And I found the story of Shinzon to be seriously flawed, to boot. If one assumed that he was cloned and grew to adulthood in a normal time frame, it makes no sense. Picard would have basically been a nothing when Shinzon started out life and it made no sense to have had him patterned after Picard. The ONLY way that could have worked would have been had the growth been sharply accelerated, time-wise.
I'm surprised that people keep thinking that -- they're forgetting just how old Picard is, and what a veteran captain he already was when TNG began. As of NEM, he's 74 years old and has been in command of the
Enterprise for over 15 years. Shinzon was only in his 20s, so by the time was born, Picard had already established himself as the legendary commander of the
Stargazer, the man who became the youngest captain in Starfleet history and led an extraordinary 22-year mission of exploration.
DiW had a logical explanation for this, which is pretty much the same one I'd thought of when I saw NEM. Basically, Romulan agents stole the DNA of a number of starship captains, including Picard (who commanded the Stargazer at the time) with the intent of substituting their clones somewhere down the line.
Yes, that's the other thing that surprises me -- the way the critics of the Shinzon idea jump to the conclusion that Picard was the only one sampled. The DiW idea that he was one of multiple targets seems like an entirely natural assumption to make.
Where growth-acceleration would have needed to factor in would be the age discrepency between the clones and the originals, but given the advanced state of surgical disguise in the 24th century, it's possible the Romulans would just have made their clone infiltrators 'look' the correct age.
Err, this was a critical plot point in the movie. It was explained outright that Shinzon was supposed to be given a treatment that would artificially age him once he reached adulthood. His whole biology was designed with that in mind. But since the project had collapsed, he wasn't given that treatment, and without it, his body was breaking down. That's the whole reason the movie happened in the first place. The reason he staged the coup, took over the government, and made a bogus peace offering to the Federation was so that he could lure Picard to Romulus, steal his genetic material, and use it to repair his own genetic damage so that he could live on.
Plus how would he have gotten out of the mines and slavery? I didn't buy THAT bit either.
That was explained as well. The Romulans used Reman troops as cannon fodder in the Dominion War, just as armies throughout history have used slaves as soldiers -- see the Jannisaries of the Ottoman Empire, for instance. Shinzon was one of those troops, and his heroism and tactical brilliance in the war enabled him to rise through the ranks despite his origins.
We're conditioned by American history to see slavery in a certain way, but different cultures have practiced slavery very differently, and there have been plenty of human cultures where slavery has not been an absolute bar to career advancement in the military or even the government. Whole dynasties in the Muslim world have been ruled by people who were nominally slaves to the caliphate back home. So who's to say how much upward mobility a slave might have in Romulan culture in normal circumstances, let alone in wartime where prejudices often must give way to survival?
And there is no way that the paranoid Romulans would have either teamed up with him (yeah, a human escapee from the Reman mines. Rrrigght), or he would have made it past security to take over things.
Again, the movie explained this. The Romulans themselves were divided; Praetor Hiren was being challenged by a faction that objected to his "appeasement" of the Federation and wanted to embrace an expansionist military policy. They were already primed and willing to overthrow the government, and Shinzon's war record won him their respect. Since they were hostile to the Praetor anyway, it's not at all surprising that they would've been willing to ally with another enemy of the Praetor, as Shinzon was. Politics makes strange bedfellows, after all. Shinzon said the right things about backing their expansionism and therefore won their support for his coup. Probably they saw him as something of a figurehead, someone who could take the risks and the blame so they wouldn't have to.
There, I'll agree. I don't dislike NEM as many others do - I usually place it 4th in my list of favourites, after "First Contact", "Undiscovered Country" and "Generations" (in that order), but I think the movie's biggest failing (other than pointlessly killing off Data) was the apparent unwillingess to capitalize, onscreen, on the wealth of potential storytelling and characterization that the premise promised. It's a tragedy that a character of Shinzon's complexity had to be overlooked, rendered only in brief, not always coherent strokes, in exchange for buggy racing with Tusken raiders.
Hmm, I only partly agree. Personally I think Shinzon was a very rich character, and I love his interplay with Picard, but a lot of that is subtext. And that potential is somewhat underutilized by the whole business of Shinzon pursuing a rather pointless attack on Earth. And I thoroughly agree that the buggy chase was a waste of time that could've been better spent on real storytelling. The problem is that the market demands that
Star Trek films be action blockbusters rather than thoughtful science-fiction dramas. Shinzon could've been a great character for a story arc on the TV series, but movies these days have to be kept simple, so maybe there was just too much to get across in too brief a time and it didn't work for most viewers (although it worked fine for me, mostly).
Ruanek's character was in Vf and in a short story in the Dominiion war story collection too. it's nice to see him in the this series again.
