The glaring backstory hole in all this is that the Tal Shiar -- and, by implication, the Zhat Vhash -- must have known about Data for at least a couple of decades through the TNG series and movies, and likely some time before that, given the duration of Data's service prior to TNG season 1.
There would, inevitably, have been some degree of fleet and public notoriety attached to a synthetic life form being acknowledged to have sentient / sapient status by the Federation and to then progress through Starfleet to the point of reaching Lieutenant Commander and Second Officer of the flagship. If the Romulans had any intelligence service worth more than a penny they would have picked up on this.
So how come the murderous fundamentalist fanatics made NO effort to kidnap or assassinate Data in all that time...?
I mean, obviously the real reason is that the Zhat Vash weren't created before PIC, but I think there are a number of plausible in-universe justifications.
First and most obviously, it is actually exceedingly difficult to infiltrate the flagship of a foreign power's space force, particularly when that ship is often deployed far away from your territory or off in unexplored space.
Secondly, I think it's pretty clear that Nedar's infiltration of Starfleet under the "Oh" alias was likely at least in part a reaction to Data's presence, and likely part of a long-term plan to eventually get him killed.
Third -- and this is just spitballing here, but -- what if several of the accidents or crisis the
Enterprise encountered during TNG that they'd thought were from something else, were at least in part the result of Zhat Vash manipulation? What if, for instance, the Zhat Vash managed to manipulate the ship into entering that temporal loops in "Cause and Effect," or to hit that quantum filament in "Disaster?" Maybe it was the Zhat Vash who got those alien lifeforms to colonize the quantum singularity aboard the Romulan warbird so that the
Enterprise would be destroyed trying to help it in "Timescape." Maybe a Zhat Vash assassination attempt was why Data lost his memory and wandered into that prewarp village in "Thine Own Self." Etc.
Maybe they felt that assassinating Data would be too risky, given his high public profile and the no-doubt large-scale efforts being undertaken by the Daystrom Institute to re-create a Soong-type positronic brain. Maybe they felt that such a high-profile situation necessitated a political as well as special-ops-type response, and then Data went and died on them before they could act.
Maybe the Zhat Vash were not in a position to act on their own wishes as a result of the Romulan political situation before the supernova.
Finally -- maybe the Zhat Vash felt that Data would be unable to reproduce, since no one had yet figured out how to re-create a Soong-type positronic brain, and therefore they were willing to spy on him rather than destroy him until such time as they felt it likely he would be able to build a viable "son" or "daughter."
Sci said:
2396: Maddux leaves Coppelius and creates the synths Dahj and Soji from a new lab on Freecloud.
I was never under the impression that Dahj and Soji were created on Freecloud. Finding Coppelius was always presented as Soji finding home, the place that she was created. Hence the "childhood" memory fragments that served as clues to the planet's identity.
Ah, fair point. Chabon has said on Instagram that his intention was that Maddux had operated from Freecloud when he sent them off, but maybe I conflated that with
building them.
It was discussed openly by the characters in Episode 8, "Broken Pieces".
Raffi: The Romulans send in a mole...a half-Romulan Vulcan named Oh. She burrows into Starfleet, rises through the ranks, and becomes head of Security. And all the while she has one mandate: to put a stop to the Federation's research on development of synthetic life-forms. To this end, she decides to engineer a situation so terrifying that the Federation's only response will be to ban synths forever.
Jurati: The Romulans were behind the attack on Mars.
Yeah, the show told us...through the characters...who know.
Well there you have it then! The Feds know about Nedar.
218 Romulans ships came from where? The Romulan Free State government?
Good question. I think it's highly probable that those ships were Tal Shiar rather than Free State per se. They were relatively small ships -- they looked like they only had a couple of decks. And we already know from DS9's "The Die is Cast" that the Tal Shiar has a history of building its own fleets. Add to this the fact that the Tal Shiar under the Star Empire was able to commandeer Imperial Fleet vessels for its own use but was unable to unilaterally commandeer the Artifact until they could claim they were acting against Hugh's "hostility" in PIC, and the Free State's willingness at all to allow Federation scientists to study Borg technology, and I think it's improbable the fleet in "Et in Arcadia Ego, Part II" was taking its orders from the Free State.