10 Star Trek Characters More Important Than You Realised

The Vulcan character Yuris makes only one appearance in the episode Stigma of Star Trek: Enterprise, but it is nonetheless a markedly notable one. The episode centres around the ramifications of T’Pol’s worsening Pa’nar Syndrome – an illness that she contracted by mind meld during an assault by a fellow Vulcan the year prior.

In this period, Vulcan civilisation is distinctly intolerant to mind melders, whom it considers to be a deviant and unpalatable part of society. Research on Pa’nar syndrome is, therefore, not considered a priority, and those seeking treatment are more likely to be castigated and exiled in disgrace.

The allegory of this episode is deliberately clear – it was Enterprise’s then part in Viacom’s HIV awareness campaign. It is not T’Pol, however, through which the metaphor of HIV and homophobia plays out, but Yuris. Towards the end of the episode, he reveals that he too, a prominent Vulcan physician, is a member of the ‘minority’ of mind melders. He does so to save T'Pol’s career and get her the advances in treatment she needs. His plea to his fellow scientists that there is nothing ‘abhorrent’ about the way he (and all melders) lives his life is inscribed with all the real-world homophobia of the HIV/AIDS crisis – what was often called the ‘gay plague’. He becomes the figure of the gay man, the guilty victim, the threat to society, through his ‘ab[errant]horrent’ 'lifestyle' as a melder. This is a uniquely powerful, and sadly accurate, analogy.