The main reason for giving the Romulans “Klingon-design” ships specifically later on was that a PA accidentally stepped on the Romulan Bird of Prey model and broke it.
That’s not confirmed to have happened, it’s only a theory. There’s another theory that it was because they needed to show off the expensive new D7 model which had been gifted to them
@@TheMrPeteChannel My theory is that someone left the cloaking device on by mistake and it was misplaced as a result. ... What? It doesn't actually turn invisible? That's disappointing.
@@amiscellaneoushuman3516 "If anyone could use a good tailor, it would be them" Odo's quote when asked if it was the Romulans behind Garak's attempted assassination (DS9, forgot the name of the episode).
When you remember those costumes were introduced in the 80s, they make a lot more sense. My grandmother rocked a pantsuit that looked a lot like a Romulan uniform back in the 80s :)
In the background material for the tabletop game Starfleet Battles it's stated that the Klingons and the Romulans had a brief alliance and exchange of technology. Which is why Klingon ships ended up with cloaking devices and why Romulans were using the D7 design.
I hate to nitpick but John Colicos played Kor. Michael Ansara was the actor who played Kang. I sure someone in the comments has already posted this. Jolan Tru
I would rather the next Star Trek movie take place in neither the Kelvin Timeline nor the Prime Timeline but go back and take place in the original universe. I've had enough of the JJAbramsverse. You forget to mention the DS9 episodes featuring the Romulans and their involvement in the Dominion War.
I know this comment is four months old but I just want to point out that the Prime timeline is the original universe. Everything made before Star Trek 2009 was Prime timeline, JJ-verse is Star Trek 09, Into Darkness and Beyond.
@Tyler Durden I absolutely agree. JJ took Trek and made it into Star Wars. We already have star wars. My idea has always been to just create a movie crew of new characters. In response to the original poster, the Dominion War may have been the most amazing Romulan arc in the entire trek universe.
@Tyler Durden absolutely I agree with you 100% plus JJ or should I say jar jar Abrams gas torched and wrecked BOTH Star Trek and Star Wars with his total debauchery of Canon !!!.. Before he finished the 2009 Trek movie Abrams even stated in a interview that he NEVER watched TOS as a kid or as an Adult To me that says a lot about the out come of all three of his Trek movies including all of the post George Lucus movies ,; attempting to attach his own "Spin," and interjection into 🌟 Wars Canon ,thus calling it his own original content.
One thing they have managed is to have some terrific actors play Romulans. From Mark Lenard in TOS through to Andreas Katsulas (sp?) in TNG they have always been interesting portrayals.
the one thing I liked about ST Picard, is how the Romulan compliment of the space station is a mixture of all the styles they used over the years: grey uniforms and black wigs from TNG, black checkerboard uniforms from Nemesis, bald soldiers like in 2009, _black_ Romulans, etc.
I don't recall where I heard it, but there is a lore explanation for the Romulans having D7 cruisers. In "Balance of Terror", we are told that the Romulans did not have warp drive (yet the Bird of Prey had warp nacelles). Also in TOS, the Klingons do not have cloaking technology. At some point, the Romulans traded cloaking technology for Klingon warp technology which included plans for the D7. This is why we see Romulan D7s and cloaking Klingon vessels in the movies.
One possible explanation for the Bird of Prey having warp nacelles is that it had non-tactical warp. The idea is that a ship with tactical warp capabilities unequivocally outclasses one without... except that the Romulans had the cloaking device.
watch again. scotty is speaking about the power of the ship towards weapons etc not the drive system. www.ditl.org/article-page.php?ArticleID=12&ListID=Articles#:~:text=Romulan%20Warp%20Drive%20One%20of%20the%20stranger%20facets,new%20Romulan%20ship%20encountered%20in%20that%20episode%20%3A
STO did the Romulans justice with the Empire still existing, the formation of the Romulan Republic and the Tal'Shiar up to their old games trying to become the the top Romulan faction.
I've always enjoyed and been drawn to the Romulans. And yes, I think you nailed it. Their characters are always somebody you remember unlike a lot of other 1 time people you just could care less for. Their devious nature make them fun, and the actors really ham up the parts to really drive their culture home every time. You never know their purpose, just know that its' going to be interesting with a romulan involved.
When I am going trough the original series I often find little details that remind me just how old the show is, both in terms of production tech and in series development. But they did such a good job with the Romulans out the gate that I don't find anything like that with them.
Thank you for including "The Romulan Way". I read this a long time ago and thought it really explained how the Romulans came to be, while also giving up so much of their Vulcan heritage.
Your comprehensive examinations are worthy of attention. The novel, "Spock's World" gave a narration closer to the one mentioned in, "The Romulan Way," so I'm surprised you missed that, but then, there have been dozens of books in each series' lines, of which I have long since lost count and ability to buy (I worked for B&N from 1995-97, so I used to have income, and a discount). Your analysis is succinct and fulsome. Thank you. I just subscribed, and look forward to more. I'm an Aspie, so it's hard for me to connect irl. Sci-fi, Marvel Universe, etc., showed me potentials within which I could live. The human mind creates universes, which reflect real potentials both here, and Multiverseally. Live long, and Prosper. #IDIC #CThia
Actor John Calicos portrayed the Klingon Commander Kor in ST:TOS and decades later the same Kor, the long lived High Master in ST:DS9. Michael Anzara portrayed Kang, young and aged respectively, in both series.
My fan canon has always been that Surak's Awakening simply did not take in a particular region. Since I have never seen ridged Vulcans, I am going to go with this, especially since I have seen more variety to skin tones than with the two tone (now three tone) Romulans. I think the people who refused the Awakening were from a particular region with most having a particular look indicative of it. Then they left en masse.
I like the ST Picard explanation that ridges are from Northern Romulans. Personally I feel like they appear as a specific result of Vulcanoid physiology versus environment. I came up with the idea that Vulcans have a glandular network in their forehead that keeps their brains cool in Vulcan's extremely hot environment. In cooler environments like Romulus or even Mintaka, it gets...stuffed up and swells, hence forehead ridges.
ST: Enterprise was a lost opportunity to show the entirety of the Earth-Romulan War, and the original establishment of the neutral zone. It would have made for an epic story arc. I simply cannot understand why they decided to devote the show to an endless succession of convoluted unnecessary time travel plots.
It was strange for them to ignore the Romulans for the entire first three seasons, sans a one off episode. I will also never understand why they did not use the Romulans surprise attacking Florida with an atomic weapon in favor of the Xindi launching a surprise attack. The entire third season could have been about the Enterprise trying to put together clues about who attacked earth and discovering who the Romulans were. At the very least they could have made the Xindi puppets of the Romulans who got them to attack earth for them.... instead of the weird Sphere Builders.
Enterprise was a whole series of weird decisions. Gotta love it, redheaded stepchild though it is. (Also is the phrase redheaded stepchild still socially acceptable? It made me feel weird as soon as I typed it, bc obv redheads and stepchildren are blameless and harmless. Or have we as a society collectively agreed that it’s just a harmless, albeit weird outdated phrase out of context?)
@@UndyingNephalim that would have been better, agreed. I struggle with ENT season 3 for the same reason I once struggled with voyager... why test a doomsday weapon that isn't ready on the planet you plan to use it on? If they had tested the weapon elsewhere, and then just rocked up to earth with a functioning weapon... similar to voyager, did janeway not know about time bombs? As time has marched on both Voy and Ent have become favorites but at the time I couldn't wrap my head around that stuff and just instead rewatched TNG.
Well I can only speak for myself, but I think it's fair to say that alot of us who had been with what we today call the berman era since 1987, 18 years later in 2005 when Enterprise got the axe... let's just say franchise fatigue was a thing. ENT was not getting the ratings anymore and even die hards like myself were just tired of it. That may sound blasphemous but if 12 years from now the kurtzman era is still airing I challenge anyone to still be excited on a weekly basis. absence makes the heart grow fonder and it was probably only 2 years after ENT left the air and us die hard trekkies were binging the VOY and ENT episodes we missed, and were ready for it to come back on the air.
enterprise is another universe, reason behind photons being early is temporal war, could it be that romulans felt that earth was even stronger and forming federation faster even. many reason why romulan war didn't play out
8:36 Let's appreciate for a moment the flat out obvious appearance of Colonial Vipers from Battlestar Galactica on the cover of the Star Trek book :) And sorry I hope the Kelvin timeline dies as soon as possible.
I'm disappointed you haven't touched upon DS9 at all. The Romulans were portrayed brilliantly there. Scheming, cunning, surprisingly becoming Federation allies but still loads of scheming on both sides as they prepare for a post-war Alpha Quadrant. It was very much the start of a US-USSR cold war setting.
True, till their homeworld is about to be vaporise from the supernova that lead tens of millions of offworld Romulans homeless. 18 Billion natives on Romulus were perished.
My personal view was that shortly after the Vulcans became a Spacefaring civilisation they were driven back to their home world by some threat ( there’s plenty of indications that happened int the alpha quadrant by the number of destroyed and elder races who have also abandoned space travel ) while the Romlians were left to fend for themselves who in the original series seen to be Harding their borders more than expanding them to the point I felt that the war was caused by humans trying to colonise In their neutral zone ( much like the opium wars between Britain and China )
I'd love to see the agents of the temporal Corps go in and prevent Spock's failure and thus preventing the destruction of Romulus and the maniacal revenge fueled chaos by Nero and the destruction of the USS Kelvin. Thus setting the timeline back on its original course.
While thinking about the new brow compared to “Balance of Terror” I was wondering if they had a caste-like system. Strong brows being pushed into leadership roles. I wonder if anyone else here considered this?
Star Trek Picard Season One has established that the Romulans with brow ridges are Southerners while the ones without brow ridges are Northerners, and they tend to make fun of each other as evidenced by the banter between Laris and Zhaban in the Picard home in Labarre, France.
Kelvin timeline. High school jocks and cheerleaders in space. I could only take Bones seriously as an officer. Go back to Prime. Kelvin reminds me o Jar Jar Binks.
@@OffRampTourist I agree.. Karl Urban is a very good versatilel actor As far as I am concerned he was SPOT ON was Dr Leanerd "Bones" McCoy he brought with him his own. Touches and talents that DeForest Kelly made as a character worthy of endearment. The same can also be said of the fellow that played Pavlo Checkov and how he reimagined Walter Keoing 's version on this character.. Also the actor who played Montgomery Scott was very good as well ..
In my opinion, if Klingons are used to represent USSR/Russia, Romulans as a whole represent the culture of a certain East Asian culture, which I will say begin with Nemesis and then amplified in Picard; depend on how you see it, thus split, with one side going very high in secrecy, the other keeping old traditions. This is especially when you look at Qowat Milat and Elnor's design.
Ironically the klingons originally liked large cruses while the Romulans liked more agility. In the 24th century they basically swapped ship design doctrines with klingons closing the bird of prey and the Romulans choosing the D'Deridex
I have long thought that part of the split between Vulcans and Romulans was different philosophies on how to deal with a critical issue. In Star Trek: Enterprise there are episodes dealing with The Vulcans nearly wiping themselves out. One of the main issues was the strength of Vulcan emotion and how contact with aliens had caused them to lose control and lead them to a war that nearly killed them all. Sarak's solution was to learn to suppress all emotions. So the often related statement that Vulcans have no emotions is a lie, they have simply learned not to express them. Romulans chose a different path. First was to become xenophobic. Any alien influence was suspect. The second half was a rigidly structured society. While Vulcans exerted control inwardly, Romulans exert the control outwardly.
the vulcans had always been warlike. its just that with tech advancing they got better at killing one another and ruining what was left of their planet
I thought the TNG era finally established that the Klingons had birds of prey as their light cruiser/raider class ships and Romulans had 'warbird' as a general term for all of their ships, but it gets mixed up so much in other works that I can't tell anymore
TOS: There's no doubt in my mind that after "Balance of Terror" and "The Deadly Years", the original Romulan bird-of-prey remained one of the workhorses of the Romulan fleet. By the time of "The Enterprise Incident", it is widely believed that the Romulans formed a temporary alliance with the Klingons, hence the use of their battlecruisers in that episode, along the first Klingon ship with a cloaking device we ever saw in Star Trek III.
Whoa. Somebody forgot about DS9! They joined the Star Fleet Alliance as one of three armies. They fought the Dominion. Their pragmatism and shrewd world view became more prominent and contrasted very well with the Klingon Empire and Starfleet. And they were important to one of DS9's best episodes "Pale Moonlight".
John Colicos did not portray Kang. He portrayed Kor, in the first season episode Errand of Mercy, the first appearance of the Klingons. Kang was portrayed by the late, great Michael Ansara, in the third season episode Day of the Dove. Get your references straight.
Will you consider including i future episodes, or even make an episode in on itself about, the 70's and 80's Star Trek roleplaying games' lore, and how it connected or diverged or even influence movies and tv-shows?
The change to the Romulans' physical appearance in TNG is not unlike what was done with the Klingons for Discovery and both were really unnecessary. The Romulans were established in TOS as being nearly indistinguishable from Vulcans, different only in culture. At least Picard cleaned up the mess by simply giving us every Romulan variant ever seen. This also fixed the common Trek problem of nearly all representatives of any given alien species being the same in culture, language, and dress. Hopefully the Klingons will get the same treatment soon
What about the Romulan/Vulcan origin hinted at in The Paradise Syndrome where representatives of one was (or both) were kidnapped and relocated to another world long ago by an ancient race? Maybe both originated on an as yet unknown planet.
I always chalk it up as the earlier appearance of the cloak either being temporal shenanigans or being a significantly less advanced version that's easier to detect and Balance of Terror was a perfected version.
In a way you are right, in both Enterprise and Discovery what they are calling "cloaks" are actually more like stealth technology we use today, it kept sensors from detecting them too easily but they could be seen when close enough. By the time of TOS the Romulans had perfected the light bending technology and the ship in "Balance of Terror" was the first equipped with it, as well as the new weapon.
I dont think the idea was holograms were a new thing in TNG, I think the idea was, or at least can reasonably be taken as the level of holographic technology seen in TNG was new. At least to the characters in the show. Theres a fair difference between rendering a single object like a ship that needs to be convincing from a distance and rendering a fully immersive space with perfect replicas of trees grass water wind sound scents etc. Not only that but it is able to alter the apparent perspective of people in the holodeck space, two people can appear hundreds of feet apart while sharing the same smallish room. I think we can also allow that not everything in trek holds up to scrutiny and thus cant really be relied upon as solid canon, that same episode had the Enterprise able to detect the romulan ship so well that they could shadow the ship perfectly. Matching course and speed to appear as a sensor glitch, yet despite clearly having the exact position course and speed of this ship they couldn't fire on it without a visual?? Targeting via sensors was a thing all the way back in WW2 when many on staff had been fighting, and was a common thing in the military by the mid to late 60s. This just doesnt hold up even in the shows contemporary period, DSC did a light recon of this where the Klingon cloak in season one didnt completely hid the presence of the ship but did actively disrupt sensors to make accurately targeting the ship difficult. And while you might argue that BoT establishes that cloaks are a brand new thing theres no dialogue that actually says that. From the crews perspective accounting for season one of discovery Starfleet had seen cloaks before, but had found a way to effectively penetrate it. Then ate confronted with a refined cloak that left them starting over from step one. As stories involving cloaks usually do. This different cloak may be why the Romulans couldn't warp away, their solution to the Klingon cloak being busted required the warp core to be entirely off line. Season 2 of DSC shows Klingons using their cloaks at warp but they are also detected by Disco before they arrive.
The Balance of Terror was based on a film and book written by a veteran of the Battle of the Atlantic based on his experiences in World War II against U-Boats. So to maintain the dramatic consistency the tech may certainly seem inconsistent. However the facts of that episode actually support your later interpretation of Discovery's events. Enterprise was tracking the Bird of Prey via Motion detector, not their normal sensors. They couldn't actually get a lock. In other words, she couldn't see them if they didn't move. It's entirely possible that without normal sensors attacking would've only given away their position without any guarantee of hitting them at the range they were at. However, Discovery detecting the Klingons actually had nothing to do with them using warp drive. Discovery's battle with the Sarcophagus ship before their trip to the Mirror Universe provided sufficient sensor data for Starfleet to completely defeat that iteration of the Klingon cloaking device.
Hi Romulans Most loved enemy in my early star trek. Enterprise was good and should have been given the full seven years to take it to the level that many fans feel it would have reach. I agree Star Trek into Darkness was a bad choice to build a story that could NEVER come near Wrath of Khan. I would like a new Star Trek with the the Chris Pine crew, Thank for sharing your work on the history of a great race.
Can some one tell me how Romulan got to the place they are in Star Trek discovery or did that happen off camera. Because I do not remember them losing their home planet in TNG or any of the TNG tv spin offs.
It was from the prelude comic to the first Star Trek movie set in the Kelvin universe. A star in Romulan space threatened to go supernova and destroy the Romulan homeworld. Spock, using Red Matter, managed to stop it but not before it devastated Romulus itself, thus forcing an evacuation. Religious extremists called the Jaad Vash disrupted the evacuation plan because they were fearful of the Federation's advances in A.I. They hatched a plan to destroy the StarFleet evacuation armada that was being built at Utopia Planitia shipyards near Mars, hoping that would turn the Federation government, and its people, against any further research into A.I. and synthetic life. That the plan would also be dooming most of the Romulan people to genocide was immaterial to them, since they were driven by the fear of a propency that the creation of artificial life would lead to the destruction of all organic life in the universe. That's pretty much my breakdown of the first season of _Star Trek:PICARD_ I haven't watched much of _Discovery_ but I don't think the Romulans are involved as much as the Klingons (and I think it's _Picard_ that you are referring too).
@@STSWB5SG1FAN thanks, ya sorry about that I wrote that before going to bed and got discovery and Picard mixed up but you managed to figure that out anyway thanks for the great reply.
@@STSWB5SG1FAN Have you dug into the STO lore about the Romulans and the Hobus supernova? Since it is now partnered with/partially owned by CBS it is technically cannon. Oh and yes some hard core trekkies are furious about that, until they play the game.
@@VadulTharys Indeed STO's lore on Romulans is primarily drawn from Diane Duane's Rihansu novels, including their language. They explain the Hobus supernova in a way superior I think to Picard's... simplification. In the Kelvin films the event is called the Hobus supernova and was clearly written by someone who had absolutely no clue about how stellar phenomena actually work or anything about interstellar scales. In STO it's explained as an artificial hypernova caused by a Tal Shiar science experiment gone awry and sabotaged by an advanced alien race. Picard explains it as just the Romulan star going supernova for no known reason, but it is more sane than the Kelvin timeline's explanation.
@@3Rayfire I agree, that and STO as you go through the Romulan storyline you eventually learn all the details of the who/what/when and where of the supernova. It was caused by the Iconians as revenge for an action Empress Sela took during the bombardment of their home world 150K years in the past. The details of the story make much more sense in tying together all the Star Trek series from TOS to Picard, and up to 2410. The Borg invasions, the war with the Dominion, the stupid wars fought by all the various Alpha and Beta quadrant species. All tied together and orchestrated by the Iconian survivors as revenge.
My take up Until first contact came out was that that Vulcans that soon after they developed star travel were driven back to Vulcan where they mostly stayed ( this being the cause of upheaval that lead to surak’s teachings ) while the romulans were born from colonists abandoned or for some reason failed to return and and hid out in a nebula where they stayed up till humans Colonised on their territory this being why their tech was not much better than earths till kirk’s time and were forced to buy Klingon tech.
Diane Duane's Rihannsu series, along with her "Spock's World" novel, were the first serious attempts at fleshing out Romulan culture and history. It ranks up with John M. Ford's excellent book "The Final Reflection", which did the same for the Klingons. I always thought it unfortunate that the Next Generation etc. didn't use more of this background material. And - off topic - as long as I'm here, I also highly recommend Janet Kagan's excellent novel, "Uhura's Song", one of my personal favorites.
I've always preferred the Romulans over the Klingons. Even the bird-of-prey in Star Trek III The Search For Spock was originally intended to be a Romulan warbird of some kind. before the villains of that film were switched to Klingons etc's! Looking exactly like Vulcans but being completely opposite was always fascinating to me. if Vulcans can be compared to Elves? then Romulans would naturally be Dark Elves by comparison. The Picard show pisses me off how they've ruined them. Hell even JJ Abrams got'em right in the 2009 Star Trek film. I wish the original series featured more episodes on the Romulans as i didn't like the Next Generation era episodes of them, but certainly liked and understood the DS9 and the sparse Voyager ones which expanded on them overall.
@@3Rayfire They're ruined because Romulans didn't need that kind of exposure into their society, Romulans always worked best as Cold War soviet for the Russians in the classic series. an ongoing threat of further Russian hostilities in the TNG era shows of; TNG, and DS9. Picard doesn't do anything creative or new with'em at all. except make'em out to be scheming extremist with a grudge cos they're now played off as; "oh woe is me" salty victims now. Nero in Star Trek 2009 was done far better by comparisons. Kelvin timeline comparison or not, why aren't these Romulans shaving their hair off and putting painted tattoos on their bodies as a form of grieving and reverence to their lost ones?the shit is all over the place and not even interesting anymores'. i'll be quite happy just going over old TOS episodes and the TNG era stuff thank you for my Romulan fixes!
Actually concerning how the Remans fit into all of this, their introduction in Nemesis, very late into the series, it begs one question. Prior to their introduction, what was the second planet "Beneath the Raptors Wings" as it were on the Romulan insignia, supposed to represent?
@@dilsnikdilznik Well Remans were speculated before as the planet has been there since TOS. Nobody ever saw or bothered depicting a Reman before in the main canon or many supplemental materials.
"they arent the united super faction they once were" that is, until a mere splinter group of romulans shows up with -literally- a fleet of over 200 state of the art ships.
Picard can't decide if the Romulans are empoverished refugees or a massive empire. If you care about previous ST lore, or even the basic premise of ST, Picard is so full of inconsistencies that it makes your head spin.
I've always thought it made much more sense that the Vulcans left Romulus, or whatever they called their homeworld. Surak grew tired of the infighting, and he and his followers were expelled from the planet, possibly pre-warp, but fell through a temporary wormhole that dropped them on Vulcan. Was it my imagination, or was that TNG Romulan example the actor who plays Ducat?
Speaking of Dukat, I read a novel that told more about Macet, the first Cardassian we meet, and it said Macet and Dukat are relatives. But I always thought they should have kept Macet and his crew as being from a Cardassian colony that had lost contact with the homeworld after a horrible war, and they had evolved slightly different from regular Cardassians.
the Romulan ships were also called warbirds not bird of prey it was in the show due to the full lore of the race being done yet and the reason they have the d7 is explained later as the same reason the Klingons have cloaks they swapped tech at some point and had an alliance for a short time
bird of prey, warbird are ship class names like battlecruiser, destroyer etc. both klingons and romulans have bird of prey ships with the functions being fast attack or reconnaissance.
There is no Kelvin timeline. A change of timeline does not turn Kahn from an Indian sikh into a British white guy. JJ's movies aren't Star Trek, they're crap.
I don’t know why they simply didn’t explain Romulans, Vulcans and Remans similar to Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Like Earth they walked the planet at the same time but had different evolutionary outcomes. Rather than dying off, they went “flying off” to another world.
A lot of folks didn’t like the direction “Picard” took, but Michael Chabon deserves a lot of credit for reconciling the ridged TNG Romulans with the TOS Romulans-by bringing back the Vulcan-looking TOS Romulans and showing both standing side by side. I was annoyed for a lot of years that TNG changed the Romulans, as if the makeup artists on TNG didn’t get the memo that the Romulans and Vulcans were the same species. That was kind of the whole point back in TOS, but TNG screwed up the canon (while the TOS movies ignored that and continued to show Romulans as proper Vulcanoids).
well centuries to thousands of years on a different planet could bring minor evolutionary changes to segments of the population. Romulus and Remus are not desert worlds like Vulcan. Plus Romulans and Remans did undergo deliberate genetic alterations.
@toomanyaccounts - Well, yeah, there’s all kinds of ways you can retroactively explain it. But, even at the time, it seemed like an unnecessary (and uninformed?) change just for the sake of change, with little regard for who the Romulans were supposed to be-namely an offshoot of the Vulcan race or extremely close cousins. It was the kind of strange, random alteration the folks running “Discovery” would be thrilled about-one that seems it wasn’t entirely thought through. Artistically, you can make a stronger argument for radically altering the Klingons from TOS to TMP/TNG by saying that Klingons are an alien species, so we want them to look more alien, less human. You can’t really say that about Vulcans and Romulans. Vulcans look like humans with upswept eyebrows and pointed ears-a look so iconic even the people behind “Discovery” didn’t dare change them (almost to our surprise-it’s a wonder Sarek didn’t walk in looking like Nosferatu). Vulcans have an iconic look and Romulans were intended to essentially be the same species living on a different planet. It seems artistically ironic for Romulans to look so radically different from Vulcans, when even in the era of TNG, the Enterprise was constantly running into alien species that looked IDENTICAL to humans-I don’t mean humanoids with little bumps-but humanoids who look IDENTICAL to humans, even though they are not directly related. (I’m not talking about being seeded by some common ancestor millions of years ago. I’m talking about aliens with no DIRECT connection to Earth looking identical to humans.) Whereas, Vulcans and Romulans are literally the same species from the same planetary origin. That’s what made it such a random change back in the TNG days. Now as far as explaining what happened, you could say that, yeah, there were some environmental factors-climate, gravitational-which MIGHT account for some rather radical changes to cranial structures in a relatively short period of time since leaving Vulcan (we’re only talking thousands of years rather than tens of thousands). Although the fact that we’ve seen smooth-headed Romulans as recent as Star Trek VI makes me think maybe there’s some other things going on, as well. You mentioned the Romulans altering their own DNA. Plausible, but I don’t think that’s been firmly established un canon. Here’s what we do know in canon: The Vulcan exiles who eventually became Romulans made stops on other worlds along the way before finally settling on Romulus. We know this because of archeological digs established on TNG. The Enterprise-D also encountered a primitive Vulcanoid race that also happened to more closely resemble Romulans than Vulcans. The Remans have an almost reptilian appearance, but also clearly have Vulcanoid features. One could easily conjecture that there is some alien, non Vulcan DNA that has managed to get mixed into the Romulan genome. There’s another possibility. There may be pockets of Vulcans who look like TNG Romulans. The renegade Vulcan V’Shar agent played by Robin Curtis (I can’t remember the character’s name) May suggest this. She looked like a Romulan and I don’t recall it being established that she had been surgically altered (and would she need to be if TOS Romulans still existed? LOL). It’s entirely possible that the majority of Romulans who left Vulcan already had the ridges and som smooth heads went with them. Maybe the war that took place on Vulcan was literally a race war. And/or more than likely, there is more than one strand of alien DNA in their blood. They are, after all, a conquering empire. But I’m very glad to see the two varieties standing side by side on “Picard.”
@@MoonjumperReviews we know from time to time that there were Vulcans who idolized the Romulans and would likely have defected to join them. These would likely form their own communities and while regarded as Romulan in culture would be physically Vulcan. plus wouldn't put it past the Romulans to abduct shiploads of Vulcans with the offspring eventually being culturally Romulan. This population would be a recruitment source for infiltration missions by the Romulans into Vulcan or starfleet.
@toomanyaccounts - Yes, quite possible. You make a good point. And there’s historical precedent for that. The kidnapping of South Korean and Japanese citizens by North Korea, for instance-and for various purposes from espionage to being forced to work as actors in propaganda films. (And then, like you said, there will be a handful that defect voluntarily for their own ideological reasons.)
they were in enterprise. however by tos and tng most vulcan ships were just trading ships, or small scale science ships or they were on starfleet ships either mixed in or entirely vulcan.
The appearance of the Romulans in DS9 was greatly interesting especially in the episode In The Pale Moonlight.
"Its a fakeeeeeeeeee!!!" (lol).😆
@@MGSBigBoss77 It's real!!
yeah where is the big talk about those
you mean the best trek episode ever made
Best ever episode, indeed 👍👍👍
The main reason for giving the Romulans “Klingon-design” ships specifically later on was that a PA accidentally stepped on the Romulan Bird of Prey model and broke it.
Really?
Read it from Mark Altman & Edward Gross’s oral history novel, ‘The Fifty-Year Mission’.
That’s not confirmed to have happened, it’s only a theory. There’s another theory that it was because they needed to show off the expensive new D7 model which had been gifted to them
I heard the orginal Romulan BoP model was stolen.
@@TheMrPeteChannel My theory is that someone left the cloaking device on by mistake and it was misplaced as a result.
...
What? It doesn't actually turn invisible? That's disappointing.
I have to admit, the Romulans are my favourite Star Trek species, even if their TNG era costumes look ridiculous.
Remember the Cardassians' uniforms?
@@RapidCityJM which ones, the TNG ones or the DS9 ones?
@@amiscellaneoushuman3516 "If anyone could use a good tailor, it would be them" Odo's quote when asked if it was the Romulans behind Garak's attempted assassination (DS9, forgot the name of the episode).
@@STSWB5SG1FAN
"Improbable Cause" the first of a fantastic two-part episode from Season 3 and one of my top-10 DS9 episodes.
When you remember those costumes were introduced in the 80s, they make a lot more sense. My grandmother rocked a pantsuit that looked a lot like a Romulan uniform back in the 80s :)
In the background material for the tabletop game Starfleet Battles it's stated that the Klingons and the Romulans had a brief alliance and exchange of technology. Which is why Klingon ships ended up with cloaking devices and why Romulans were using the D7 design.
I hate to nitpick but John Colicos played Kor. Michael Ansara was the actor who played Kang. I sure someone in the comments has already posted this. Jolan Tru
Beat me to it!
I would rather the next Star Trek movie take place in neither the Kelvin Timeline nor the Prime Timeline but go back and take place in the original universe. I've had enough of the JJAbramsverse. You forget to mention the DS9 episodes featuring the Romulans and their involvement in the Dominion War.
I know this comment is four months old but I just want to point out that the Prime timeline is the original universe. Everything made before Star Trek 2009 was Prime timeline, JJ-verse is Star Trek 09, Into Darkness and Beyond.
I wish, to this day, that the Tal Shi'ar officer for the Defiant's cloak was a recurring character
@Tyler Durden I absolutely agree. JJ took Trek and made it into Star Wars. We already have star wars. My idea has always been to just create a movie crew of new characters. In response to the original poster, the Dominion War may have been the most amazing Romulan arc in the entire trek universe.
@@vergeofchaos There is already a chance, that Picard will continue the Prime Timeline
@Tyler Durden absolutely I agree with you 100% plus JJ or should I say jar jar Abrams gas torched and wrecked BOTH Star Trek and Star Wars with his total debauchery of Canon !!!.. Before he finished the 2009 Trek movie Abrams even stated in a interview that he NEVER watched TOS as a kid or as an Adult To me that says a lot about the out come of all three of his Trek movies including all of the post George Lucus movies ,; attempting to attach his own "Spin," and interjection into 🌟 Wars Canon ,thus calling it his own original content.
One thing they have managed is to have some terrific actors play Romulans. From Mark Lenard in TOS through to Andreas Katsulas (sp?) in TNG they have always been interesting portrayals.
the one thing I liked about ST Picard, is how the Romulan compliment of the space station is a mixture of all the styles they used over the years: grey uniforms and black wigs from TNG, black checkerboard uniforms from Nemesis, bald soldiers like in 2009, _black_ Romulans, etc.
Also Picard explained ridges and said that Romulans has talk shows. And these are the only advantages of this... product. :)
Mark Leonards performance as the Romulan commander in TOS was probably is one of my favourites in all of trek history.
I liked Joanne Linville who played the Romulan Cmdr who had the hots for Spock.
I don't recall where I heard it, but there is a lore explanation for the Romulans having D7 cruisers.
In "Balance of Terror", we are told that the Romulans did not have warp drive (yet the Bird of Prey had warp nacelles). Also in TOS, the Klingons do not have cloaking technology. At some point, the Romulans traded cloaking technology for Klingon warp technology which included plans for the D7.
This is why we see Romulan D7s and cloaking Klingon vessels in the movies.
One possible explanation for the Bird of Prey having warp nacelles is that it had non-tactical warp. The idea is that a ship with tactical warp capabilities unequivocally outclasses one without... except that the Romulans had the cloaking device.
watch again. scotty is speaking about the power of the ship towards weapons etc not the drive system.
www.ditl.org/article-page.php?ArticleID=12&ListID=Articles#:~:text=Romulan%20Warp%20Drive%20One%20of%20the%20stranger%20facets,new%20Romulan%20ship%20encountered%20in%20that%20episode%20%3A
STO did the Romulans justice with the Empire still existing, the formation of the Romulan Republic and the Tal'Shiar up to their old games trying to become the the top Romulan faction.
I've always enjoyed and been drawn to the Romulans.
And yes, I think you nailed it. Their characters are always somebody you remember unlike a lot of other 1 time people you just could care less for.
Their devious nature make them fun, and the actors really ham up the parts to really drive their culture home every time. You never know their purpose, just know that its' going to be interesting with a romulan involved.
It should be noted that Remus was mentioned in "The Balance of Terror" and was only explained in Nemesis.
When I am going trough the original series I often find little details that remind me just how old the show is, both in terms of production tech and in series development. But they did such a good job with the Romulans out the gate that I don't find anything like that with them.
Thank you for including "The Romulan Way". I read this a long time ago and thought it really explained how the Romulans came to be, while also giving up so much of their Vulcan heritage.
Your comprehensive examinations are worthy of attention. The novel, "Spock's World" gave a narration closer to the one mentioned in, "The Romulan Way," so I'm surprised you missed that, but then, there have been dozens of books in each series' lines, of which I have long since lost count and ability to buy (I worked for B&N from 1995-97, so I used to have income, and a discount). Your analysis is succinct and fulsome. Thank you. I just subscribed, and look forward to more. I'm an Aspie, so it's hard for me to connect irl. Sci-fi, Marvel Universe, etc., showed me potentials within which I could live. The human mind creates universes, which reflect real potentials both here, and Multiverseally. Live long, and Prosper. #IDIC #CThia
Season 5 of Enterprise was supposed to have the Romulan Earth War?!? I am so mad now!
And to reveal who Future Man was.
There are Enterprise novels that cover it, but yes, it's really sad we didn't see it.
Crossing my fingers that the next Lore Evolution will be on the Cardassians.
THERE ARE LORE LIGHTS!
The fact I can say the word Cardassian architecture in reference to Deep Space Nine makes me look forward to this even harder.
The Cardassians and the Romulans were definitely the most interesting baddies in the Trek universe.
Actor John Calicos portrayed the Klingon Commander Kor in ST:TOS and decades later the same Kor, the long lived High Master in ST:DS9. Michael Anzara portrayed Kang, young and aged respectively, in both series.
My fan canon has always been that Surak's Awakening simply did not take in a particular region. Since I have never seen ridged Vulcans, I am going to go with this, especially since I have seen more variety to skin tones than with the two tone (now three tone) Romulans. I think the people who refused the Awakening were from a particular region with most having a particular look indicative of it. Then they left en masse.
I like the ST Picard explanation that ridges are from Northern Romulans. Personally I feel like they appear as a specific result of Vulcanoid physiology versus environment. I came up with the idea that Vulcans have a glandular network in their forehead that keeps their brains cool in Vulcan's extremely hot environment. In cooler environments like Romulus or even Mintaka, it gets...stuffed up and swells, hence forehead ridges.
ST: Enterprise was a lost opportunity to show the entirety of the Earth-Romulan War, and the original establishment of the neutral zone. It would have made for an epic story arc. I simply cannot understand why they decided to devote the show to an endless succession of convoluted unnecessary time travel plots.
It was strange for them to ignore the Romulans for the entire first three seasons, sans a one off episode. I will also never understand why they did not use the Romulans surprise attacking Florida with an atomic weapon in favor of the Xindi launching a surprise attack. The entire third season could have been about the Enterprise trying to put together clues about who attacked earth and discovering who the Romulans were. At the very least they could have made the Xindi puppets of the Romulans who got them to attack earth for them.... instead of the weird Sphere Builders.
Enterprise was a whole series of weird decisions. Gotta love it, redheaded stepchild though it is.
(Also is the phrase redheaded stepchild still socially acceptable? It made me feel weird as soon as I typed it, bc obv redheads and stepchildren are blameless and harmless. Or have we as a society collectively agreed that it’s just a harmless, albeit weird outdated phrase out of context?)
@@UndyingNephalim that would have been better, agreed. I struggle with ENT season 3 for the same reason I once struggled with voyager... why test a doomsday weapon that isn't ready on the planet you plan to use it on? If they had tested the weapon elsewhere, and then just rocked up to earth with a functioning weapon... similar to voyager, did janeway not know about time bombs? As time has marched on both Voy and Ent have become favorites but at the time I couldn't wrap my head around that stuff and just instead rewatched TNG.
Well I can only speak for myself, but I think it's fair to say that alot of us who had been with what we today call the berman era since 1987, 18 years later in 2005 when Enterprise got the axe... let's just say franchise fatigue was a thing. ENT was not getting the ratings anymore and even die hards like myself were just tired of it.
That may sound blasphemous but if 12 years from now the kurtzman era is still airing I challenge anyone to still be excited on a weekly basis. absence makes the heart grow fonder and it was probably only 2 years after ENT left the air and us die hard trekkies were binging the VOY and ENT episodes we missed, and were ready for it to come back on the air.
enterprise is another universe, reason behind photons being early is temporal war, could it be that romulans felt that earth was even stronger and forming federation faster even. many reason why romulan war didn't play out
Thanks for doing this video. The Romulan Way is one of my favorite books, and is my personal Head-Canon for the Romulans!
Didn't a single Romulan show up in voyager but he was in their past
yes, and a couple more in "message in a bottle" (Prometheus episode)
@@Kirifairy oh right yeah, the sneaky butt heads tryed to Nick a ship
the romulan from the past is one of the only who gets portrayed as a good guy, it was an all right episode imo
Two Romulan appearances, impressive for a show a quadrant away.
The was a Romulan ex-Borg in VOY too.
8:36 Let's appreciate for a moment the flat out obvious appearance of Colonial Vipers from Battlestar Galactica on the cover of the Star Trek book :)
And sorry I hope the Kelvin timeline dies as soon as possible.
I'm glad you spotted the colonial vipers. I saw this book as a child in a library and never even noticed them.
I just found this channel so glad I did!
I love love LOVE the TNG Romulans, particularly the D'deridex Warbird.
I'm disappointed you haven't touched upon DS9 at all. The Romulans were portrayed brilliantly there. Scheming, cunning, surprisingly becoming Federation allies but still loads of scheming on both sides as they prepare for a post-war Alpha Quadrant. It was very much the start of a US-USSR cold war setting.
True, till their homeworld is about to be vaporise from the supernova that lead tens of millions of offworld Romulans homeless. 18 Billion natives on Romulus were perished.
John Colicos played Kor(TOS "Errand of Mercy"). Michael Amsara played Kang
My personal view was that shortly after the Vulcans became a Spacefaring civilisation they were driven back to their home world by some threat ( there’s plenty of indications that happened int the alpha quadrant by the number of destroyed and elder races who have also abandoned space travel ) while the Romlians were left to fend for themselves who in the original series seen to be Harding their borders more than expanding them to the point I felt that the war was caused by humans trying to colonise In their neutral zone ( much like the opium wars between Britain and China )
I have read the books,
The Romulan Way and Spock's World many times.
To me they are canon.
What is the music that starts at 7:10 ? I've heard it in a few mobile games, but could never find the original source.
I would like to know too
@@amichels its from star trek online
the Romulans were the best species of the Star Trek Universe.
I'd love to see the agents of the temporal Corps go in and prevent Spock's failure and thus preventing the destruction of Romulus and the maniacal revenge fueled chaos by Nero and the destruction of the USS Kelvin. Thus setting the timeline back on its original course.
The Romulan Empire will live😎👍
Word
While thinking about the new brow compared to “Balance of Terror” I was wondering if they had a caste-like system. Strong brows being pushed into leadership roles.
I wonder if anyone else here considered this?
It's more likely that the TOS Romulans were intended to resemble Vulcans, whereas the creators of TNG wanted the Romulans to look distinct. That's it.
Star Trek Picard Season One has established that the Romulans with brow ridges are Southerners while the ones without brow ridges are Northerners, and they tend to make fun of each other as evidenced by the banter between Laris and Zhaban in the Picard home in Labarre, France.
_Romulans - so predictably treacherous._ - Weyoun
Kelvin timeline. High school jocks and cheerleaders in space. I could only take Bones seriously as an officer.
Go back to Prime. Kelvin reminds me o Jar Jar Binks.
I like to call the Kelvin timeline Star Trek Fast and Furious.
Too bad std and stp are just as bad
@@mrklean0292 I think that was the appeal of the Kelvin line for fans of that ... Fast and the furious meets outer space...lol...
I did like the new Doctor McCoy. He seemed the truest and most respectful reimaging.
@@OffRampTourist I agree.. Karl Urban is a very good versatilel actor As far as I am concerned he was SPOT ON was Dr Leanerd "Bones" McCoy he brought with him his own. Touches and talents that DeForest Kelly made as a character worthy of endearment. The same can also be said of the fellow that played Pavlo Checkov and how he reimagined Walter Keoing 's version on this character.. Also the actor who played Montgomery Scott was very good as well ..
In my opinion, if Klingons are used to represent USSR/Russia, Romulans as a whole represent the culture of a certain East Asian culture, which I will say begin with Nemesis and then amplified in Picard; depend on how you see it, thus split, with one side going very high in secrecy, the other keeping old traditions. This is especially when you look at Qowat Milat and Elnor's design.
The only time I ever saw any personality trait in a Romulan was in DS9: "It's a fa-a-ake!"
Ironically the klingons originally liked large cruses while the Romulans liked more agility. In the 24th century they basically swapped ship design doctrines with klingons closing the bird of prey and the Romulans choosing the D'Deridex
JJ Abrams: Romulans? You mean futuristic Elves wielding cool looking swords?
Romulans are Romans who never lost power...just like my Civ game.
I have long thought that part of the split between Vulcans and Romulans was different philosophies on how to deal with a critical issue. In Star Trek: Enterprise there are episodes dealing with The Vulcans nearly wiping themselves out. One of the main issues was the strength of Vulcan emotion and how contact with aliens had caused them to lose control and lead them to a war that nearly killed them all. Sarak's solution was to learn to suppress all emotions. So the often related statement that Vulcans have no emotions is a lie, they have simply learned not to express them.
Romulans chose a different path. First was to become xenophobic. Any alien influence was suspect. The second half was a rigidly structured society. While Vulcans exerted control inwardly, Romulans exert the control outwardly.
the vulcans had always been warlike. its just that with tech advancing they got better at killing one another and ruining what was left of their planet
3:50
I see you Dukat you can hide from me, you rascal.
🖖😎👍Very nicely well done and very well informatively executed and nicely explained indeed 👌.
I thought the TNG era finally established that the Klingons had birds of prey as their light cruiser/raider class ships and Romulans had 'warbird' as a general term for all of their ships, but it gets mixed up so much in other works that I can't tell anymore
you forgot the Romulans in DS9, they had the most notable shift in uniform as well as more footage of their warbirds in action
In Picard the Romulans look more like the Elves from Lord of the Rings.
That's OK the Klingons were orcs.
In Disco.
@paulsarnik8506 Yeah, you gotta admit Klingon have gotten f****ng ugly since since the original series.
TOS: There's no doubt in my mind that after "Balance of Terror" and "The Deadly Years", the original Romulan bird-of-prey remained one of the workhorses of the Romulan fleet. By the time of "The Enterprise Incident", it is widely believed that the Romulans formed a temporary alliance with the Klingons, hence the use of their battlecruisers in that episode, along the first Klingon ship with a cloaking device we ever saw in Star Trek III.
I wish we could learn even more about those space elves
Nice, you mentioned the og books. Great video
That romulan at 4:00 is Gull Ducott ..I think.
Whoa. Somebody forgot about DS9! They joined the Star Fleet Alliance as one of three armies. They fought the Dominion. Their pragmatism and shrewd world view became more prominent and contrasted very well with the Klingon Empire and Starfleet. And they were important to one of DS9's best episodes "Pale Moonlight".
I didn't forget about DS9. They just weren't significantly different than they were in TNG.
Honestly, I liked the original Balance of Terror Romulans. The 'Space Roman' design just fit so well with the rest of the Greco-Roman themes of ST:ToS
I’m really surprised Discovery has gotten so good with the third season. I wouldn’t have thought it possible.
Was that Marc Alaimo in those Romulan costume pics? I love how the various Berman era series used a pretty steady stable of actors as various aliens.
Yes, Alaimo played the Romulan commander in The Neutral Zone.
John Colicos did not portray Kang. He portrayed Kor, in the first season episode Errand of Mercy, the first appearance of the Klingons. Kang was portrayed by the late, great Michael Ansara, in the third season episode Day of the Dove. Get your references straight.
I think Romulans would be a great alien counterpart to the Federation in a post-Voyager show.
Will you consider including i future episodes, or even make an episode in on itself about, the 70's and 80's Star Trek roleplaying games' lore, and how it connected or diverged or even influence movies and tv-shows?
I still wonder about the parallel universe where the ST3 Bird of Prey stayed as a Romulan ship and the TNG D'deridex was a Klingon battlecruiser.
I liked the TNG design better than the Kelvin timeline Hot Topic style Romulans.
The change to the Romulans' physical appearance in TNG is not unlike what was done with the Klingons for Discovery and both were really unnecessary. The Romulans were established in TOS as being nearly indistinguishable from Vulcans, different only in culture. At least Picard cleaned up the mess by simply giving us every Romulan variant ever seen. This also fixed the common Trek problem of nearly all representatives of any given alien species being the same in culture, language, and dress. Hopefully the Klingons will get the same treatment soon
What about the Romulan/Vulcan origin hinted at in The Paradise Syndrome where representatives of one was (or both) were kidnapped and relocated to another world long ago by an ancient race? Maybe both originated on an as yet unknown planet.
Wow, did you wax over the DS9 involvement and the first Kelvin-verse movie which started in Prime?
I always chalk it up as the earlier appearance of the cloak either being temporal shenanigans or being a significantly less advanced version that's easier to detect and Balance of Terror was a perfected version.
In a way you are right, in both Enterprise and Discovery what they are calling "cloaks" are actually more like stealth technology we use today, it kept sensors from detecting them too easily but they could be seen when close enough. By the time of TOS the Romulans had perfected the light bending technology and the ship in "Balance of Terror" was the first equipped with it, as well as the new weapon.
Please do a lore evolution on the Andorians ! 👍🏻😎
I dont think the idea was holograms were a new thing in TNG, I think the idea was, or at least can reasonably be taken as the level of holographic technology seen in TNG was new. At least to the characters in the show.
Theres a fair difference between rendering a single object like a ship that needs to be convincing from a distance and rendering a fully immersive space with perfect replicas of trees grass water wind sound scents etc.
Not only that but it is able to alter the apparent perspective of people in the holodeck space, two people can appear hundreds of feet apart while sharing the same smallish room.
I think we can also allow that not everything in trek holds up to scrutiny and thus cant really be relied upon as solid canon, that same episode had the Enterprise able to detect the romulan ship so well that they could shadow the ship perfectly. Matching course and speed to appear as a sensor glitch, yet despite clearly having the exact position course and speed of this ship they couldn't fire on it without a visual?? Targeting via sensors was a thing all the way back in WW2 when many on staff had been fighting, and was a common thing in the military by the mid to late 60s.
This just doesnt hold up even in the shows contemporary period, DSC did a light recon of this where the Klingon cloak in season one didnt completely hid the presence of the ship but did actively disrupt sensors to make accurately targeting the ship difficult.
And while you might argue that BoT establishes that cloaks are a brand new thing theres no dialogue that actually says that. From the crews perspective accounting for season one of discovery Starfleet had seen cloaks before, but had found a way to effectively penetrate it. Then ate confronted with a refined cloak that left them starting over from step one. As stories involving cloaks usually do.
This different cloak may be why the Romulans couldn't warp away, their solution to the Klingon cloak being busted required the warp core to be entirely off line. Season 2 of DSC shows Klingons using their cloaks at warp but they are also detected by Disco before they arrive.
The Balance of Terror was based on a film and book written by a veteran of the Battle of the Atlantic based on his experiences in World War II against U-Boats. So to maintain the dramatic consistency the tech may certainly seem inconsistent. However the facts of that episode actually support your later interpretation of Discovery's events. Enterprise was tracking the Bird of Prey via Motion detector, not their normal sensors. They couldn't actually get a lock. In other words, she couldn't see them if they didn't move. It's entirely possible that without normal sensors attacking would've only given away their position without any guarantee of hitting them at the range they were at.
However, Discovery detecting the Klingons actually had nothing to do with them using warp drive. Discovery's battle with the Sarcophagus ship before their trip to the Mirror Universe provided sufficient sensor data for Starfleet to completely defeat that iteration of the Klingon cloaking device.
John Colicos played Kor. It was Michael Ansara that played Kang.
Hi Romulans Most loved enemy in my early star trek. Enterprise was good and should have been given the full seven years to take it to the level that many fans feel it would have reach. I agree Star Trek into Darkness was a bad choice to build a story that could NEVER come near Wrath of Khan. I would like a new Star Trek with the the Chris Pine crew, Thank for sharing your work on the history of a great race.
Can some one tell me how Romulan got to the place they are in Star Trek discovery or did that happen off camera. Because I do not remember them losing their home planet in TNG or any of the TNG tv spin offs.
It was from the prelude comic to the first Star Trek movie set in the Kelvin universe. A star in Romulan space threatened to go supernova and destroy the Romulan homeworld. Spock, using Red Matter, managed to stop it but not before it devastated Romulus itself, thus forcing an evacuation. Religious extremists called the Jaad Vash disrupted the evacuation plan because they were fearful of the Federation's advances in A.I. They hatched a plan to destroy the StarFleet evacuation armada that was being built at Utopia Planitia shipyards near Mars, hoping that would turn the Federation government, and its people, against any further research into A.I. and synthetic life. That the plan would also be dooming most of the Romulan people to genocide was immaterial to them, since they were driven by the fear of a propency that the creation of artificial life would lead to the destruction of all organic life in the universe.
That's pretty much my breakdown of the first season of _Star Trek:PICARD_ I haven't watched much of _Discovery_ but I don't think the Romulans are involved as much as the Klingons (and I think it's _Picard_ that you are referring too).
@@STSWB5SG1FAN thanks, ya sorry about that I wrote that before going to bed and got discovery and Picard mixed up but you managed to figure that out anyway thanks for the great reply.
@@STSWB5SG1FAN Have you dug into the STO lore about the Romulans and the Hobus supernova? Since it is now partnered with/partially owned by CBS it is technically cannon.
Oh and yes some hard core trekkies are furious about that, until they play the game.
@@VadulTharys Indeed STO's lore on Romulans is primarily drawn from Diane Duane's Rihansu novels, including their language. They explain the Hobus supernova in a way superior I think to Picard's... simplification. In the Kelvin films the event is called the Hobus supernova and was clearly written by someone who had absolutely no clue about how stellar phenomena actually work or anything about interstellar scales. In STO it's explained as an artificial hypernova caused by a Tal Shiar science experiment gone awry and sabotaged by an advanced alien race. Picard explains it as just the Romulan star going supernova for no known reason, but it is more sane than the Kelvin timeline's explanation.
@@3Rayfire I agree, that and STO as you go through the Romulan storyline you eventually learn all the details of the who/what/when and where of the supernova. It was caused by the Iconians as revenge for an action Empress Sela took during the bombardment of their home world 150K years in the past. The details of the story make much more sense in tying together all the Star Trek series from TOS to Picard, and up to 2410. The Borg invasions, the war with the Dominion, the stupid wars fought by all the various Alpha and Beta quadrant species. All tied together and orchestrated by the Iconian survivors as revenge.
My take up Until first contact came out was that that Vulcans that soon after they developed star travel were driven back to Vulcan where they mostly stayed ( this being the cause of upheaval that lead to surak’s teachings ) while the romulans were born from colonists abandoned or for some reason failed to return and and hid out in a nebula where they stayed up till humans Colonised on their territory this being why their tech was not much better than earths till kirk’s time and were forced to buy Klingon tech.
7:16 and the video is over, gosh what a short video!
Diane Duane's Rihannsu series, along with her "Spock's World" novel, were the first serious attempts at fleshing out Romulan culture and history. It ranks up with John M. Ford's excellent book "The Final Reflection", which did the same for the Klingons. I always thought it unfortunate that the Next Generation etc. didn't use more of this background material. And - off topic - as long as I'm here, I also highly recommend Janet Kagan's excellent novel, "Uhura's Song", one of my personal favorites.
Kang was portrayed by the actor Michael Ansara,
John Colicos Played Kor
I've always preferred the Romulans over the Klingons. Even the bird-of-prey in Star Trek III The Search For Spock was originally intended to be a Romulan warbird of some kind. before the villains of that film were switched to Klingons etc's! Looking exactly like Vulcans but being completely opposite was always fascinating to me. if Vulcans can be compared to Elves? then Romulans would naturally be Dark Elves by comparison. The Picard show pisses me off how they've ruined them. Hell even JJ Abrams got'em right in the 2009 Star Trek film. I wish the original series featured more episodes on the Romulans as i didn't like the Next Generation era episodes of them, but certainly liked and understood the DS9 and the sparse Voyager ones which expanded on them overall.
How are they ruined? Keep in mind we were primarily dealing with a psycho cult and not dealing with the Romulan people at large.
@@3Rayfire They're ruined because Romulans didn't need that kind of exposure into their society, Romulans always worked best as Cold War soviet for the Russians in the classic series. an ongoing threat of further Russian hostilities in the TNG era shows of; TNG, and DS9. Picard doesn't do anything creative or new with'em at all. except make'em out to be scheming extremist with a grudge cos they're now played off as; "oh woe is me" salty victims now. Nero in Star Trek 2009 was done far better by comparisons.
Kelvin timeline comparison or not, why aren't these Romulans shaving their hair off and putting painted tattoos on their bodies as a form of grieving and reverence to their lost ones?the shit is all over the place and not even interesting anymores'. i'll be quite happy just going over old TOS episodes and the TNG era stuff thank you for my Romulan fixes!
Actually concerning how the Remans fit into all of this, their introduction in Nemesis, very late into the series, it begs one question. Prior to their introduction, what was the second planet "Beneath the Raptors Wings" as it were on the Romulan insignia, supposed to represent?
Remans were not introduced there. Nosferatu looking Remans were.
@@dilsnikdilznik Well Remans were speculated before as the planet has been there since TOS. Nobody ever saw or bothered depicting a Reman before in the main canon or many supplemental materials.
@@3Rayfire Remans are an off shoot of the Romulans. genetically enginnered to do a task on that planet.
@@toomanyaccounts Yeah, though there's the other theory that they evolved into their current form adapting to Remus. I forgot the theory.
Thanks for the recommend of a book.
"they arent the united super faction they once were" that is, until a mere splinter group of romulans shows up with -literally- a fleet of over 200 state of the art ships.
Picard can't decide if the Romulans are empoverished refugees or a massive empire. If you care about previous ST lore, or even the basic premise of ST, Picard is so full of inconsistencies that it makes your head spin.
In DS9 one of best episodes is Romulan centric with Cardassian spice, In Pale Moonlight deserved a mention here
I've always thought it made much more sense that the Vulcans left Romulus, or whatever they called their homeworld. Surak grew tired of the infighting, and he and his followers were expelled from the planet, possibly pre-warp, but fell through a temporary wormhole that dropped them on Vulcan.
Was it my imagination, or was that TNG Romulan example the actor who plays Ducat?
Answer: Yes, it was. He was in the episode that reintroduced them to TNG.
Speaking of Dukat, I read a novel that told more about Macet, the first Cardassian we meet, and it said Macet and Dukat are relatives. But I always thought they should have kept Macet and his crew as being from a Cardassian colony that had lost contact with the homeworld after a horrible war, and they had evolved slightly different from regular Cardassians.
The Romulans are my favourite faction and race from Star Trek
0:50 it was his son’s obsession with the Romulan empire which led him to create the Romulans 😂
Oopsie!
Glad I'm not the only one that heard it
the Romulan ships were also called warbirds not bird of prey it was in the show due to the full lore of the race being done yet and the reason they have the d7 is explained later as the same reason the Klingons have cloaks they swapped tech at some point and had an alliance for a short time
bird of prey, warbird are ship class names like battlecruiser, destroyer etc. both klingons and romulans have bird of prey ships with the functions being fast attack or reconnaissance.
I would like both Prime and Kelvin movies, with perhaps a technobabble crossover here and there
What about the romulans in DS9? Unfortunately you did'nt include them... :-/
Because they weren't significantly different than they were in TNG.
Agreed on everything - except the Kelvin timeline. PLEASE reboot that. I left the theater after the Kirk/product placement shot.
1:58 B-ben Stiller?
My favourite star trek race!!!
John Colicos played Kor. Michael Ansara played Kang.
No mention of all the Romulan development in DS9???
there was some but it was mostly cardassian, klingon, ferengi that got heavily fleshed out and for the better
John Colicos played Kor, Michael Ansara played Kang.
Vulcans: Elves
Romulans: Dark elves
Remans: Orcs
The background music in this video made me think I left Star Trek Online idling in the background 😂
There is no Kelvin timeline. A change of timeline does not turn Kahn from an Indian sikh into a British white guy. JJ's movies aren't Star Trek, they're crap.
What about romulans in DS9 ? Was there so little change ?
Interesting to revisit this after Discovery Season 3 and
SPOILERS
Learning about Ni'Var! Just very interesting!
I don’t know why they simply didn’t explain Romulans, Vulcans and Remans similar to Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Like Earth they walked the planet at the same time but had different evolutionary outcomes. Rather than dying off, they went “flying off” to another world.
A lot of folks didn’t like the direction “Picard” took, but Michael Chabon deserves a lot of credit for reconciling the ridged TNG Romulans with the TOS Romulans-by bringing back the Vulcan-looking TOS Romulans and showing both standing side by side. I was annoyed for a lot of years that TNG changed the Romulans, as if the makeup artists on TNG didn’t get the memo that the Romulans and Vulcans were the same species. That was kind of the whole point back in TOS, but TNG screwed up the canon (while the TOS movies ignored that and continued to show Romulans as proper Vulcanoids).
well centuries to thousands of years on a different planet could bring minor evolutionary changes to segments of the population. Romulus and Remus are not desert worlds like Vulcan. Plus Romulans and Remans did undergo deliberate genetic alterations.
@toomanyaccounts - Well, yeah, there’s all kinds of ways you can retroactively explain it. But, even at the time, it seemed like an unnecessary (and uninformed?) change just for the sake of change, with little regard for who the Romulans were supposed to be-namely an offshoot of the Vulcan race or extremely close cousins. It was the kind of strange, random alteration the folks running “Discovery” would be thrilled about-one that seems it wasn’t entirely thought through.
Artistically, you can make a stronger argument for radically altering the Klingons from TOS to TMP/TNG by saying that Klingons are an alien species, so we want them to look more alien, less human.
You can’t really say that about Vulcans and Romulans. Vulcans look like humans with upswept eyebrows and pointed ears-a look so iconic even the people behind “Discovery” didn’t dare change them (almost to our surprise-it’s a wonder Sarek didn’t walk in looking like Nosferatu). Vulcans have an iconic look and Romulans were intended to essentially be the same species living on a different planet. It seems artistically ironic for Romulans to look so radically different from Vulcans, when even in the era of TNG, the Enterprise was constantly running into alien species that looked IDENTICAL to humans-I don’t mean humanoids with little bumps-but humanoids who look IDENTICAL to humans, even though they are not directly related. (I’m not talking about being seeded by some common ancestor millions of years ago. I’m talking about aliens with no DIRECT connection to Earth looking identical to humans.) Whereas, Vulcans and Romulans are literally the same species from the same planetary origin. That’s what made it such a random change back in the TNG days.
Now as far as explaining what happened, you could say that, yeah, there were some environmental factors-climate, gravitational-which MIGHT account for some rather radical changes to cranial structures in a relatively short period of time since leaving Vulcan (we’re only talking thousands of years rather than tens of thousands). Although the fact that we’ve seen smooth-headed Romulans as recent as Star Trek VI makes me think maybe there’s some other things going on, as well. You mentioned the Romulans altering their own DNA. Plausible, but I don’t think that’s been firmly established un canon. Here’s what we do know in canon: The Vulcan exiles who eventually became Romulans made stops on other worlds along the way before finally settling on Romulus. We know this because of archeological digs established on TNG. The Enterprise-D also encountered a primitive Vulcanoid race that also happened to more closely resemble Romulans than Vulcans. The Remans have an almost reptilian appearance, but also clearly have Vulcanoid features. One could easily conjecture that there is some alien, non Vulcan DNA that has managed to get mixed into the Romulan genome. There’s another possibility. There may be pockets of Vulcans who look like TNG Romulans. The renegade Vulcan V’Shar agent played by Robin Curtis (I can’t remember the character’s name) May suggest this. She looked like a Romulan and I don’t recall it being established that she had been surgically altered (and would she need to be if TOS Romulans still existed? LOL). It’s entirely possible that the majority of Romulans who left Vulcan already had the ridges and som smooth heads went with them. Maybe the war that took place on Vulcan was literally a race war. And/or more than likely, there is more than one strand of alien DNA in their blood. They are, after all, a conquering empire.
But I’m very glad to see the two varieties standing side by side on “Picard.”
@@MoonjumperReviews we know from time to time that there were Vulcans who idolized the Romulans and would likely have defected to join them. These would likely form their own communities and while regarded as Romulan in culture would be physically Vulcan. plus wouldn't put it past the Romulans to abduct shiploads of Vulcans with the offspring eventually being culturally Romulan. This population would be a recruitment source for infiltration missions by the Romulans into Vulcan or starfleet.
@toomanyaccounts - Yes, quite possible. You make a good point. And there’s historical precedent for that. The kidnapping of South Korean and Japanese citizens by North Korea, for instance-and for various purposes from espionage to being forced to work as actors in propaganda films. (And then, like you said, there will be a handful that defect voluntarily for their own ideological reasons.)
Why weren't the Vulcans space ships featured more in the Star trek franchise?
they were in enterprise. however by tos and tng most vulcan ships were just trading ships, or small scale science ships or they were on starfleet ships either mixed in or entirely vulcan.
@@toomanyaccounts O-kay Thanks for that
@@michaelbourrell2693 memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Vulcan_starship_classes
ngl I'd love to see a video from you explaining how Beyond is a stronger film than Into Darkness for you. I'm curious!!!