Some speculation about the Romulans and the Borg invasion

[rfmcdpei]

kkozoriz1 wrote:

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If we`re going for the unreliable narrartor to explain away the odd lines, does that mean that we have to be prepared to do the same for Spock and Spock Prime through the rest of the movie?

If they need to be explained that way, yes. Spock's statement doesn't make sense: colonies of Vulcan proper aside, there are huge numbers of civilizations of Vulcan background out in the wider galaxy, everything from the expansive Romulans down to the pre-industrial Mintakans. It's a logical impossibility that there could only be ten thousand Vulcans.

Anyway, the people who wrote the canon said that the figure of ten thousand applies only to the ten thousand who escaped Vulcan, not to the number of survivors of members of the Vulcan species inclined towards the cultural norms of the homeworld, never mind the number of survivors from the entire species. What more is to be said?

Was Spock being truthful with his emotional moment with Uhura? Was Spock Prime telling NuKirk the truth or was he telling him a line of baloney in order to get him motivated to take command from Spock and stop Nero?

Is there any reason, inside or outside the narrative of the universe, to suspect that either Spock was being insincere? The extraordinary pressures of the immediate past made Spock manifest a romantic interest in a woman he'd long interacted with in a close, friendly professional mode; Spock Prime told young Kirk about his long-standing friendship with Kirk Prime and his knowledge of Kirk's own abilities. There's nothing intrinsically impossible, or inaccurate, for these.

Is America a colony of Great Britain?

No, but if the United Kingdom was somehow destroyed, there would still be tens (if not hundreds) of millions of people of substantially British descent outside of the United Kingdom. Certainly the English language wouldn't become extinct.

(And what about the Commonwealth? Something like two billion people live in countries belonging to an organization with the Queen of the United Kingdom at its head, some of these countries still retaining the British monarch as their head of state.)

[Deranged Nasat]

rfmcdpei wrote:

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This leaves aside the Rihannsuverse, possibly novelverse character of Ael, who as Empress may have triggered a fairly intimate rapprochement with the Federation. It takes something pretty significant to explain how Nanclus was able to sit in on a classified Federation briefing to the UFP president how Starfleet would raid the Klingon homeworld if the RSE wasn't pretty impressively friendly.

Indeed. One of the stronger arguments for incorporating Ael, and Rihannsu's basic story, into the mainstream novel continuity is certainly the fact that between around 2275 and 2310 (loosely) the RSE seemed to pursue genuine hopes for a good relationship, even an alliance, with the UFP. Ael and the civil war would help explain that (we have D'tran and his supporters prior to this in Vanguard, of course,but full government support for peace would come significantly easier if Rihannsu is "counted"). Then Vokar and his ideological cousins rose up, unfortunately, there was Tomed...and the borders closed.

rfmcdpei wrote:

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Extrapolating wildly, if the IRS does hold the northeastern half of Romulan space, that ]might indicate that it holds more the colonial frontier. Judging by the Rihannsu novels, which suggest that the colonials are more liberal and humane in the idealized Romulan sense than the homeworld might like, descended from the Ship Clans which were never that invested in the myths brought by the colonists, well. Thoughts?

That's an interesting idea, and I really like the suggestion. It would be great to have a sense of the rate and direction of Romulan expansion, who settled where and when and where the strongholds of each ideological perspective or sub-culture are. We can dream...

[kkozoriz1]

rfmcdpei wrote:

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If they need to be explained that way, yes. Spock's statement doesn't make sense: colonies of Vulcan proper aside, there are huge numbers of civilizations of Vulcan background out in the wider galaxy, everything from the expansive Romulans down to the pre-industrial Mintakans. It's a logical impossibility that there could only be ten thousand Vulcans.

Anyway, the people who wrote the canon said that the figure of ten thousand applies only to the ten thousand who escaped Vulcan, not to the number of survivors of members of the Vulcan species inclined towards the cultural norms of the homeworld, never mind the number of survivors from the entire species. What more is to be said?

Is there any reason, inside or outside the narrative of the universe, to suspect that either Spock was being insincere? The extraordinary pressures of the immediate past made Spock manifest a romantic interest in a woman he'd long interacted with in a close, friendly professional mode; Spock Prime told young Kirk about his long-standing friendship with Kirk Prime and his knowledge of Kirk's own abilities. There's nothing intrinsically impossible, or inaccurate, for these.

Seeing as Spock has just seen the destruction of his home planet and the death of his mother, it's entirely possible that he simply latched onto the first person who reached out to him, that being Uhura. Or are we to assume that he was making an informed, shall we say "logical" decision, moments afterward?

This is also the Spock that counseled Kirk to attack Nero once he was defeated and helpless so i guess anything is possible.

[rfmcdpei]

Deranged Nasat wrote:

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Indeed. One of the stronger arguments for incorporating Ael, and Rihannsu's basic story, into the mainstream novel continuity is certainly the fact that between around 2275 and 2310 (loosely) the RSE seemed to pursue genuine hopes for a good relationship, even an alliance, with the UFP. Ael and the civil war would help explain that (we have D'tran and his supporters prior to this in Vanguard, of course,but full government support for peace would come significantly easier if Rihannsu is "counted"). Then Vokar and his ideological cousins rose up, unfortunately, there was Tomed...and the borders closed.

Drawing from her own novels, but also from the TOS novels, Duane made a good point when her Kirk observed that the number of Romulan provocations to the Federation was rising sharply as a consequence of Romulus' increasingly deadly internal politics. The Triumvirate seem to have wanted unfettered powers for their own purposes: let them conquer vast swathes of space, use augmented telepathy to dominate the minds of their lessers, use frighteningly advanced science to deploy star-killing metaweapons and who knows what else. The Romulan Civil War, coming as it did after the Triumvirs had engaged in abundant and socially unacceptable violence at those within and without the RSE, discredited the crazy/ultraviolent school of Romulan expansionists ...

Or so I'd like to think. It took a military coup that came out of nowhere to create a Romulan government preparing to order a genocidal strike at Earth, and that government collapsed pretty quickly over the basic issue of the ethics of the thing. (That, and fear of Shinzon and the consequences of his acts. Would the RSE really be ready to take on the Federation, even after Earth's annihilation? Crazy/ultraviolent actions can as easily lead to massive retaliation as to submission.)

It would be great to have a sense of the rate and direction of Romulan expansion, who settled where and when and where the strongholds of each ideological perspective or sub-culture are. We can dream...

I think we can get an idea from the map. The Romulans seem to have started their expansion in sphere maybe thirty years across, located off-centre from Romulus (to the southeast), before embarking on two major expansions. The first took the Romulans in the general direction of Vulcan and the other Federation core worlds, coming up close to the worlds of the Debrune (whoever they were, exactly) before eventually being halted. The second, apparently more successful, went "east" and succeeded in acquiring a huge swathe of space before the movement petered out, partly because it came up against the Klingon border. At some point, the initial Romulan sphere seems to have been threatened: the Neutral Zone comes within ten light-years of Romulus, and the Battle of Cheron happened very close to Romulus and created a status quo where the ]Enterprise could make a quick fly-by scan of Cheron to determine who won the race war without starting an interstellar incident.

Maybe the Romulans of the home sphere and the Federation border region are the people most strongly wedded to the expansionist project, the home sphere out of fear and 5he border region out of tradition, while the Romulans living in what became IRS space are more traditionalist, attached to their traditional liberty and displeased with intrusions on these liberties by their government, by aggressors, and (maybe) by undue aggression on their part?

[rfmcdpei]

kkozoriz1 wrote:

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Seeing as Spock has just seen the destruction of his home planet and the death of his mother, it's entirely possible that he simply latched onto the first person who reached out to him, that being Uhura.

We could. Is there any reason why we must? We know that Spock and Uhura have a long professional relationship, one close enough that Spock's willing to respond to a bit of teasing and transfer Uhura to a new command on will, and close enough for Uhura to try to console him, even touching him physically. The idea of an emotionally strained Spock acting on romantic feelings he chose not to acknowledge is believable, and doesn't run contrary to what we know of the two characters, or of Vulcan (or human!) physiology and psychology.

Or are we to assume that he was making an informed, shall we say "logical" decision, moments afterward?

Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point.

This is also the Spock that counseled Kirk to attack Nero once he was defeated and helpless so i guess anything is possible.

It would be the rare person who, faced with the ability to annihilate the person(s) responsible for the death of the person's homeworld and home and family (including the person's mother just a metre away), wouldn't resist the desire to wish for the person(s) destruction. Nero's certainly willing to engage in massive overkill to avenge his family; why mightn't Spock be willing to do the same sort of thing?

The difference between the new possibilities for Spcok/Uhura romance fic and Spock's desire for Nero's death, on the one hand, and Spock's statement that only ten thousand Vulcans survived Nero and the assumption that Vulcanoids don't expand at all, is that there's nothing in what we know of the Star Trek universe and the dynamics of peoples and societies to forbid the first two (much the contrary), and much to suggest that the last two are ill-grounded. There are plenty of Vulcans after Nero, with the colonists of Vulcan cultural backgrounds and the numerous less prominent Vulcanoid cultures and the Romulan empire about; there's plenty of reasons to think that, in two millennia of aggressive expansion, there are numerous Romulan settlement colonies outside the Romulan homesystem, apart from conquered worlds and civilizations.

[kkozoriz1]

To summarize, the only thing Spock said that we should disregard is that there's 10,000 Vulcans left. Also, revenge upon a helpless enemy is a good and valid action.

Gotcha

[rfmcdpei]

kkozoriz1 wrote:

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To summarize, the only thing Spock said that we should disregard is that there's 10,000 Vulcans left.

If it's the only implausible thing, sure.

Mintaka III alone, even at a Bronze Age level of development, would support a population of tens of millions of Vulcans. Romulus, a world settled by Vulcans who've developed an expansionistic culture defined by Vulcan models will understand on the homeworld, supports a population of billions of Vulcans. What we know about the Rigelians suggests they're Vulcan-like enough that drugs used to stimulate blood production in that population work well enough on Vulcans.

The existence of these three large populations alone, well-established in canon, demonstrates that Spock's initial assertion is incorrect. His is not an endangered species.

Add to this the implausibility that a well-established interstellar civilization wouldn't have a large population away from its homeworld, and the director's own statement that the "ten thousand" figure refers only to the number of Vulcans evacuated from the planet--not the total number of survivors--and, well.

Sure, Orci said that in passing. In future movies, he may well contradict this; he left himself enough room to do that. Until then, we've got a well-documented statement of canon that's backed up by other canonical information from the film and by novelverse canon.

Also, revenge upon a helpless enemy is a good and valid action.

Who said that? Young Spock did, sure, maybe a bit more than a day after the unprovoked destruction of his homeworld and its population and his mother in front of his eyes. As I said, it'd be a rare person in that situation who wouldn't act in that way.

[ProtoAvatar]

In star trek XI, Nero said he is the last of the romulan empire.

Spock said there are only 10000 vulcans left, that the vulcans are an endangered species.
At the end of the movie, it is, again, established that the vulcans are experiencing a crisis due to severely limited numbers - which is not consistent with hundreds of millions of vulcans living in off-world colonies.

When they wrote the script, the scenarists' intent was to have the vulcans be an endangered species (10000 of them) and the 24th century romulans be all but extinct.

Of course, that does not really make sense when one considers the capabilities of an interstellar trek civilization.
Which is why many interpret the movie as "Nero was emotionally compromised and his words are not to be taken at face value" or "Spock was emotionally compromised and his words are not to be taken at face value".

Of course, this hand-waving interpretation does not really fit the events as presented in star trek XI, is forced - and it shows.
Nevertheless, it may be preferable.


About the rihannsu novels - it is pretty much the same situation.
The rihannsu novels - most of the events depicted therein - do not fit the main trek lit conntinuity, they were not intended to fit this main lit continuity:

Huge romulan colony ships, strong enough to defeat, almost singlehandedly, the romulan military? No inkling of this in canon (or main lit continuity) depictions of the romulans.

Zero point energy romulan tech - far more advanced shields, weapons, etc - gained by the federation, at the end? Not really.

The romulans being friendly with the federation?
In star trek V, it was obvious nobody cared about the "planet of galactic peace".
In star trek VI, the romulans were a part of the plot to kill the federation president.
This so-called 'friendship' was pretty superficial - more like a frozen war.

The romulans calling themselves/being called rihannsu? Not really.

Many on this forum try to interpret the rihannsu books as being part of the main trek lit continuity - and, inevitably, their interpretations are forced, they never quite manage to reconcile two different continuities; fuzzy logic and hand waving abound.

[Christopher]

rfmcdpei wrote:

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Mintaka III alone, even at a Bronze Age level of development, would support a population of tens of millions of Vulcans. Romulus, a world settled by Vulcans who've developed an expansionistic culture defined by Vulcan models will understand on the homeworld, supports a population of billions of Vulcans. What we know about the Rigelians suggests they're Vulcan-like enough that drugs used to stimulate blood production in that population work well enough on Vulcans.

Mintakans weren't Vulcans, but "proto-Vulcan humanoids." A related or parallel-evolved species, but not the same species. As for Rigelians, all we know about them is that they have similar blood chemistry to Vulcans, and in Trek terms, that doesn't guarantee any greater degree of kinship.

Nonetheless, it is really rather unlikely that any civilization that's been starfaring for centuries -- either Vulcan or Romulus -- would have no significant offworld populations. Trek's tendency to portray all species (including humans) as native to their homeworlds by default is a persistent conceptual flaw, one that doesn't make sense within the greater context of the universe as it's been established. It's a case of writers not thinking through the ramifications of the universe they're working in.

Add to this the implausibility that a well-established interstellar civilization wouldn't have a large population away from its homeworld, and the director's own statement that the "ten thousand" figure refers only to the number of Vulcans evacuated from the planet--not the total number of survivors--and, well.

A producer/screenwriter's statement, not the director's.

Sure, Orci said that in passing. In future movies, he may well contradict this; he left himself enough room to do that.

Actually I think it's more likely to go the other way. As I said, screenwriters tend to overlook the idea of offworld colonization. I suspect that the line was written with the unexamined assumption that Vulcans lived only on Vulcan, and when that fan raised the question to Orci in the Q&A, Orci realized that had been an oversight and offered a correction. So I'd expect that, if the issue came up in a later movie and if there were room to mention it, Orci and Kurtzman would be more likely to clarify that there are surviving Vulcan colonies. All storytellers make mistakes, but in serial fiction one has the opportunity to correct them. (Which is one reason why it's unwise to treat every passing line of dialogue as inviolable gospel. An ongoing series is a work in progress, always subject to revision.)

[kkozoriz1]

So Spock is now a member of an endangered species with millions or billions of other survivors?

Have we ever heard of a Vulcan colony other that Vulcanis Lunar Colony? (absence of evidence <> evidence of absence and all that but still...)

[rfmcdpei]

Not so much that as Spock was shell-shocked and not making the most accurate logs. He didn't show very good judgement on any number of occasions after Vulcan's destruction: not putting Kirk in detention but sending him in a lifepod to the surface of a marginally habitable planet, trying to strangle Kirk on the latter's return on top of the conn console while the bridge crew and his father looked on aghast, making out with Uhura on the transporter pad, favouring killing Nero regardless of the possible good sense of keeping him alive.

Besides, Spock's statement is proved wrong by the simple fact billions of Romulans, as much members of he Vulcan species as any of the inhabitants of 40 Eridani, not only survived the attack on Vulcan but dominate a superpower. Vulcans are demonstrably not an endangered species.

Vulcan genetic diversity has been diminished. The Romulans were probably a genetically unrepresentative sample of the population of the planet Vulcan as much as they were ideologically unrepresentative (see founder's effect). Vulcan would house more genetically diverse lineages than the rest of Vulcan civilization; on Earth, there's far more diversity in Africa, home of the human species, than in the rest of the world combined. That's still different from saying Vulcans are endangered.

[rfmcdpei]

ProtoAvatar wrote:

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In star trek XI, Nero said he is the last of the romulan empire.

Spock said there are only 10000 vulcans left, that the vulcans are an endangered species.
At the end of the movie, it is, again, established that the vulcans are experiencing a crisis due to severely limited numbers - which is not consistent with hundreds of millions of vulcans living in off-world colonies.

And not consistent with the existence of billions of Romulans, Vulcans but for political naming conventions.

Reducing the Vulcan population of Vulcan cultural background from (say) 5 billion down to 50 million--a drop of 99%--would certainly threaten the survival of this culturally distinctive group.

Besides, the people who wrote the movie said that the ten thousand figure relates to the people living on Vulcan itself. What more needs to be said?

About the rihannsu novels - it is pretty much the same situation.
The rihannsu novels - most of the events depicted therein - do not fit the main trek lit conntinuity, they were not intended to fit this main lit continuity

Agreed. That's why I wrote that I consider the Rihannsu novels as relevant to the novelverse, canonical except where they can't be.

There's numerous references made to the Romulans as Rihannsu in the novelverse. Leaving aside the inclusion of the Rihannsu in the earlier generation of novels, particularly but perhaps not only in the novels of Margaret Wander Bonnano and Carolyn Clewes, the new integrated novelverse makes numerous explicit references to Duane's novels. The colony world of Artaleirh introduced in detail in The Empty Chair is visited in A Singular Destiny a generation later; the telecapture technology used by the Romulan colonials in the Civil War is directly connected to the telecapture technology used by the RSE at the beginning of the Romulan War; in one of the alt-hist novellas, a Romulan senator mentions how Empress Ael is disturbed by the Federation use of a Genesis Device on Praxis. The Rihannsu language is used in the novelverse when Romulans are shown talking, and name formation is clearly Rihannsu--Admiral Valdore's full name is given as Valdore i'Kaleh tr'Ihaimehn, as Rihannsu a name as ever there was one. Most of the new novels even explicitly credit the Rihannsu novels in their neat bibliographies.

The romulans being friendly with the federation?
In star trek V, it was obvious nobody cared about the "planet of galactic peace".
In star trek VI, the romulans were a part of the plot to kill the federation president.
This so-called 'friendship' was pretty superficial - more like a frozen war.

Starfleet was involved in the plot to kill the Federation president.

If we're assuming implacable hostility, there's still the question of why Nanclus was president at this briefing. If you represent a determinedly hostile power, one that made concerted efforts to conquer the core worlds of your neighbour a century ago and has since made numerous raids and petty attacks on the neighbour, why would you be invited in on a top-secret briefing showing how your neighbour's military is going to engage in the snatch-and-grab raid on the homeworld of another power? Keep in mind that the Romulans and Klingons had an alliance for some time, and it would surely be easy for the Romulans to send the information over.

Why would the Romulan ambassador be present? Assuming that the Federation isn't run by stupid people, the simplest explanation seems to be that the Romulans are close enough to the Federation to be trusted with highly sensitive information as it's being briefed to the Federation president.

Many on this forum try to interpret the rihannsu books as being part of the main trek lit continuity - and, inevitably, their interpretations are forced, they never quite manage to reconcile two different continuities; fuzzy logic and hand waving abound.

As I said, they aren't fully compatible. That hasn't stopped numerous usable elements of the Rihannsu novels from being incorporated into the new novelverse, they and their author being explicitly credited in numerous novels.

[kkozoriz1]

Seeing as Spock is apparently shell shocked or suffering from PTSD for the remainer of the movie, why would he be allowed to not only ship out with the Enterprise but be named First Officer? He encouraged Kirk to fire on the Romulans even though they no longer posed a threat.

"Captain, what are you doing?

You show them compassion, may be the only way to earn peace with Romulus.

It's logic Spock, thought you'd like that.

No, not really. Not this time."

Even when Kirk says it may be the only way to earn peace with the Romulans, Spock chooses revenge.

[Sci]

kkozoriz1 wrote:

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To summarize, the only thing Spock said that we should disregard is that there's 10,000 Vulcans left.

He never said there were only 10,000 Vulcans left, he said that there were only 10,000 survivors of the planet Vulcan. The "endangered species" line is one that should be seen as emotional hyperbole resulting from the extreme trauma of losing his homeworld and his mother in one swoop.

And, yes, people sometimes say stupid things when they've endured trauma. It's called being a realistically-written character.

rfmcdpei wrote:

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We could. Is there any reason why we must? We know that Spock and Uhura have a long professional relationship, one close enough that Spock's willing to respond to a bit of teasing and transfer Uhura to a new command on will, and close enough for Uhura to try to console him, even touching him physically. The idea of an emotionally strained Spock acting on romantic feelings he chose not to acknowledge is believable, and doesn't run contrary to what we know of the two characters, or of Vulcan (or human!) physiology and psychology.

True -- although, frankly, the impression I got from the "You're transferring me to the Enterprise" scene and the turbolift scene was that Spock and Uhura had been seeing each other for quite some time.

Also, revenge upon a helpless enemy is a good and valid action.

The Narada had already demonstrated an ability to survive passage through a black hole into other timelines. Nero had been given an offer of rescue upon condition of surrender; he refused. There was no guarantee that the Narada would be destroyed by its passage through a black hole again, and if it survived, there was every indication that Nero would attack and kill more innocent people wherever he ended up.

So, in summary, you have a hostile war criminal, who has already killed billions, who has refused surrender, and for whom there is a significant chance he'd pose a threat to more innocent lives once he escapes.

Yes, it's perfectly appropriate to kill him.

kkozoriz1 wrote:

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Have we ever heard of a Vulcan colony other that Vulcanis Lunar Colony? (absence of evidence <> evidence of absence and all that but still...)

P'Jem, for one.

ENT also establish numerous territorial disputes with the Andorians in the pre-Federation era. So it's unavoidable that there are Vulcan colonies.

kkozoriz1 wrote:

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Seeing as Spock is apparently shell shocked or suffering from PTSD for the remainer of the movie, why would he be allowed to not only ship out with the Enterprise but be named First Officer?

We do not know how long after the main body of the movie that epilogue takes place. The exact time frame is left deliberately ambiguous.

Even when Kirk says it may be the only way to earn peace with the Romulans, Spock chooses revenge.

I'm sorry, but that's akin to saying that if the United States Army is in a firefight with Osama bin Ladin and he's about to escape unless they shoot him in the back, they shouldn't shoot. It's just absurd.

Yes, capturing him (be it Nero or bin Ladin) alive is preferable, but if that's not possible in combat, the logical thing is to protect innocent life by killing him.

[kkozoriz1]

Sci wrote:

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We do not know how long after the main body of the movie that epilogue takes place. The exact time frame is left deliberately ambiguous.

I'm sorry, but that's akin to saying that if the United States Army is in a firefight with Osama bin Ladin and he's about to escape unless they shoot him in the back, they shouldn't shoot. It's just absurd.

Yes, capturing him (be it Nero or bin Ladin) alive is preferable, but if that's not possible in combat, the logical thing is to protect innocent life by killing him.

Seeing as Kirk still has the scars on his face it would appear to be a few days at most. Spock goes through this horrible trauma and in less than a week is all better? He removed himself from duty and apparently declared himself fit again as well. Where was McCoy?

Nero wasn't going anywhere. The Narada was falling apart, pieces were falling off. It was on both sides of the wormhole, not going in one side and coming out the other in some other reality like we saw earlier.

This is akin to capturing an enemy solder who cannot run away, who has no weapons left and shooting him in the back. It's called revenge.

It's not surprising the support Spock has for his actions. How many war crimes have gone unpunished in Iraq and Afghanistan? If you take on the same actions of your foes, you become them.