Hey, I never noticed that before....
- Thread starter Warped9
- Start date
SPOCK: My father's race was spared the dubious benefits of alcohol.
MCCOY: Now I know why they were conquered.
—"The Conscience of the King"
SPOCK: Vulcan has not been conquered within its collective memory. The memory goes back so far that no Vulcan can conceive of a conqueror.
—"The Immunity Syndrome"
MCCOY: Now I know why they were conquered.
—"The Conscience of the King"
SPOCK: Vulcan has not been conquered within its collective memory. The memory goes back so far that no Vulcan can conceive of a conqueror.
—"The Immunity Syndrome"
My explanation is that Vulcan was "conquered" by Surak's philosophy of logic and emotional self-control.
Wow, great memory. I had to look it up
Macbeth's soliloquy in Act 5 Scene 5
We do not discuss it with outsiders.
I feel that the dialog of "Metamorphosis" is pretty clear that for TOS Zephram Cochrane invented the warp drive not just for Earth, but for most of the Federation. If that is the case I think it's arguable that mankind brought warp drive to the Vulcans, and in doing so introduced them into the larger galactic picture. A historical analog would be Commodore Perry sailing into Tokyo Bay to reestablish trade with the Western world. So McCoy in "Conscience" is basically messing with Spock by referring to those events as being conquered.
On that note, this also is a better explanation for why Starfleet is so human centric, Earth was the driving force for its formation and helps explain why the Enterprise is often described as an "Earth" ship.
TOS was world building on-the-fly. Even the broad date was up in the air. Within the limits of TOS, there's enough wiggle room to suppose that various races discovered warp, or some other means of starflight, on their own. That much would be needed to cover the Vulcan/Romulan back history, and the Earth-Romulan war.
Certain episodes, like "Where No Man Has Gone Before," are simply unrecoverable without some serious contortions. (The Valiant got all the way out there—farther than anyone else had gone before or since—with impulse engines. So, was it ever established, within the TOS episodes, that impulse is strictly sub-light? When the Enterprise was damaged in that episode, Kirk's log said they were years away from help. If impulse was sub-light, those "years" would be millennia.)
Certain episodes, like "Where No Man Has Gone Before," are simply unrecoverable without some serious contortions. (The Valiant got all the way out there—farther than anyone else had gone before or since—with impulse engines. So, was it ever established, within the TOS episodes, that impulse is strictly sub-light? When the Enterprise was damaged in that episode, Kirk's log said they were years away from help. If impulse was sub-light, those "years" would be millennia.)
I'm pretty sure TOS has no episodes that established impulse as strictly sub-light
I lean towards Zefram Cochrane was an alien from Alpha Centauri or an earth colonist born on Alpha Centauri and discovered the space warp which was apparently a much better FTL system than the existing FTL drives (impulse, ion, etc).
I had always assumed the Romulan diaspora was with generation or sleeper ships, which helps better explain why the Vulcans would have lost touch and forgotten about them.
The Earth-Romulan war is a little more tricky. I wonder if back in the 60s the production using an opponent separated via a neutral zone was trying to draw a parallel with the Korean War and its demilitarized zone. If that's the case, that war may have been a much more localized conflict in the area around Romulan space.
Much like @blssdwlf, I think a case could be made that impulse power allowed for rudimentary FTL capabilities, because otherwise Romulans obviously wouldn't be a threat. From the dialog, warp power is much faster and provides more power based on Kirk and Scott's exchange. It's also notable that fuel is a concern for the Romulans in the episode, but never for Enterprise, which may be an analogy for nuclear versus oil powered ships, which may mean that impulse powered ships might have reasonable bursts of FTL speeds, but at the expense of any kind of range.
Last edited:
Absolutely. McCoy talks about a war a hundred years ago. If the Romulan's "simple impulse" was sublight, they would have fought Earth ships the way toddlers fight a motorcycle gang. We could pop into their solar system unannounced, blow up their fleet, and pop out again before they knew there even was a war.
For a war like that, the only reason to even bother would be for conquest and pillage of the Romulan homeworld. And that's not our thing.
We can also infer from "The Menagerie" Part II and "Metamorphosis" that Starfleet shuttlecraft go faster than light. They gotta.
I feel newer stuff supersedes the earlier stuff. Vulcan has never been conquered erases McCoy's earlier line from continuity. "James T. Kirk" erases the James R. Kirk inscription from WNMHGB. Starfleet and the Federation takes "Space Command" and "Earth ship" out of continuity. And so on.
And in "The Apple," the landing party beams down in two groups. An initial party of six and a second party of three, McCoy and two security guards.
They obviously knew they were due to run into Space Nazis at some point & had to be prepared.
Interestingly, Zephram Cochrane is not referred to as "the inventor of warp drive" in "Metamorphosis," but rather the "discoverer of the space warp."
That sounds to me like Zephram Cochrane's breakthrough was actually discovering a natural phenomenon that warped space, along the lines of the tachyon eddy in the DS9 episode "Explorers" that let Sisko and Jake make it to Cardassia in an old fashioned solar sailing ship. And maybe he reverse engineered that phenomenon into something that could duplicate the effect artificially. But somehow over the years that just became "Zephram Cochrane invented warp drive" instead. Probably just from people misremembering the dialogue in the pre-VCR era.
Absolutely. Like @Metryq says above, TOS was worldbuilding on the fly. Originally Spock was a Vulcanian who had an ancestor who married a human female. By the end of the first season he was a Vulcan whose mother was human.
But who refers to their father that way? Or their mother?
The same person who introduced his parents to Kirk without mentioning their relationship at all.
Or, they, meaning Roddenberry et al., hadn't yet nailed down that the "human female" who one of his ancestors married was his mother. My money's on that.
Spock was well over any caginess about acknowledging he had a human mother by the very next (or very first production) episode, "The Corbomite Maneuver" ("She considered herself a very fortunate Earth woman").
Last edited:
From "Corbomite" onward, in which he admits it's his mother who is from Earth, or in other words, every episode after the pilots, it isn't.
Exactly. My point was they changed their minds about lots of stuff over the course of the first season as their thinking evolved.
Similar threads
