There always seemed to be a huge discrepancy in the sizes people appeared on the Enterprise-D viewscreen - Q for example in the pilot, and the Ferengi in "The Last Outpost". It was a weird choice.
Tomalak's intelligence?
- Thread starter TJ Sinclair
- Start date
Novels aren't canon, of course.
Well, the Ferengi were deliberately made huge on the viewscreen in "The Last Outpost." It was even explicitly stated in dialogue that the image was distorted in some way. The idea was that the Ferengi were making themselves look big and scary to compensate for how small they really were (shades of Balok).
Anyway, why wouldn't there be a discrepancy? It's not as if every alien ship commander or government official would all be sitting exactly the same distance from their cameras and have them all on the exact same zoom setting.
A: Everyone here knows that.
B: How is that in any way relevant to the conversation?
Thank you Captain Obvious, uh, I mean McBain.
It's worth noting that Tomalak didn't do half-bad for himself. Not only did he becomie proconsul under two very different praetors, but the alliance he struck with Sela came very close to succeeding in its goals of acquiring Dominion technology for the Typhon Pact.
And nobody ascends to the centre seat of a Romulan warbird by being stupid,dullards don't tend to last long.
Perhaps Tomalek's ambition simply exceeded his ability.
As for recasting Tomalek,it would of course be possible(Peter Coyote would IMO make a great Romulan)but Katsulas had such tremendous presence that it is his face I see whenever Tomalek gets a mention.
Perhaps Tomalek's ambition simply exceeded his ability.
As for recasting Tomalek,it would of course be possible(Peter Coyote would IMO make a great Romulan)but Katsulas had such tremendous presence that it is his face I see whenever Tomalek gets a mention.
That strikes me as quite plausible.
The particular plan that took him down, the attempt to acquire Dominion technology and shuttle it through the wormhole to the Typhon Pact, did seem to be reasonably well-constructed--the planners thought the Breen merchanter had the cargo capacity to transport the material, they expected the Dominion couldn't intercept the ship's transmissions or detect it, they thought that the warbird could sneak out of the Gamma Quadrant past DS9. It's just that things went wrong that the planners couldn't control, whether we're talking of the Pact underestimating Dominion capacities or of the timing problems with DS9's bombs. It's easy to imagine circumstances where the plan did go off successfully.
Tomalak, for his part, would have benefitted enormously from Sela's successful gambit. Kamemor and her regime probably would have been tossed out, but Tomalak? Maybe he could have become Emperor, after all. He probably was quite useful to Sela as a sufficiently conventional Romulan--a half-blood could almost certainly never have become Praetor, but a Romulan military officer of note with a close ally?
Yup. They thought they were using him, but he was using them.
Actually I thought that the plan only really fell apart when they decided to add the bombs as a contingency plan, I mean if their hadn't been any bombs the crew wouldn't have found them, the station wouldn't have been on alert, and the warbird could have gotten away before either the Enterprise or Robinson could warn them about the deception.
Sure, we know that, but the Romulans and allies who planned the backup plan turned out to make the wrong assumptions. The communications jammer that the Romulans had placed near the Gamma Quadrant terminus of the wormhole probably would have been enough--neither the Odyssey nor the Enterprise beat the Romulan vessel back to the Bajoran system, and without communications no one would have learned what happened in time to prevent it. Coming up with another backup contingency plan to ensure that DS9 couldn't intervene would have been only prudent. Imagining the plan backfiring so spectacularly was something no one involved imagined.
Romulan intelligence underestimated the Dominion (fooled by the Breen acquaintance?) and overestimated the Federation. I don't think that the case can be made that this was a product of Romulan incompetence. It just was bad luck for Sela and Tomalak that things happened the way they did in the order they did.
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