Not sure why everyone is so hot on the Romulan War. Star Trek is NOT Star Wars.
So far we've had the Borg conflict, unending strife with the Klingons and Cardassians, the Dominion war and countless other skirmishes and engagements, random encounters leading to movies (Beyond, Into Darkness, The Khan-flict, so on...)
Enough already.
Star Trek is supposed to be about Boldly Going where no one has gone before. I was highly disappointed that Discovery immediately dove into Yet Another War involving Klingons. Same with Picard. Lower Decks has the background threat of Something Something Packleds.
Enough. Wars and time-travel are Star Trek's two go-to story ideas for storytelling, and it need not be.
You mean like in TOS, where the Federation and Klingons briefly go to war in one episode and wage proxy wars against each other in another?
Or TNG, which featured a Klingon civil war, and we learn later on that the Federation has been engaged in a border war with the Cardassians all this time in the background that morphs into a Cardassian conflict with the Maquis?
Or DS9, which starts after the end of the Occupation, then sees a Klingon-Federation war, a Klingon-Cardassian War and then the Dominion War? And the Terran rebels against the Alliance in the mirror universe?
Or Voyager, which sees a war between the Borg and Species 8472?
Or Enterprise, which had the Vulcan-Andorian conflict in the background, a season focused on the Xindi conflict, and the Temporal Cold War over the course of four seasons? That latter becoming known as the Temporal Wars in Discovery, a series that though that the Trek franchise need yet another Klingon war?
War is a part of the franchise, just like Star Wars. However, Star Wars, after a passing mention of the Clone Wars in A New Hope, has addressed it in the prequel movies and a tv series and then moved on to other stories. While Star Trek has basically approached the Romulan War as 'there was a major war many years ago and the Romulans have hated the Federation ever since…moving on.' Yes, Moonves cancel the show before Enterprise got to it. But when both Coto and Berman wanted to tell a Romulan War story, albeit with different visions, clearly there’s a story to be told here.
Fact is, we know of four key battles (Galorndon Core, Sol, Vorkado, & Cheron). We know of important figures (Chulak, the Stiles family, the Romulan captain who inspired the photonic shockwave maneuver that the Doctor would reference two centuries later in “Workforce”) that took part. We know that it ends in the alliance of Earth/Vulcan/Andoria/Tellar, meaning that the Coalition of Planets as depicted at the end of S4 has to fall apart, although how is not clarified. We know that Alpha Centauri is a separate signatory from United Earth to the Federation, although we don’t know why. We know that Remans were a subject species of the Romulan Empire, and that at least one species seen in TNG – the Corvallens – operated near the Romulan border. We know that the Romulans are engaged in hundreds of campaigns on their side of the Neutral Zone over the next 100 years in the aftermath of the war and they were armed with atomic weapons upon their re-emergence to the Federation that they did not seem to have in Enterprise. And we know that among the dozens of worlds located in the Neutral Zone, one of them was the Iconian homeworld. All of this being alpha canon, and not beta canon.
And based on what we know that was planned for the fifth season of Enterprise, a visit to Stratos/Ardana for zenite and T’Pol being revealed to be half-Romulan does fit into the story. Plus, Romulans were originally supposed to be depicted as honor bound in the TOS movies, before they were depicted as engaging in deception and as a cerebral enemy for the Federation in TNG. And with the Romulans being a vulcanoid species, it opens up the possibility that they did visit the Delphic Expanse years before Archer (maybe looking for kamacite), but left due to trellium-D exposure, thereby opening a possible connection with the the Xindi conflict and the the Romulan war. And while we don't actually know if Station Salem One was the same starbase as Starbase 1, it would make sense if its destruction was the Pearl Harbor-level bloody preamble to war that was referenced by Picard.
And you don’t see the opportunity for exploration in the Romulan War setting? And to weave all of this history together in one coherent narrative?
