The Earth - Romulan War (non-canon)
- Thread starter Rahul
- Start date
Something I don't understand is why Paramount not wanting to explore this era of the ST universe.
They love to go back to prequels over and over but never really put any effort in this aspect.
Fans have desired to see the Earth-Romulan war over and over and TPTB had perfect allignment with Enterprise but they would rather create the Xindi than make it the beginning of the Earth-Romulan war.
Baffling.
They love to go back to prequels over and over but never really put any effort in this aspect.
Fans have desired to see the Earth-Romulan war over and over and TPTB had perfect allignment with Enterprise but they would rather create the Xindi than make it the beginning of the Earth-Romulan war.
Baffling.
They were going to do the war, but the show didn’t make it. It was always the plan.
Now if they do it… they’re just doing more ENT.
Well, first of all, not all fans have desired this. I certainly have no desire to see it.
And second, the fans that do want this will be sorely disappointed. Why? Because whatever the people currently in charge of Star Trek would do with it, would not be remotely what those fans have envisioned in their heads for the last 50+ years. (And yes, I'm talking about the fans who have been watching Star Trek since TOS, because newer fans or the 99% of fans who don't frequent the TrekBBS on a regular basis don't give two damns about the Romulan war. I mean, c'mon. The current people in charge seem to think fans want Star Trek to be a comedy show or 90210 in space.
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Unless you retcon a lot of the backstory from TOS, the Earth-Romulan War has some elements that would be extremely limiting as a narrative, while also being boxed-in as to where the story can ultimately go and how. For example, it's red-letter canon that humanity never "officially" finds out what a Romulan looks like in the war.
So you would have a story where either the protagonists and antagonists never meet face-to-face, or maybe you put the Romulans (and I guess the Remans) in encounter suits like the Breen where for some reason they're destroyed in death, or you say fuck all of it and have the villains be known and come up with convoluted reasons for why the truth was covered up. Also, Spock's description of how the war was fought already doesn't exactly mesh with Enterprise, since it's made to sound incredibly crude in "Balance of Terror," where humanity and the Romulans were lobbing nuclear warheads at each other. But Enterprise establishes Earth already had phasers, photon torpedoes, and the Romulans had warbirds and drone ships with disruptors.
Since Archer is set up as an incredibly consequential figure to all of this, you'd either need Scott Bakula to reprise his role, basically making it a sort-of Enterprise continuation, which from Paramount's perspective the question would be whether there's any market for revisiting a show they canceled in the 2000s for low ratings with none of the actors being big draws beyond their affection within the existing fanbase. Or they recast it and basically do the same thing Strange New Worlds does and visually reboot everything with new actors in some of those roles while also changing story elements (e.g., rethink the Romulans the same way the Gorn have been changed). Another option might be having different viewpoint characters who were people in the Earth-Romulan War that are significant but off having their own story while Archer and his crew were having theirs.
The only way I could see it working is if you took the idea and totally rethought it from the ground up, and let it be its own thing that is disconnected from continuity. That way you're not tied down by anything from either Enterprise or "Balance of Terror," and you can allow the war to go in any direction the script wants to go. There was a story back in July that Paramount is considering that with a "Star Trek Origin Movie" that would go that route and be a new entry point to Star Trek.
From The Hollywood Reporter:
Paramount has two Trek films in development. One is prequel focusing on humanity’s early contact with aliens and the formation of the Federation. Andor director Toby Haynes is attached to direct a script by Seth Grahame-Smith that is rumored to take place largely on Earth. The studio sees the project as an entry point for new fans who do not need to know about decades of canon (or keep up with the myriad shows on Paramount+). No cast or release date is set, but it’s in pole position to be the next Trek to hit the big screen.
One of my issues with Star Trek since 2009 has been how much it feels like everything kind of "winks at the camera" and sometimes doesn't feel like it takes Star Trek seriously at all. It rests on tracing over the past, changing it some, pointing at it and saying "remember this and doesn't it look cooler with the new CGI" and thinking that's innovative in showing hidden depths to old characters and subjects.
This is part of the reason that, while I like Strange New Worlds and think there are great episodes and actors in there, I don't see it as a "flagship" series that advances Star Trek as a franchise. It's a prequel/re-imagining of old characters within a time period where they're locked into certain things having to happen. You get episodes where its descends almost to being a parody of Star Trek instead of doing their own thing, and having their own distinctive voice that ADDS to the material. What does Strange New Worlds want to say as a theme about Star Trek, that adds deeper meaning to the ideas behind Star Trek, or do they just want to go pew-pew with xenomorph Gorn and turn Spock into a comedic character?
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Standard nuTrek.
Fans: "We would really like something like Legacy that advances the timeline..."
Paramount: "Fuck you, only prequels."
The good new is that with Paramount's track record, this film has only a 50% chance of actually being made. And the odds are probably actually much lower.
We see Washington, New York, and Paris blow up in SNW as Pike goes on about the eradication of 600,000 species of animals and plants and 30% of Earth's population. I didn’t get the impression it was limited mostly to Asia at all. There was probably a nuclear winter over the former BosWash megalopolis as well.
I always wondered what other worlds they were helping out.
That’s creative. The three stars always bugged me too; I just imagine them as an abstract representation of space without further significance.
Though as I type this the thought comes to mind that it could be a reference to a popular galactic myth and ubiquitous interstellar saying referring to “the three corners” of the galaxy — used by the artist to illustrate that we’re already united in various ways.
I wondered about that too when ENT was going. I think maybe it wouldn’t have made sense for them to do a first contact story with our nearest star when they’d have been going there for a while by that point.
I always thought it was a lost opportunity to do something really creative and show the fifth founding member to be a non-humanoid. Show more of a spectrum of alien lifeforms in the Federation—from human, to slightly different Vulcan, to more different Andorian/Tellarite, to very different Alpha Centaurian.
This is only a problem if you try to tell the story in the typical Trek way. Navy ships didn’t have view screens on WWII yet the tension was pretty high.
I remember in the pre-internet days some debate regarding Alpha Centauri. There were those in the camp that it was an independent Human colony and others that took the stance that it was an inhabited alien planet and home of the "Centaurans," the first extraterrestrial species Humans encountered (this was decades before First Contact hit the theatres.) Under the latter scenario, "Zephram Cochrane of Alpha Centauri" was a Human expatriate who developed warp drive there instead of on Earth.
IIRC, many of the arguments took place at conventions or in the letter pages of fanzines. Those seem like prehistoric times now...
Still not totally off the track though. Paris is the oddball because we see Paris in the 24th AND 25th centuries... and... it looks like Paris.
New York and Washington make some sense. Even in my version here, the US got hit... just not as hard. I think there's a reason why San Francisco became so important... it just got through WW3 largely unscathed and became something of the center for the western powers.
Paris... is still and oddball, although I like to think that perhaps as United Earth was gearing up, as a sign of unity to the world they got together and rebuilt one of the destroyed cities. Paris just happened to be it and became the capital because of it.
My personal headcanon for why there are “three stars” on the Federation flag when there are four-founding members is that the view of the stars represents Earth.
The three stars are the stars of Vulcan, Andoria, and Tellar Prime as seen in the night sky of Earth, since it serves as the capital.
I do think at a certain point it becomes too much to believe there was a full-scale nuclear war in the 2030s and Bozeman, Montana looks like it does in First Contact in the early 2060s.
Cochrane, Lilly and the rest of that camp would be doing well just to have food and not be dying from cancers rather than having the resources to develop interstellar flight and have a bar with stocked tequila.
There had to have been a point where the parties involved in World War 3 realized it was going too far and pulled back to an extent, since if I remember the estimates from the 1980s (and movies like The Day After and Threads) a full exchange would be devastating to a level even beyond Q’s court of atomic horrors and a possible extinction-event that would cripple society for centuries. Just growing food would require scraping multiple inches of contaminated topsoil, with no equipment (since its probably either been destroyed or EMPed). And even if you did have a working tractor, where you gonna put all that dirt?
I don’t think it’s odd but speaks to it being rebuilt using advanced future technologies. You might rebuild one day if you’re lucky enough to be capital world of a vast interstellar civilization, but I think most of us get that we won’t in the real world, so seeing our world burn was powerful — and fucking awesome for it.
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Except, I believe, there are certain oddities with the location of the Eiffel Tower.
It's plausible. It's hinted in the first season of ENT, through Reed and Sato, that the Vulcans could have landed somewhere else. I'd imagine that UK, Japan and Brazil were in a similar situation as Montana at the time - more economic depression than nuclear wasteland. It's really just the US, from Indiana to the Eastern Seaboard, and Paris that are the confirmed nuclear wastelands. That the Vulcans landed in Montana also allowed for a resurgance in American culture.
As for the Eastern Coalition, if they were an Augment faction, then yes, they would probably be finished off.
Althugh, if the Romulan War is all hands on deck, would humans refuse to utilize Augments if it helped them to turn the tide of the war? Do humans trust them that little?
It's four founding races, but five founding worlds.
Alpha Centauri gained independence from Earth a couple of decades before the events of ENT. I supposed Aplha Centauri to represent all the human colonies. Which makes sense. I'm not aware of any independent worlds in relation to the Vuclans, Andorians or Tellarites.
It's not the problem you think it is.
a) Yes. Telepathically controlled drone ships. A.I. controlled ships, nebula based warfare.
b) Yes. Romulan forces are in suits. Remember, the Romulans are an empire; they have grunts that can do the work for them that hail form all sorts of world the Romulans have conquered.
c) Yes. No shortage of ideas, from covering up the truth to prevent a surge on anti-Vulcan sentiment on Earth to a lie that the Romulans are a different species suffering from an experimental mutagenic virus that makes them look like Vulcans. Maybe someone serving in the war vaporizes a captive Romulan out of grief.
How powerful are the photonic torpedoes compared to a nuclear warhead in the ENT era? Maybe the torpedoes don't pack a big enough punch and are better used as mines.
The nuclear weapons don't need to be lobbed at starships. They could be lobbed at military bases, shipyards, trade outposts and colony cities. They could also be used to wipe out recently set up beachheads to stall momentum.
The nukes might be used for their EMP qualities. Or to de-mine certain regions of space.
Maybe some Earth ships and Romulan ships could only be fitted with nuclear weapons instead of phasers/photon torpedoes/disruptors, because those ships are so old (50-100 years old). And they were dragged out to the frontline in the face of dwindling numbers.
And and even after all that, there are nuclear-powered ships like DY-100s that could be used for kamikaze runs. And possible nuclear-powers stations and sensors as well.
At this point, unless you are showing some top secret recon missions the NX-01 was on, or the NX-01 operating as a command center during the war, Archer's really only needed for the founding of the Federation. it's more important to see him signing the Federation Charter and taking a group photo, or even argue why the Federation should be formed at Babel conferences, than leading troops into battle after an inspiring speech.
If Archer is basically the space version of Washington, what would be Archer's equivalent of Crossing of the Delaware River, anyways? Since I can't think of any.
It's the reason I feel that Earth going through an Imperial Starfleet phase was a more accurate history of late 21st and early 22nd century Earth, up to a point - the 2120s.
There's a war with the Kzinti, until Cochrane discovered warp drive. You're telling me that the Earth forces at the time don't reverse engineer any of that Kzinti tech they captured?
Then there's the loss of the Valiant. It's plausible that some on Earth assumed that it was destroyed by aliens. And the Valiant's disappearance was why United Earth movement temporarily fell apart. It would also give Vulcans a reason to step back a bit and let humanity solve their problems on their own. Even though humans ended up in a lawless, kill all the lawyers state. I don;t see why any humans in that period would want to engage with Vulcans, or any alien species.
There's also the fact that it would be illegal to have genetic enhancments. This means a lot of diseases could not be cured immediately. So, in the abscence of medical supplies, if the Vulcans aren't sharing, then humans are plundering various ships to gain access to medical treatment.
I feel that the early human colonists did a lot of stealing of alien tech to try and fix their society. That contributed to a lot of leaps in advanced in technology, but also led to some messy first contacts. And would be a reason for Vulcans to give humans access to their trade route, to control where humans go and prevent them from accidentally starting a war. And allow them access to the Interspecies Medical Exchange for the same reason. By the 2120s, the imperialist mentality would have settled down with the quality of life having gone way up on Earth. And they can focus on exploring.
But with this expansion, the Romulans would have reason to try and sabotage Earth's efforts for decades. Which leads to the creation of Starfleet.
I would argue that the US still existed... Cochrane was expecting to get paid for building Phoenix... and given just how quickly at least parts of the world recovered after the Vulcans came back (within a few years, Conestoga was launched to colonize Terra Nova...), AND given that so much of everything we see is American-dominated... it stands to reason the US got out of the war still in pretty good shape, even if it did take some hits.
Brings me back to the San Francisco thing... I think for whatever reason, the west coast fared better than the east coast, and post-WW3, San Francisco is a hugely important city for large reason because... it exists.
I like to think that Eastern Coalition isn't an augment faction, rather than the Eastern Coalition is a normal human faction that acted as something of a successor state to the Augment factions.
In my timeline, the Augments rise up, build their empires... which end up mostly in Asia (there are augments everywhere, they just all don't take the same route to power... the North American Augments build corporations and become billionaires, pulling strings from being the scenes). When the Augments fell, their nations still existed... and the normal humans had to scramble to seize power.
On a side note about the North American augments, i've made a timeline where the lead up the Eugenics Wars and ultimately things like the ECON involves some non-augment sympathizers getting involved. I have a whole section about how Dr. Nichols becomes a tech magnate after introducing transparent aluminum, who eventually absorbs Chronowerx after Starling disappears, and ends up being one of the lead tech suppliers to the Augments.
I like what the novels did that nukes were used as sensor flashbangs.
Didn’t read them—what?
He means they were used to temporarily blind or disrupt sensor scans.
