posted
I didn't read the whole thread, and it's kind of hard to glean the details from what people are talking about, but I don't really care for the idea that the Romulans know who the Vulcans (that is, in relation to themselves) but the Vulcans don't know who the Romulans are. Personally, I think Vulcan actions in Enterprise prior to this season make more sense if you assume that the Vulcans know more about the Romulans than they're letting on. (For instance, why are the Vulcans so eager to set up client states like Earth close to the Romulan Empire? I think I've weakly ranted about this before, but were I in charge, I'd have it all part of a grand Vulcan strategy to surround the Romulans with Vulcan allies before the Romulans can do the opposite. But, that's just me.)
Registered: Mar 1999
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Romulans will not be seen but will use remote control to pilot thier ships so the Vulcans don't find out they are related.
Q may be responsible for the Klingons getting thier bumpies taken away for a while.
Vulcans and Andorians combine forces to destroy a Romulan invasion with the help of Archer, and the Romulans then blame Archer for thier setback and sets up the Earth-Romulan War.
-------------------- "Well, Sergeant? Aren't you going to say that it's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside? Everybody else does."
"It's pretty obvious, isn't it?"
The Doctor and Sgt. Benton, in "The Three Doctors"
Registered: Oct 2004
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posted
See, again, I'd prefer it if the Romulans launched an attack on Earth to keep it out of Vulcan hands, rather than because Earth got in the way of an attack on Vulcan directly; but perhaps all that Vietnam talk this past year has unduly affected my tastes.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Well, it looks like the first rule of the e-mail is you don't talk about the e-mail. Probably at least twenty people in that thread asked where the e-mail came from and how to get it, and everyone pretended they weren't even there.
As for Romulans knowing about Vulcans, Simon, I'd say it makes sense. The first Romulans would have passed the story down through the generations about how they escaped their oppresors on Vulcan, or something. The Vulcans, on the other hand, didn't keep track of the renegades who fled the planet 2000 years earlier. When some unseen aliens calling themselves "Romulans" show up, why do you think the Vulcans would say "gee, I wonder if they're descended from those people who left Vulcan twenty generations ago, even though there is no evidence that would even cause such a thought to occur to me"?
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
That's not quite my favored interpretation. What I'm saying is that I like the idea that the Vulcans know that the Romulans, perhaps not necessarily by that name, left Vulcan traveling in some general direction, perhaps for some specific destination, perhaps not, and that ever since they've either been successfully keeping tabs on them or are just sort of generally aware of where they probably are, and have been planning accordingly.
I mean, I'm not insisting that the Vulcans know exactly who the Romulans are prior to "Balance of Terror," though I think that's a neat idea.
Moreover, I don't think there's any reason to think that my favored version is more or less likely than any other. The whole Romulan/Human conflict thing is hazy enough to allow for almost any interpretation. I'm just suggesting what I'd like to see.
(Having said that, what about the reference from Voyager to a war between Romulus and Vulcan? I got the impression that it wasn't the civil war that led to their split that was being described, but rather that it was implying some sort of interplanetary conflict after that point but presumably prior to Vulcan joining the Federation.)
Basically, I like the idea of there being some underlying strategy behind Vulcans taking planets like Earth under their wing, as it were, and I think that it would provide a handy provocation to war, as well as making certain Vulcan actions less sinister (They wanted to hold back human exploration because they didn't want us encountering the Romulans before we were ready.) and others more so. (They were grooming humanity to be their foot soldiers in a potential conflict without letting us know about it.)
(Also, perhaps the reason they were so unwilling to send ships into the Delphic Expanse to look for the Xindi is because they felt that was only a feint intended to distract from a Romulan invasion. After all, if the Vulcans were planning on waging their war by proxy, then surely the Romulans would be as well, or so the Vulcans would assume.)
But, like I said, this is just what I'd personally like to see.
Registered: Mar 1999
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"But, like I said, this is just what I'd personally like to see."
I had interpreted your original post not as "this is my idea", but as "their way makes no sense; here's my idea". And I was pointing out why their way made sense. But, if that wasn't your intention...
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:I think its a bogus bunch of bullshit, perpetuated by a few on that board as a mean joke.
I would have thought so as well, if I didn't already know that one of the posters confirming the rumor actually works for the show.
quote:Q may be responsible for the Klingons getting thier bumpies taken away for a while.
No, that's not true. You misread the post. When the member "Quills" made his post implying that the big secret was the reason for the Klingon'a TOS appaerance, he signed his post "Q". He didn't mean that Q was responsible.
quote:Having said that, what about the reference from Voyager to a war between Romulus and Vulcan?
Simon, I really think that you should treat this line for what it is...a throwaway line. Voyager and DS9 were full of them. The one writer for that one episode made this one vague statement, which has not been backed up in any way by any further evidence. He might as well have said "the hundred-years war between the Terellians and the Tyreleans," for all that the line would matter. It's best left ignored, IMHO.
So apparently, the rumor about the next ST movie involving the Romulan war, with an entirely new cast of characters, was either just BS, or TPTB realized just how stupid a premise like that would be for a movie (not the Rommie War itself, but the use of new actors no one has ever seen in Star Trek before).
Either way, if what I've read turns out to be true, then I'm very excited to see what happens this season. Unfortunately, I still have no doubt in my mind that no matter how good this season might be, it will be the last.
Registered: Jun 2000
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posted
Well, I mean, that's true, but what isn't a throwaway line? And how are DS9 and Voyager full of them while TNG and TOS are not? I mean, I see what you're getting at. It's just something I've thought would be cool. But by the same token, the whole idea that the "Earth/Romulan War" was fought between Earth and Romulus, as opposed to the Federation and Romulus, sort of occupies the same ideaspace. I mean, at that point in Star Trek everything was "Earth" or "human" even though later in the show those references get redacted to "Federation."
Anyway, lots of what we focus on as "canon" and important is, ultimately, fairly arbitrary. (Well, being fiction, ultimately all of it is arbitrary, but you know what I mean.)
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
We don't have to literally throw away that particular line, of course. These are Q speaking, after all: if one caused a hundred-year Vulcan-Romulan war, the other may easily have "uncaused" it, erasing it from our timeline.
In any case, I'm definitely in love with Manny and his cohorts. The Romulan angle here seems just convoluted enough to fit my personal tastes: not a mere rationalization, but a rationalization with a twist of lemon (and I do like lemon).
"Ancient writings of Surak"... I wonder if they've got clearance to mention one S'Task here?
But... Klingon foreheads "explained"? Now I'm trembling. I hope the explanation will be sufficiently comedic. Or tear-jerking dramatic. If it's merely plausible, then it's an opportunity wasted.
quote:"Ancient writings of Surak"... I wonder if they've got clearance to mention one S'Task here?
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), S'Task and pretty much every other reference from Diane Duane's pre-TNG envisionings of Vulcan & the Romulans have been ignored in favor of the newer Sherman & Schwartz books, especially "Vulcan's Soul: Exodus," with a quite different take on Surak's era.
Of course, whatever ENT has up its sleeve could be different as well...
Registered: Jun 2000
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posted
I'm still awaiting a soft-cover "Exodus", having been generally satisfied with "Forge" and "Heart" and not finding much in the way of explicit contradictions of the Rihannsu interpretation...
Of course, ENT has already canonically outdated some of Duane's work, by giving us an interstellar Vulcan monastery a millennium before Surak. It is a rather major departure from Duane's writing that Vulcan would already be an interstellar colonizing power when they go from warlike to pacifist-logical - but then again, it's exactly what Spock says in "Balance of Terror"! Duane must have ignored that one, or then she thought that Spock was speaking of dirtside colonization rather than interstellar colonization.
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