Eh, I'd blame Stewart. From what I understand he wanted a more happy 'light' movie in the vein of Star Trek IV, and convinced TPTB to go along with it. It really sucks that Michael Piller's last big Star Trek contribution was 'Insurrection.'
I'll get to your thought-provoking previous post in a sec, Prae, but I want to gawk at this for a second--Insurrection was really their attempt to try to emulate the snappiest and most outright entertaining Star Trek adventure of all time? My God, I knew Insurrection was a failure, but now I can appreciate its failure on a whole new level. It's really quite sad.
Oh, and, with all due respect to the man, screw Stewart's mid-life macho crisis. I blame him for a lot of what went wrong with the TNG films. Maybe he was getting tired of his tea-sipping alter ego, but if that's the case,
kill Picard, don't have him try to become something he's not, namely some kind of action hero. It's Jean-Luc Picard, not Jean-Luc McClane, spouting "Engage, motherfucker" with a footfull of broken transparent aluminium.
I agree. I personally would not have been able to 'pull the trigger' on the Romulans. (Obviously I have a personal affinity for the Romulans.
) I think the simplest solution for Maurice Hurley is to have used another less important TOS adversary race - the Gorn, just for an example - as the race that is exterminated by the Borg but also manages to defeat a cube and fuels the
Enterprise's quest to understand how. Either possibility would have negated the need to 'replace' the Romulans with someone else in the Dominion arc on DS9, and offered the chance for us to see more of the Romulans.
Hey, or the Klingons. Maybe it's hindsight and their later overexposure talking, but I wouldn't mind seeing the Klingon Empire wiped off the face of the galaxy.
But the Gorn could work, I suppose. Surprising we never saw them after Arena (Mirror Darkly doesn't count)--maybe no one wanted to go to trouble of making (decent) Godzilla suits for the reptiloids.
The Romulans have always been underutilized - to some regard, the limit that we have seen of them has IMO added to their intrigue, in contrast to the Borg, who many argue were diminished by overuse. What we have seen, for me at least, has made me want to know and see more. I think they suffered in some regard from the 'personality transplant' that occurred between them and the Klingons between TOS and TNG. Really, I suppose it is TNG that is to blame for this.
I thought it was largely a result of Star Trek 3--that it was decided that the enemies should be Klingons instead of Romulans, in order to not confuse casual movie-goers with pointy-eared good guys and pointy-eared bad guys. My understanding was they added some of the nastier elements (the targ or whatever-it-was-dog-thing and such) to Klingon it up, but the dialogue and plot remained mostly unchanged, so that the Roms-cum-Klingons spoke of honor and stuff--not to mention, flew around in a cloaked bird-of-prey. Ultimately, I think that it was a good change--Kirk's loss on Genesis flows naturally into his role in Star Trek 6 as reluctant and conflicted peacemaker--but it did leave the Romulans somewhat rudderless as an enemy, consigning them to the unenviable role of an alien Oceania.
On the other hand, I find this decision, if in fact true, somewhat insulting as a movie-goer, as I doubt most people would be confused by different pointy-eared characters and factions than they would be confused by the varying motivations of different round-eared characters found in many major Hollywood productions. "Why is Jet Li fighting that guy? They both have epicanthal folds on their eyes--I am truly befuddled!"
I'll admit my source on this: the TrekBBS. I have no idea if it is true.
The Klingons seen in the films prior really didn't appear to have much in the way of honor. Obviously, there were Cold War metaphors involved there: the UFP was meant to represent the USA and her allies, the Klingons the Russians, and the Romulans the Chinese.
They could do well in any future Romulan appearances to play up the Chinese analogy, in my opinion. This emphatically does not mean, although Garak would have us believe this, that they have to be uninteresting commissars in ill-fitting gray suits. If that was ever an accurate stereotype of Chinese society, it certainly is no longer, and they'd do well to not only try to represent a real-world divide (as they did with the Fed-Kling Cold War), but do so in a way actually relevant to the real-world divide. Which would perforce mean a rather less bland Romulus.
I can't help but wonder if the modern Romulan culture reflects what Vulcan would be like if the Awakening of Surak had not happened? Why were the Romulans able to survive, if in the pre-Surak dark times the Vulcans were fighting constantly and on the verge of destroying themselves as Spock infrequently described? Is it, as TMoST seems to suggest, that where the Romulans dedicated themselves to total logic and peace, the Romulans dedicated themselves to 'warrior stoicism' and it is only the poverty of the Empire that prevents it from being something greater?
...
They go out of their way to show a heavily stratified society on Romulus, but a man could make the case that it's really the
Romulans who are free. Vulcan social organization borders on theocracy. Ever met a Vulcan who didn't practice logic? Okay, yeah, that one guy.
The Romulans may have political and economic dictatorship, but from their perspective, the real gray ones are those emotionless drones back there on what might as well be Arrakis. And I imagine they live in constant fear, mostly imagined but backed up somewhat by attempts by people like Spock to undermine their military-industrial aristocracy, that one day the Vulcans are going to use the vast resources of the Federation to come and enforce their totalitarian vision of what they ought to be on Romulus.
This might be the reason they kept their identities so secret during the war (I suspect the other reason is to keep species-specific biological weapons from being brought to bear against them by the Andorians, who I am sure had a big stockpile of anti-Vulcan viruses they were just itching to use). At any rate, the perceived need to defend themselves is the primary justification for their own dictatorship.
The formative years of the Romulan world-state were probably easier in many respects than those of their Vulcan cousins. We don't know the Roms never fought a nuclear civil war of their own--it's never been mentioned--but the Vulcans did.
It's key to remember that the Vulcans evolved, physiologically, psychologically and sociologically on what I like to call Planet Hell (no, not the one from Voyager). If we believe the fly-bys from TOS, they have pinkish-purple oceans--purple oceans being possible by the mechanism of purple sulfur bacteria living in nearly completely anoxic waters without a thermohaline current, deadly to any sort of life we would care to know, belching out hydrogen sulfide gas to unwary beachgoers. The entire continental surface of the planet appears to be a red, iron oxide-rich desert. Vulcan, in a word,
sucks. It sucks immeasurably. That humanoid life exists there would have to be both a miracle and a curse.
I like to think that there was a great debate before the Sundering (as Duane puts it, iirc), between the Romulans-to-be and the Vulcans who remained. On the Romulan side, I suppose there must have been Duane's S'Task, who'd have argued that only somewhere else could peace and prosperity be attained. And on the other side, there's Surak, arguing with religious fervor the conviction that the monster that torments the Vulcan people is inside them, that to leave would be merely to transplant the evil which besets them. Surak of course, is presently dying--Vulcan's not just a desert, now it's a radioactive desert, the bombs have all gone off and billions are dead. Surak won't leave the survivors behind. As many who can fit into the arkships do.
A few hundred years later...
For a while, maybe, Romulus was a paradise. But even within the lifetimes of the first generation on the ground this paradise must have faltered. Every ecosystem has its limits, and eventually the Romulans hit theirs, and the old problems resurfaced--long after he was dead, Surak was proven right about at least one thing: people are naturally bad.
Eventually, they adapted the archaic Vulcan code of honor and developed the despotic state to deal with and channel their innate drives for violence and conquest. They created a star empire to expand their population and resource base--to extend their ecological niche--even to diminishing returns, even to the detriment of individuals, even to worldwide catastrophe--just like they had on Vulcan, but just like any life form would given the chance to do it.
Just like our life form would, come to think of it.
Yet the Romulans remain free, in a sense: perhaps too free. Free to exploit their own people, free to create a stultifying political structure, free to master entire populations on other worlds. Anarchy breeds dictatorship; libertarianism breeds oligarchy.
One day, perhaps, the Vulcan people would come to a compromise between their equally extreme solutions to the key problem Surak posed. I think it's clear from the evidence we have that neither logical zealotry and socially-enforced self-denial nor interstellar military adventurism and survival-of-the-fittest politics really make much of anybody happy.
I mean, Sybok seemed happy, but he rejected both approaches for full-on lunacy.
In this respect, the Vulcans and Romulans represent, really, the crossroads humanity sits at--between bankrupt spiritualism on one hand and an abyss of materialism on the other. There ought to be another way, but no one's really found it yet.
I have always thought it would have worked better dramatically had the Romulans actually 'broken' Yar, and Sela actually turned out to be a brainwashed, alternate Yar from 'Yesterday's Enterprise.' There would then be a possibility of redemption, and still the bitterness of facing down a familiar face.
I see your angle, here, and like it, but at the same time I'd find it tough to swallow that a brainwashed Yar would be given the responsibility necessary for her to be a credible villain. Then again, I have the same question about Shinzon.
I don't know... while intriguing, that might have been too much. However, Sela would have worked nicely in the original version of 'Insurrection' that featured the Romulans as the antagonists trying to gain control of the dilithium-rich B'aku planet. IMO, the 'Fountain of Youth' idea would have been a nice secondary discovery, rather than a main motivation. This would have also set us up for a potentially better 'Nemesis.'
She beats Rufao--hey, wait a minute, wasn't that the kid from
Hook?
I'd have loved it if the Romulans were the TNG movies' equivalent of the TOS movies' Klingons. Especially since that's pretty much how it worked on the show.
WOW! whose worse? Shatner and TVF ''or'' Stewart and st9?
I have to say ''praetor'' I think you and me are on the same page when it comes to ideas and concepts to explore within the TREK verse! (I too would like to expand upon the romie's)It's a shame we weren't in charge of ''ENTERPRISE'' It might not have made 7 season's, but it shure would have made for a great run!
By the By I'm still looking for my book(Really almost a series bible!) with all my idea's on what I would have done ''differantly''. I'll either post it up, or if it's real long I'll start a new thread.
