcan culture but the shame that came with being a victim.

It's why Enterprise can easily be called the show that did the most with the Vulcans, as so much of its central plot involved how everyone interacted with them. Unlike the original series, where it was the humans interacting with Spock, a half-human, half-Vulcan, and at times watching the show through his eyes, Enterprise flipped the script.

The humans were the fish out of water in Enterprise, not the Vulcans and it was the humans trying to keep up with things, unlike Spock in the original series. It explored far deeper, far darker tones of the Vulcan culture than in the original series, and that's why it's fair to call Enterprise the show that did the most and the best with Vulcans.