The Romulans in Trek TOS didn’t have facial ridges. At some point, they must have genetically engineered themselves to have ridges because it makes them look badass -- and they thought ridges looked cool on Klingons.
Vulcans and Romulans
- Thread starter CuttingEdge100
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^^^
Romulans don't discuss that with outsiders...
Romulans don't discuss that with outsiders...
It's possible that some Romulans have ridges while others don't. Remember how lots of TOS Romulans wear those helmets that cover up where the ridges would be? It's possible in the time between TOS and TNG the Ridged ones just became the majority.
Or they may have been the majority all along. Perhaps the division back in Surak's time was along racial lines, and most of those who chose to leave (or were banished) were of the ridged races. They'd butt heads with Vulcans in the ENT era, and lose a big war with Earth. In TOS, only an aggressive ridgeless minority would dare attempt a rematch, probably in hopes of gaining some prominence. And that one would go very badly, so we'd never see a resurgence of ridgeless soldiers and commanders and politicians, not even in the TNG era...
TImo Saloniemi
TImo Saloniemi
That might explain some of the animosity between the Balance of Terror Romulan commander and the younger (helmeted) officer he clashed with. The commander possessed no ridges and the younger officer did.
That might explain some of the animosity between the Balance of Terror Romulan commander and the younger (helmeted) officer he clashed with. The commander possessed no ridges and the younger officer did.
That makes sense. Hooray!
Or you could say that romulans lost their ridges because of the klingon augment virus, blah blah
That might explain some of the animosity between the Balance of Terror Romulan commander and the younger (helmeted) officer he clashed with. The commander possessed no ridges and the younger officer did.
Or it could simply be because the younger officers' daddy put him on the ship... which is what is implied in the episode.
...If we assume that all the ridged folks in TOS hid their ridges beneath helmets, we may well deduce that the ridges were considered shameful, perhaps a mark of lower social standing in general, and thus of inferior bloodline in those cases a ridgehead achieved social success.
Or we may decide the ridgeheads were prominent in those professions that called for helmets - echoing, say, the old stereotype of all NY cops being black or Irish. The professions might be highly regarded in the Romulan society, or then not: they sound like military careers, and the military might be prominent in that society, yet the foot soldier or starship security guard might be a pariah element of the military culture.
Thankfully, though, our exposure to Romulans in TOS was limited to the crews of two starships only. We might plead statistical fluke, whatever our pet theory about the larger Romulan society happens to be. Or we might argue that Romulan ships, like Klingon ones, tend to be maintained and crewed by specific clans with specific physical traits.
Timo Saloniemi
Or we may decide the ridgeheads were prominent in those professions that called for helmets - echoing, say, the old stereotype of all NY cops being black or Irish. The professions might be highly regarded in the Romulan society, or then not: they sound like military careers, and the military might be prominent in that society, yet the foot soldier or starship security guard might be a pariah element of the military culture.
Thankfully, though, our exposure to Romulans in TOS was limited to the crews of two starships only. We might plead statistical fluke, whatever our pet theory about the larger Romulan society happens to be. Or we might argue that Romulan ships, like Klingon ones, tend to be maintained and crewed by specific clans with specific physical traits.
Timo Saloniemi
That might explain some of the animosity between the Balance of Terror Romulan commander and the younger (helmeted) officer he clashed with. The commander possessed no ridges and the younger officer did.
That makes sense. Hooray!
Or you could say that romulans lost their ridges because of the klingon augment virus, blah blah
To have ridges or not to have ridges, that is the question of both the Romulans, Klingons and ruffles too. The 1979 TMP change to the Klingons and explanation in ENT was all very interesting...at least the writers acknowledged the changes.
Since we know from Enterprise that Vulcans built P'Jem monestary 3000 years before Earth joined the interstellar community, it stands to reason that a thousand years later when the separation (and final devastating conflict that destroyed most of their technology) happened, the Romulans decided to take whatever advanced technology they could still find at the time and left Vulcan (it probably was a planned move in the first place).
They could have travelled through space at Warp 1.5 or Warp 2, and eventually reach Romulus where they settled.
I find it a bit illogical the Vulcans would use generational ships for travelling all the way to P'Jem and creating a small monastery there.
What's the point?
If they came there for Kholinar, then it would be expected for Vulcans to reach the planet in their lifetime so they could undergo the process and not die of old age before they ever got there.
At the moment of their departure, and for some time to come, the Vulcans resumed their conflict until devastating themselves technologically, with Surak leading the way to logic and took 1000 years to rebuild, leaving them with just less than 1000 years to achieve other technological feats we saw in ENT.
Earth indeed took 98 years (to be precise) to recover from the global conflict that was probably very much like the one on Vulcan, and reached Warp 5 along with several technologies that would be relatively able in going up against various foes of the era in question.
Vulcans taking much longer to recover probably coincides with their perception of logic and reason.
We've seen how much they slowed technological development for Earth alone.
If they hadn't interfered to such a degree, it's possible that Archer would have been in command of a Warp 6 or Warp 7 ship (very much comparable to Vulcans) by 2151, and the NX-01 would have been launched decades earlier.
They could have travelled through space at Warp 1.5 or Warp 2, and eventually reach Romulus where they settled.
I find it a bit illogical the Vulcans would use generational ships for travelling all the way to P'Jem and creating a small monastery there.
What's the point?
If they came there for Kholinar, then it would be expected for Vulcans to reach the planet in their lifetime so they could undergo the process and not die of old age before they ever got there.
At the moment of their departure, and for some time to come, the Vulcans resumed their conflict until devastating themselves technologically, with Surak leading the way to logic and took 1000 years to rebuild, leaving them with just less than 1000 years to achieve other technological feats we saw in ENT.
Earth indeed took 98 years (to be precise) to recover from the global conflict that was probably very much like the one on Vulcan, and reached Warp 5 along with several technologies that would be relatively able in going up against various foes of the era in question.
Vulcans taking much longer to recover probably coincides with their perception of logic and reason.
We've seen how much they slowed technological development for Earth alone.
If they hadn't interfered to such a degree, it's possible that Archer would have been in command of a Warp 6 or Warp 7 ship (very much comparable to Vulcans) by 2151, and the NX-01 would have been launched decades earlier.
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Perhaps that's how they GAINED it. It is, in the novels, how the Trill from "The Host" managed to get ridges (the Augment virus infects a Trill colony).
Improving makeup looks for aliens was something TOS itself started, so it's hardly terrible to just do what's been done all along unless it was a bad idea then (and no one thinks so). And it didn't contradict anything in TOS about Romulans, it just adds to the bigger whole.
But it wasn't done because they thought it added something to the race. They did it because they thought their audience would be confused because Romulans and Vulcans looked alike. Which was the whole point behind the Romulans to begin with.
A religious one? Isolation is often an important aspect of monastrial life...
The basic assumption that the Romulans left in an unprecedented exodus is perhaps worth challenging. We could just as well assume that Vulcan had a small interstellar empire at that point, and that Romulans didn't so much "leave" as "fail to keep in touch". They might already have been living off-Vulcan to a large part, and their small group of star systems seceded from the larger Vulcan whole, perhaps leaving two midget empires of roughly equal size. Romulus itself might have been settled only after the secession, of course - but some parts of the Romulan Star Empire might be old Vulcan colonies that lie basically next door to the original home system (and thus explain the apparent proximity of the RNZ to Vulcan in, say, "Unification" or STXI).
To the contrary, it might be that Vulcan aid was the sole reason Earth achieved high warp so quickly. Vulcans had no Vulcans to aid them! It's easy to invent something when you can read about it in the user's manual...
Did they? At the time "The Neutral Zone" was filmed, there had only been one Vulcan character in the show, Henry Darrow's oddball Admiral in "Conspiracy". They could always have claimed this Admiral was a human/Vulcan hybrid or something if they wanted to bring alienness to the Vulcanoid whole through the application of more intricate prosthetics.
Timo Saloniemi
I know we see a Vulcan in passing in Encounter at Farpoint and we also see one as a competitor of Wesley's in Coming of Age.
TOS and TMP makeup master Fred Philips said during production of TMP that the ridged Klingons were what he had always wanted to do with them, and the big screen budget allowed him to accomplish this goal. He also stated, as did GR, that nitpicky fans were expected to imagine TOS with ridged Klingons, as if they had always been that way. All the rest is retcon.
