I was reading a thread on Reddit the other day where someone was asking about why the Romulans in Next Generation have ridges and I seem to remember that there was a recent-ish novel this and I'm looking for some confirmation. (In case I made this up via mid-stroke.) The way I remember it being explained is that there was a sect or group of Romulans that had come into power during the Next Generation-era that were a variant of the Vulcan-Romulan race who had the ridges. Am I completely making this up or does this appear in one of the novels? And if so, which one? Thanks a bunch!
Do they mean a different race, like white/black/Asian/etc., or a different species altogether? I could buy the former; different ethnic/racial groups on Vulcan having differently shaped foreheads is no more implausible than having differently shaped eyes or noses. But postulating a whole separate hominid species from Vulcans evolving on Vulcan is... radical, to say the least. And quite unnecessary.
Christopher, YES, like a different race of Vulcans. I remember a Star Trek novel where they touched on this and said that there was some political goings on or whatever on Romulus that lead to this race of Romulans coming into power in the Next Gen-era and that is why Tomalok and all those cats had the ridges, but other Romulans seen in different eras didn't. Is this ringing a bell at all? I'm semi-concerned that this is head canon, but part of me thinks I read this during my last Trek-book binge, which admittedly was about two years ago.
Except the Romulans in Enterprise did have ridges (since Michael Westmore was doing the makeup, of course). And most of the Romulans we saw in TOS were wearing helmets that covered their foreheads, so we don't know if they had ridges or not. (Okay, strictly speaking, you can tell they didn't have the pronounced eyebrow ridges of the Westmore makeup, but we can fudge that a bit if we want.) So I tend to think that most of those helmeted Romulans in TOS were probably of the ridged majority. Almost all the smooth-headed ones we saw were senior officers or diplomats, the powerful elites. So the idea that the smooth-headed race was in power in TOS and displaced by TNG is a theory I've had for a long time, though I don't recall if I ever put it in a book.
The proto Vulcans in "Who Watches the Watchers?" had forehead ridges, so flatter foreheads might be more evolved.
Well, there sort of is, in terms of how well a species is adapted to its particular niche. In that sense, humans are much less evolved than, say, cats, because cats have been perfectly adapted to their evolutionary niche for tens of millions of years, while our hominin ancestors have only been walking upright for 4-5 million years and we've only existed as a species for about half a million years and been behaviorally modern for about 40,000 years. We're still not fully adapted to walking upright, which is why we have back, foot, and digestion problems, and we retain a lot of older behaviors that aren't well-adapted to our modern way of living, like the predatory drives underlying war and violent crime. I've often felt that's why we look on cats with such awe or fear -- because we sense that they've already got it all figured out, while we're still struggling to understand ourselves.
It would have been interesting had Joanne Linville been able to reprise her role as the Romulan Commander in TNG as planned, as her having ridges vs. not having them may have answered this question.
Obviously, crest restoration therapy no longer carried whatever stigma or high price tag that it once did, perhaps the result of QuchHa' Klingons earning some honor of their own, despite being discriminated against by their HemQuch brethren.
I think I read on MA that someone of the ST09 production team or at least someone involved with the film suggested that these ridges were some sort of implant, that was added after the Romulan was ashamed or did something not honorable or whatever and that these implants slowly made their way in to the Romulan DNA... However that would work. Of course I might be misremembering.