Romulan War

[T'Girl]

It would be really hard to tell the complete story of a war in the made-up Trek universe without doing massive info dumps.

Perhaps they could begin each episode with, instead of a captain's log, with a synopsis of the war up to that point, I'm thinking of something like a history teacher standing in front of a class of kids, or a officer in front of a military briefing, or a west wing like scene of the president getting his morning briefing, something like that ... then fade to our heroes ship.

 

[DarKush]

^
I think the Clone Wars cartoon does a good job with exposition, often setting up each episode through a news reel type announcer. Perhaps it could've been something applied to Trek for the Romulan War, or to have an embedded reporter aboard the Enterprise.

 

[Demiurge]

I thought the Xindi arc was OK, but they missed out on a couple of things. One, there was no need to have an attack on Earth - that is the type of thing that would have been referenced in the previous 20+ years of Trek episodes more than likely! It could easily have been a colony that was lost. Of course, that goes back to Braga's famous line from ST:Nemesis - "We've figured out what Trek fans want. They want to see Earth in danger.' LOL.

Two, I though they really could have had an interesting parallel with the Xindi. Instead of multiple different species that intelligently involved on the same planet, they should have made them an actual federation. The juxtaposition between the fighting a federation of allied alien worlds (all being manipulated by the Sphere Builders) and the fractious nature of the planets that would later be part of the UFP would have made for some interesting social commentary.

Finally, they should have made the Xindi disappear at the end. That could have been part of the larger Temporal Cold War arc and given it real oomph as an ongoing basis. At the very least make it understood why a major world nearby had little or no presence in the ongoing Trek saga past this time period.

Continuity is maintained, you got some actual social commentary, and you make the Temporal Cold War relevant in new ways.

As far as the Romulan War went, you can't have it sublight, it's just too dumb. But I think they showed with the holographic drone ship that you could have quite a bit of interesting new developments in the Romulan War.

You could also have made an episode where the Romulans were revealed - however the Vulcans, fearing the backlash, used telepathic means to remove the information from one or more of the crews minds. Of course, if you did that, it would have to be a branch of the Central Command Vulcans that hadn't adapted to Sarek's teachings yet. That group itself could be an interesting ongoing plot, perhaps eventually finding they had more in common with the Romulans than they did their brethren on Vulcan.

 

[T'Girl]

One, there was no need to have an attack on Earth

The episode was aired about nineteen months after the attack of September 11, 2001, I think the attack during The Expanse was an allusion to that event. An attack upon the heartland.

Two, I though they really could have had an interesting parallel with the Xindi. Instead of multiple different species that intelligently involved on the same planet, they should have made them an actual federation.

Having the enemy be composed of a multiple world, a multiple species alliance would have been interesting. The Xindi shouldn't have been from a single planet, it really added nothing to them.

At the very least make it understood why a major world nearby had little or no presence in the ongoing Trek saga past this time period.

Don't know about that, Dr. Phlox species was never referred to in any other series. One of Star Trek theme's was that there's life everywhere

 

[Timo]

...And of course we can argue that the Xindi were mentioned later/previously. There's a Xindi starbase in the Xindi Cabu system in TNG "The Battle"/"Bloodlines", and the Feline Xindi attacked Earth several times in the 22nd or late 21st century as per TAS "Slaver Weapon".

Spelling is optional - especially when one is dealing with a multispecies culture where some speakers have chitinous mandibles and others have fangs!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

...And of course we can argue that the Xindi were mentioned later/previously. There's a Xindi starbase in the Xindi Cabu system in TNG "The Battle"/"Bloodlines", and the Feline Xindi attacked Earth several times in the 22nd or late 21st century as per TAS "Slaver Weapon".

Spelling is optional - especially when one is dealing with a multispecies culture where some speakers have chitinous mandibles and others have fangs!

Timo Saloniemi

The Kzinti are not the Xindi! Trust me, if they were it would have come up in Known Space.

The Kzinti are, however, also the M'Dok.

 

[Timo]

Believing in the Feline Xindi would solve quite a few problems here ("here" being "our" side of the ratcat universe, the Trek side, not the Ringworld one that Niven himself and his sandbox buddies have been expanding afterwards).

Perhaps the ENT Xindi attack was what Sulu called the last of the four wars the Xindi fought with humankind; that would be over a century before Sulu's speech, which might be good enough to qualify for his "two centuries". Given that the Xindi are multispecies, and that there canonically exist(ed) "secret species" such as the avians, it wouldn't be surprising if mankind learned ex post facto that some earlier attacks against it had been the doings of the Xindi after all. The first three attacks just happened to be by the Feline Xindi, the Bovine Xindi and the Cuniculine Xindi, respectively.

Dividing the burden of "past wars we never saw" among a number of species yet grouping them all under "Xindi" would make life easier for us pseudohistorians...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

Or you could just retcon what Sulu said about the number and era of the man-kzin wars, like the TNG novel The Captain's Honor (where the Kzini were renamed M'Dok due to last minute lisencing issues) did and the unmade season 5 Enterprise episode (and later unmade Phase II fan film) "Kilkenny Cats" would have.

Earth's occupation of the Kzin worlds (from Known Space, and vaguely described in "Slaver Weapon") would have been a fascinating subject for Trek. It's so against the Federation ethos, yet (if you take the TNG novel into account) has been going on for two centuries.

 

[Timo]

Whatever Starfleet was doing before ENT would be fascinating.

They aren't on top of piracy, obviously, so it's not that. They aren't exploring, because NX-01 is their first serious attempt at that. They still have warships. Do they conquer? Do they colonize? Do they participate in the wars of others? Does Sol often come under attack? Do Vulcans help out against those?

Babylon Five had a dirty little war in the recent past of Earthforce, against a foe the primitive military could handle. ENT has every right to feature such a thing, too.

That said, I don't think keeping the Trek Kzinti closely related to Known Space would be fruitful. The timeline is completely different, really. There could be cute similarities, perhaps an Earth colony akin to Wunderland overran and occupied by the Feline Xindi in the first conflict. But there wouldn't be Puppeteers (beyond a few cameos played by Vulcans), there wouldn't be Ringworld, there wouldn't be ARM and the long peace. And apparently there wouldn't be radically independent Earth colonies that are at odds with the motherworld.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CaptJimboJones]

For what it's worth, I believe the Romulan War is portrayed in the Enterprise continuation novels. I haven't read any, though, so I have no idea if the story is decent. It's not caaaannnooonnn, of course, but since we're unlikely to get an onscreen ENT version of the Romulan Wars its about the closest to canon we'll ever get.

 

[F. King Daniel]

For what it's worth, I believe the Romulan War is portrayed in the Enterprise continuation novels. I haven't read any, though, so I have no idea if the story is decent. It's not caaaannnooonnn, of course, but since we're unlikely to get an onscreen ENT version of the Romulan Wars its about the closest to canon we'll ever get.

It's horrible. The worst of the Trek novel line.

 

[Hathaway Brown]

^I wouldn't say its the worst, its better than some that I've read, but its not great I'll admit.
What bugs me is that the other NX's are dropping like flies and all that is left is the Enterprise. That and the long drawn out nature of it with no real progression.

As for the War itself, I'm sure it would have made for much better TV.

 

[Smellincoffee]

^I wouldn't say its the worst, its better than some that I've read, but its not great I'll admit.
What bugs me is that the other NX's are dropping like flies and all that is left is the Enterprise. That and the long drawn out nature of it with no real progression.

As for the War itself, I'm sure it would have made for much better TV.

Like flies isn't quickl enough. As soon as we see them, they're dust. Kind of morbid considering the ships are named after NASA's shuttles -- Challenger's death especially so.

Michael Jan Friedman covered the last great battle of the Romulan War in his Starfleet: Year One. I prefer his version of early Starfleet history to Enterprise's, though I suppose I'd miss Shran. ;-) It also reads like a genuine predecessor to TOS.

 

[Hathaway Brown]

I know they were probably trying to go for gritty realism, but it almost bordered on the far fetched.

It got exciting when I first clapped eyes on the names Discovery and Atlantis in the book. "Now we're getting somewhere" I thought. Within half a paragraph I found myself saying "well that's just stupid".

 

[Temis the Vorta]

^
I think the Clone Wars cartoon does a good job with exposition, often setting up each episode through a news reel type announcer. Perhaps it could've been something applied to Trek for the Romulan War, or to have an embedded reporter aboard the Enterprise.

TCW's exposition works because of the similarity to a 1930s newsreel, which fits in with the Flash Gordon pedigree of Star Wars as a whole. But it would be jarringly inappropriate for ENT or any Star Trek series.

For an Earth-Romulan War story to work, Star Trek should use its own example of a successful, serialized war series: DS9.

The problem of the Romulans being "boring" can be solved by giving them the Cardassian treatment. Before DS9 developed the Cardies, they were "boring" too. The first step is for the writers to decide what the core identity of the Rommies is. Amazing after all this time, that hasn't even been done.