Could the Hobus destruction of Romulus have been metaphorical?

Dental hygiene is serious business.

 

Romulan arrogance even applies to flossing.

 

Romulan ale is fluoridated.

Captain's log, stardate 47824.14159. We are on a mercy mission to what is left of Romulus. The people there have not been able to brush their teeth for two weeks. We are carrying a cargo of toothbrushes, toothpaste, floss, and several thousand kiloliters of extra strong mouthwash. We hope we are not too late before tooth decay starts setting in.

(Sorry, Wormhole, it was too easy.)

 

Okay, then how would a "working class stiff" know that Spock could be intercepted at the Hobus supernova?

Because the Romulan government was always so transparent to it's people?

 

He's a working class stiff with a sub space radio.

 

If I remember the comic, it was Nero who found the Hobus system was going to go nova and informed Romulus and Spock of the problem. I think it was Nero who took Spock to Vulcan. Nero made it back to Romulus to see it destroyed as the Hobus supernova happened sooner than expected, plus the Vulcan Science Academy refused to help. The comic suggests it was a mix of pressure from Ambassabor Picard and the Jellyfish's designer La'Forge, that got Spock the ship and Red Matter.

By then it was too late for Romulus, and Nero was starting to just shoot things (specifically Klignons), intercepted Spock early, but was delayed by the Enterprise-E, allowing Spock to complete his mission to stop the supernova just before Nero arrived to get revenge on Spock.

 

Oh boy, that was an embarrassing mistake. I should know better than to write a post when I'm in a rush to get out of the house.

 

Having a chunk of the planet's crust intact, held together by a force field normally used to deflect incoming fire from space--would amount to an asteroid with greek columns on it--visually a stunning concept.

 

Likely, if not certainly? That seems a bit exaggerated, especially given that there don't seem to be any specific plans to continue with the Prime universe at this point.

 

A major event such as the destruction of Romulus will certainly be revisited some time in the next 100 trillion years of human existence. I am willing to bet my gravestone on that.

 

Even if that were true, how can you bet on its destruction being retconned?

 

``THIS is Romulus! The supernova destroyed Remus six months after we were left here. Your dear Ambassador Spock never bothered to check on our progress…''

 

Well, some wanking is needed in Science Fiction. It is Science FICTION after all, not Science. But the science part means SOMETHING. It's not Fantasy. The Science part should at least limit the wankitude. To me, the idea of a "Supernova" traveling at Warp Speed, that can threaten the whole Galaxy, and that can be "sucked back" by Red Goo was well beyond that limit.

If any future writing and production team wanted to ignore that, I would certainly not complain. I am not even against destroying Romulus or Vulcan in principle. But the crazy plot these guys cooked up was just not plausible in any way to me. Let alone that a Miner (a frakking Miner?!?), would even be privy to these events. Does the Pentagon normally brief miners on Top secret projects? Not to mention that this so-called "miner" has a "mining ship" that's armed like a Dominion Battleship. The whole thing was preposterous.

 

It must have been a slow motion camera. If that shockwave was in real time, then it is clearly traveling a tiny fraction of the speed of light. Which means it should have taken many, many years to reach Romulus, and millions of years to slowly propagate through the Galaxy. That would have given them lots and lots of time to react to it.

In any case the idea that you could "suck back" a shockwave and all the stellar matter spread from light years behind it is as absurd as the rest of the plot of ST '09.

 

Ones does what fans and authors have been doing for at least the last 40 years....making it work, rather than ignoring it.

I seem to recall there are already several explanations in Star Trek Online to how and why that supernova was like that and how it was fixed. Also the tie-in comic on why Nero's ship was so well armed (it wasn't before Romulus was destroyed...it was due to a technological refit of Borg tech the Romulans had keep in secret following the alliance with the Federation and Klingons started during the Dominion War. The upgrade was authorized by someone in the Senate to stop the invasion of the Romulan Star Empire by the Klingons, whom Nero betrayed and murdered with the staff he used to kill the captain of the USS Kelvin. The upgrades were used to defeat a large number of late 24th century Klingon warships and crippled the USS Enterprise-E that came to stop Nero from getting to Spock (the Enterprise also picked up a wounded Worf, would was with the Klingon forces on Martok's orders.) The damage to Enterprise-E prevented them from chasing Nero down before Spock drops the Red Matter, leading Nero and Spock being sucked through the time-space distortion "black hole" thing. Enterprise arrives too late to rescue Spock, but acknowledges that his mission stopped the supernova from causing more damage that it already had.

Whatever was done to Hobus was not natural, and stopping the source of the supernova cut off the blast wave from expanding much farther than it already had into Romulan space, because something about the explosion was fueling the wave as it expanded outwards, that cutting it off would stop.

No it doesn't make sense normally, but it is clear this was not a normal, or natural supernova. Someone was mucking around the Hobus system with some sort of super weapon.

 

To make it work though, it has to work. And the post-script and post-film attempts to rescue the film from its own plot absurdities fails IMHO. The best thing to do in situations like this, for fans and writers alike, is to just ignore the parts that don't work. Whether it's no female Captains in Kirks time, or Warp Speed supernovas, don't try to make it work. It wont. Just ignore it and move on.

Clearly no supernova could ever do that. And that is what it was said to be in the film. Romulus being destroyed by a hostile Alien force is fine. Just ditch the Warp Speed supernova. That's not possible. Maybe Romulus was bombed in such a way that it made it seem like Section 31 was responsible, even though they weren't. Thus the Federation was blamed.

That would be a way to keep some story essentials, but leave the silliness out. And "no" on miners having access to top secret tech, commanding or stealing super ships, or even knowing that they are being built. He shouldn't have known anything about this, let alone be at the center of it. It seems that the idea was that planets would be drilled into and the Goo inserted, so they made it a Mining Ship.

The whole thing is so transparently laughable that I have no doubt, many post-film/post-script explanations have been developed to make some kind of sense of this nutty plot. But I think they fail.

 

The miner was not a super ship at the start of the comic (though it was large so it could stay in system and collect a lot of materials). The reasoning for it being make the "super ship" was basically that was the only Romulan ship the Senator could find.

The other thing of course is that the idea of it being a super ship is based on perspective. In the comic it is made to seem rather powerful as it takes out numbers of birds of prey, and damages the Enterprise-E. However when it does into the past, it is dealing with ships that are almost 150 years older than it in terms of technology, even before the Borg tech. Borg tech that uses missiles at that. It is disabled by being rammed by a single Federation ship that is at least 150 years older than where this mining ship came from. Then it was captured by a ton of tiny Klingon ships for 25 years. They manage to finally escape and take out a number of tiny Klingon ships, then seven 150 plus backward tech Federation ships, and then get bested by a ship that is over 100 years older than it when it finally has a warning about it being there.

Not quite so super ship like. Just big with a lot of missiles.

 

THIS! But with NuKhan somehow shunted between realities to cause havoc with early 25th century Admiral Picard.

 

Romulus is dead. Long live Romulus.

Personally, I think that--after a period of upheaval in which they may enter another period of isolationism--the Romulan Empire will return with a new planet called Romulus or New Romulus.

As far as how Romulus was destroyed, I chalk it up to it being more than a supernova, but also a tightly-focused (and directional) subspace blast, that took out Romulus like a sniper hit and would have taken out everything else directly in its path if Spock hadn't stopped it.

 

So then it is "Star Trek", as scientific absurdity is on tap for the vast majority of the franchises episodes/movies.