Star Trek's Jolene Blalock Had One Big Problem With The Writing For T'Pol
Sharp-eyed Trekkies can easily see a throughline connecting Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) from "Star Trek: Voyager" directly to T'Pol (Jolene Blalock) from "Star Trek: Enterprise." Seven of Nine was brought onto "Voyager" in its fourth season as an attempt to boost flagging ratings, a mercenary tactic openly admitted by the show's creators. On the special features included on the "Voyager" DVDs, executive producer Brannon Braga suggested to fellow executive Rick Berman that their show should include a Borg as a character. Berman suggested it be "a Borg babe," and history was made. Ryan was squeezed into an architecturally impressive corset, and ratings began to go up.
Prior to and during her acting career on "Enterprise," Jolene Blalock was a professional model, having appeared in multiple magazines like FHM, Maxim, and Playboy, clothed. Casting Blalock as the Vulcan first officer in "Enterprise," then, seemed as mercenary as casting Ryan as a "Borg babe" on "Voyager"; it seemed obvious that the showrunners hired Blalock for her magazine-cover-ready appearance at least as much as for her acting talent. Contributing to this assessment was the fact that the "Enterprise" creators required its fictional characters to go through a lascivious "decontamination" sequence every time they returned from an away mission. The Starfleet vessel frequently saw its characters stripped down to their skivvies, applying salve to one another's bodies. It was all brazenly prurient.
There were also issues between Blalock and Braga as to how T'Pol should be characterized; it seems that the actress and the show creator never really agreed on her character's arc. In the oral history book "The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J.J. Abrams," edited by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, both Blalock and Braga went on the record over their individual struggles with T'Pol.
The more confident version of T'Pol
Blalock noted that the characters on "Enterprise," by the show's very design, were all neophytes. "Enterprise" was set 100 years prior to the original "Star Trek" series, and followed the very first Starfleet vessel to traverse the galaxy. The human characters had never been in space before, but the Vulcans had already been exploring the galaxy for centuries. T'Pol was an experienced space traveler and should have been a confident mentor figure to Captain Archer (Scott Bakula). Instead, she faced a lot of her own personal Vulcan drama that Blalock described as "desperate." To quote:
"The concept with the shows aren't the problem. The concepts are amazing. The issue is the dialogue. I personally believed that T'Pol should have more of her Vulcan culture. I don't believe she should be so desperate like everyone else. Because the original 'Star Trek,' which I grew up with, had a very simple message that I took from it, and that is that not everyone is like me. And I'm not perfect, and nobody's perfect, and that's okay. That really helped me."
T'Pol, in brief, could have been a lot more Vulcan, and could have been a lot more comfortable with that. T'Pol was depicted as struggling with her Vulcan upbringing by merely living on a ship with humans for a few years. Surely, her resolve would have been stronger. And why did she always have to use human colloquialisms? Blalock continued:
"I think T'Pol could be okay with being Vulcan, she shouldn't have to want to be Vulcan. In the dialogue ... Why is it that when we're trying to teach each other something, all our analogies involve Earth lore? Don't our cultures have their own lore that might make for good messages?"
Indeed.
Inconsistencies
Blalock, like all good Trekkies, was obsessed with details. It concerned her that the writers of "Enterprise" would introduce conceits or stories for T'Pol, only to drop them or forget about them later. She even remembered a few specific examples from specific episodes:
"In the first season's 'Shadows of P'Jem,' they made this huge story about how Vulcans were undermining Starfleet and had some kind of agenda, but then they never went on to address it. Then there's an episode in which T'Pol got sick, terminally ill, and they never readdress it. There's the characteristic where Vulcans don't eat food with their hands and yet they wrote scenes where T'Pol is eating popcorn at a movie or Trip will bring T'Pol a peach. It's just so strange to me."
These are the sorts of things that Trekkies notice and often wish would be addressed during production. Blalock was paying attention and longed for the same stringent continuity that the franchise's fans regularly craved. Her inability to address these small details seemingly made the actress feel frustrated and powerless.
Many of the show's writers also experienced difficulty with T'Pol. They liked the character and admired Blalock's performance, but objected to some of T'Pol's more embarrassing stories and lascivious details. Writer David Goodman said:
"Jolene gave a great portrayal of a Vulcan. Obviously, there were things they wanted me to do which I didn't necessarily approve of — like the drug addiction and the acupressure just to get them naked — but she was stunning, and by season two, it was the second-best portrayal of a Vulcan. You believe her as a Vulcan, and that's not always true with a lot of people who play Vulcans. I think she was amazing, and she could be very funny, too."
Braga vs. Blalock
It was show co-creator Brannon Braga that butted heads with Blalock most dramatically, and he too recalled some of T'Pol's more unfortunate storylines. By Braga's recollection, Blalock hated a lot of the decisions he was making and made her objections known:
"It was hard to cast T'Pol. It's very hard to cast the role of someone who is stunningly beautiful and can act. Being an actor on Star Trek is a whole other thing. Playing a Vulcan is so hard and Jolene did a really good job, but she was not happy playing T'Pol. She and I just never saw eye to eye with the character, and she just didn't like the way the character was going, particularly in the third season when T'Pol became addicted to drugs. She didn't like the romance with Trip."
The above-mentioned acupressure scenes featured Blalock and actor Connor Trineer, who played chief engineer Trip Tucker, undressing and massaging each other. This led to an uneasy romance. No fans of "Enterprise" will tell you they liked this development. Braga also posited that Blalock was under a lot of stress — starring in "Star Trek" was a high-profile gig — although he seemingly didn't reach out to the actress, nor did the two connect. He recalled:
"There was a lot of pressure to be basically the ingénue of the show, and the rest of the cast came together pretty easily. You can find interviews where she was dissing the show and me and I never, to be honest, fully understood it. We had to shut down for a month. I think she was going through some s***."
Blalock retired from acting in 2017 when she had her first child. She is now a mom of three, living largely out of the public eye.