Best Romulan episodes?
- Thread starter ReadyAndWilling
- Start date
I find Romulan episodes after TOS to be very hard to watch due to them suddenly making the Romulans hideously ugly for no reason. Female Romulan Commander from TOS is the exact opposite of that. IMO it's a real shame they ruined that great tradition.
Thats more a reflection on "Voyager" than on the Romulan in that episode.
I second this.
The Romulans are the least used of all the major races in any of the series of Star Trek. And that's a real shame, because I really like them.
The problem is that they come across as very much a race of antagonists, rather than a race which can supply characters of all kinds.
Next Generation is by far the series in which they appear the most, and are generally considered to be the primary antagonists.
But they are usually used pretty badly. They were bigged up as the thing to watch out for at the end of S1, but their appearances in S2 of Next Gen were unremarkable.
And I think that shook the writer's confidence that they were worth using. Of all the writers on all the series of Star Trek, only Ronald D Moore seemed to have any real interest in them, but he liked the Klingons and the Maquis more.
Moore is involved in many of the Romulan episodes, and almost all of the really good ones ('Die is Cast', 'Inter Arma', 'The Defector' from Next Gen etc).
'In the Pale Moonlight' is excellent of course (one of the very best episodes of this or any series), but is it really a Romulan episode?
The principle action is all about Sisko and Garik, after all. The Romulans have no real agenda in the episode, and are little more than a useful plot device to explore Sisko's hardening psyche.
The writers just never could find a good way into the Romulans as a race, to consistently tell good stories with them.
The fact that the two series in which they are the most prominent (Next Gen and DS9) have no Vulcan regular cast members is also unfortunate.
The problem is that they come across as very much a race of antagonists, rather than a race which can supply characters of all kinds.
Next Generation is by far the series in which they appear the most, and are generally considered to be the primary antagonists.
But they are usually used pretty badly. They were bigged up as the thing to watch out for at the end of S1, but their appearances in S2 of Next Gen were unremarkable.
And I think that shook the writer's confidence that they were worth using. Of all the writers on all the series of Star Trek, only Ronald D Moore seemed to have any real interest in them, but he liked the Klingons and the Maquis more.
Moore is involved in many of the Romulan episodes, and almost all of the really good ones ('Die is Cast', 'Inter Arma', 'The Defector' from Next Gen etc).
'In the Pale Moonlight' is excellent of course (one of the very best episodes of this or any series), but is it really a Romulan episode?
The principle action is all about Sisko and Garik, after all. The Romulans have no real agenda in the episode, and are little more than a useful plot device to explore Sisko's hardening psyche.
The writers just never could find a good way into the Romulans as a race, to consistently tell good stories with them.
The fact that the two series in which they are the most prominent (Next Gen and DS9) have no Vulcan regular cast members is also unfortunate.
ReadyAndWilling
Fleet Captain
they could have really explored the romulans in VOY. imagine having an undercover Romulan posing as a vulcan...
Saquist
Commodore
Visionary is the only good Romulan episode.
It has the virtue of being the only Deep Space Nine episode that can be called true SCI FI and instead of drama and it's DS9 one and only smart episode.
The rest of DS9 depiction of Romulans was a 1 Dimensional Plot Devices.
I don't think it was the only episode of DS9 that could be called 'truly sci-fi instead of drama'... hell, I was thinking back to "Whispers" before I even went into this thread...
Saquist
Commodore
A replicate as SCI FI?
I personally really don't think so. That may go back as far as the body snatches but to see what they did with that concept in NEMESIS is an astoundingly moronic. It may be a staple of Sci Fi but it's used so shallowly, that episode had no substance just a predictable reveal that everything was not what it seemed. That's Drama.
Visionary was Science Fiction because we had a Phenomenon that was unexplained and seemly separate events occuring at the same time and resolution (mild of course) that intrestingly and perhaps in an unorthodox and smart way solved the the problem The Reveal was that the Romulans caused all of it inadvertently...
I thought it was the smartest episode for those reasons and the closes DS9 ever got to Sci FI.
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