They were the same species on the same planet just a few thousand years ago, which is the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.
It might be more accurate to say that Vulcans are just Romulans with impulse control. Before the split, Vulcans were more like modern Romulans than modern Vulcans. Vulcans at that time were highly emotional and violent. Then they had a sort of cultural revolution, which involved controlling emotions and focusing on logic. This led to some traditionalists leaving Vulcan and founding Romulus, carrying that emotional and violent culture with them.
It’s curious that despite this cultural revolution that led to founding of planet Vulcan they are still basically equals technologically. It doesn’t appear that a few thousand years of excess emotion and violent tendencies has been at all detrimental to Romulan technological advances.
Their physiology is barely diverged so their intellects are likely to remain similar. Espionage is frequently the theme of Romulan encounters, which would help keep them up to date. And if they procreate more frequently than every seven years, they might have a much larger population even with greater murderousness, with more people being advantageous for tech development.
Gene Roddenberry envisaged the Romulans as Star Trek’s version of Communist China and the Klingons as its Soviet Union. In Making of Star Trek, he and Stephen Whitfield describe the Romulans as “highly militaristic, aggressive by nature, ruthless in warfare.”
That’s from the man himself. Not sure where you got the impression that romulans aren’t violent.
It’s more like how the Borg are described as an unstoppable unrelenting all powerful force… and are stopped, relent, and are devoid of power. On paper they are one thing, on screen they are another.
With the Romulans, they tend to outsource the violence. Pit party A against B, then clean up after. Practically scavengers. Klingons, Jem’Hadar, and Hirogen I’d more readily describe as violent.
You bring up a good point. It feels like Romulans have also learned to control their violent emotions, but rather than suppress them entirely that energy is just focused all into tactics and smarter ways to be ruthless.
When I think of the Romulans, I first think of that time they plotted to bomb DS9 to gain control over the wormhole only to be thwarted by time-traveling O’Brien
Black mirror is a lot like a modern Twilight Zone, which early Star Trek was significantly influenced by, and now a fan who directed an episode inspired by Trek gets to do actual Trek?
I don’t hate it, but I also strongly dislike Trek that doesn’t follow the episodic formula, meaning I can’t drop in anywhere and have an enjoyable experience. I disliked Picard for the same reason. SNW is much more planet-of-the-week, which I greatly prefer.
My expectations for this one were high, but I’m really impressed with how well they pulled it off. Tawny Newsome and Jack Quaid did a great job of dialing their performances back just enough, and the SNW cast went just a little bit broader.
Heck, even before you take into account differing xenobiologies, this has precedent on earth; different cultures are often unused to how other cultures smell.
I’m sensitive to smells and perfumes so any culture that uses them often is difficult for me. Hey are there scent suppressants I can buy or is that future tech?
There would so be a market for it, although I’d rather have the artificial odor market be killed off instead. Saves a lot of waste as well. (as the air pollution, those smells… yuck)
Hey I’m a condo maintenance guy! I swear Snelling garbage and bad smells all day has destroyed my sense of smell. If someone’s wearing strong perfume it bothers me, but I can’t smell bad smells or notice them
I’ve heard that white people smell like bologna. Could never stand the stuff myself, but I can’t vouch for my scent! Tangentially, I think my dogs’ paws smell like salami. “Ol’ salami paws”, I’ve been known to call them.
But that was just Q’s ad hominem response to an even better exchange: Q: What must I do to convince you people (that he is mortal and without powers) Worf: die.
Sorry I know you said “not epic” but most things Worf says are epic.
Alternatively, some of the best episodes of TNG were “bottle” episodes to fill space and keep costs down. If 90s trek had shorter seasons would we have had “Measure of a Man” ,“Duet”, or “Masks” made?
I know the days of a 24 episode season are long gone due to the increase of production time in modern TV, but maybe we could have 13 to 15 episodes ? Enough for a 10 episode dedicated season arc with a few others just to explore some weird anomalies that make no sense at all.
I said pretty much the same in a comment above, but I’m not against filler, or bottle episodes, though I may have come off that way. I’m just against bad filler, stuff that would have never made it into a show if there was no predetermined season lengths. In a perfect world, it would be great if stories could be chosen simply because they were great stories. I’d like to know that something like the Fly episode of Breaking Bad would could still be filmed just because the show runners thought it was a great story, and not because they had a make a certain number of episodes and needed to save some money on one episode so they could spend more on another.
Honestly, I think there should be some really corny/goofy “what were they thinking” clunker episodes. Not lazy writing that disregards established character traits or contradicts itself or anything, but something they try that doesn’t work, but they tried in earnest and it shows.
Something that reminds you of the participatory nature of suspension of disbelief.
Not sure I’d put Masks alongside Measure of Man or Duet. Or indeed have it as an argument for filler episodes.
Given TNG never had much character serialisation, I’d say filler is more like those DS9 and ENT episodes late on that never fit I to anybody’s arc. Like the holosuite ones. Some amazing ones from DS9. Some less so from Enterprise.
But SNW has a good balance between episodic and serialisation. All this comes down to can they keep up the quality on greater volume. That needs more investment at a time when Paramount is cutting back…
Yeah Spiner’s acting in that episode is great, it’s a bit ridiculous and over the point but I believe that that was intentional, and I am not holding it against the episode
Yeah, he was largely operating in safe space and still made some unethical decisions.
Janeway was willing to make the hard calls that would best serve her ship and it’s future, having your cook and your third in command get fused isn’t exactly going to result in a functioning chain of command.
Plus since the operation could be reversed, you could argue that Tuvok and Neelix aren’t actually dead, merely suspended animation like storing people in a transporter buffer. You’re still killing Tuvix, but sacrificing one to save two is “the needs of the many” in it’s most simplistic form even without the added weight of hundreds of lives depending on Tuvok’s leadership and tactical skills.
I never once considered Janeway to be out of line given her circumstances. The crew always comes first even at the cost of her own humanity and ethics. She’s a good captain, willing to make the call that ends lives and live with it so that others may not have to endure those decisions and consequences. She didn’t ask anyone else to do that for her.
Yeah fuck Tuvix, and the Philosophy 101 bullshit. Two people were the victim of an orchid-related technology malfunction. Plus, I don’t hear people making the same argument about Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.
Exactly, had they not reversed the malfunction Janeway could be considered to have killed two of her crew. That somehow never gets brought up in the philosophy discussions surrounding the episode. Refusal to act when a solution exists makes her complicit in dual homicide.
Plus! After that one episode in TNG where they de-age replacement Crusher, we have no reason to believe transporters can’t solve literally all of these issues including death. For those not in the know, since the transporter has the last time someone energized stored in their memory banks it can simply reconstruct them as they were. A literal backup snapshot of the person.
Once that episode airs, all bets are completely off. I mean seriously, you could fix someone getting their head blown off by just transporting them but altering the image to correct for their last time leaving the ship. Death? Fixed. Wounds? Fixed. You can literally pull their backups and reconstruct at any time you want.
It’s foolish to think this is even a conundrum given that slip up, just duplicate and separate, keep all three. If transporters are really making matter out of energy it shouldn’t matter if there’s three people’s worth of matter, just use more energy.
Yeah it’s basically just a Trolley Problem scenario. Two people were laying on the trolley’s current track and would have been killed if she refused to pull the lever. She pulled the lever, diverted the trolley, and killed one person laying on the second track to save the two laying on the primary track.
Sure, the philosophy people could argue that she was murdering the one by acting. But if she has the opportunity to act and refuses to do so, many more would argue that she was complicit in murdering the two. She made a choice and knew she’d have to live with it.
Neither side is more “right” than the other. That’s kind of the whole point of the trolley problem.
I mean, DS9 was almost as much in the boonies as Voyager. Assistance was limited, and there were limitations on what he could do, as he was only running the station at the behest of the Bajoran government, not as a true representative of the Federation.
It also introduced facets of war, even before it became a full blown thing in the later seasons. He wasn't always on the side of the angels... because there are no angels in war. War only ever makes demons.
It doesn't excuse his actions, but it doesn't make them truly inexcusable either. They both operated in much more of a grey area than either of the two previous series.
Bajoran space was far away but not impossibly so from Federation resources, I’m not trying to say he’s a bad Captain, merely that the comparison to Janeway is a complete farce. If we are being fair they both fail to uphold the federation’s ideals.
If we are being reasonable, they both did what they had to do in order to save lives and get the job done.
My issue is the constant Trekky tendency to pretend Janeway is a shit bag and Sisko is somehow better, it’s just bias.
True. Then you are removed and replaced by someone who does what you won’t.
It’s tricky. I think its also important to weigh in that a lot of these captains and folks in executive position spent their entire working life to get to X position. It must be hard to walk away from a life goal, which I assume is what pushes them to, “do what needs to be done.” The lingering question remaining, “Did it really need to he done?”
There are a lot of instances where the Enterprise crew wanted to do the ethical thing, and Picard stops it or tries to. For example, when Dr. Crusher wanted to help when that planet population was addicted to drugs, and Picard wouldn’t let her do that or communicate anything to them.
Also, Data once found humans frozen in space, and when he helped them, Picard was annoyed; it wasn’t even a Prime Directive issue!
In fairness, Picard is extremely upfront and honest that he has broken the Prime Directive in situations where he’s felt it would be callous not to.
Separately, he also said that while rules are a good thing, rules cannot be universally absolute.
Another thing he’s said is that Starfleet doesn’t want officers that will blindly follow orders, but rather to think about them seriously and weigh them in their minds.
Janeway straight up said to another captain that she’s never broken the Prime Directive in her life, despite clearly doing it a bunch of times. She’s in denial.
That’s my only real issue with her is her comment to the Nova class captain about it.
However, I give her the benefit of the doubt here because she’s clearly trying to encourage him that they don’t need to abandon their morality. If she tells him that she’s done it half a dozen times or so then he might be more likely to assume that’s the standard.
Now we all know in hindsight that he’d already committed an atrocity and wanted assurance from Janeway that he wasn’t alone in his decisions to prioritize crew over other sapient beings, but she was simply seeing the younger version of herself in him and attempting to assure him that he doesn’t have to give up hope and sink to those depths.
Voyager has more of a problem with character writing consistency than it does an issue with Janeway specifically, IMO.
In fairness, Picard is extremely upfront and honest that he has broken the Prime Directive in situations where he’s felt it would be callous not to.
And he’s generally careful about trying to make sure that there is justification for breaking the Prime Directive before doing so.
He was particularly put out about being involved in Klingon political successsion because it would be a violation of the Prime Directive, and he’d be wading into Klingon business, with no justification for his being so, other than that he was appointed.
I believe the only reason nothing happened to him was because of Bajor, with him being seen as an Emissary to the Bajoran people, punishing Sisko would Punishing the Prophets chosen one, they wanted Bajor in the federation no matter what, that was the end goal, so leaving Sisko essentially unpunished was right for the greater goal of bringing in Bajor.
I mean, that logic was only ever applied by the Vulcans as a personal choice/sacrifice, not something to be enforced by the barrel of a… er… phaser.
Spock sacrificed himself, it wasn’t done forcibly against his will. Kirk didn’t order the execution of one man so that others could live.
I don’t think we should take a slogan as an absolute moral lesson, you can justify all kinds of evil with it.
E.g. your organs could save dozens of lives. Would it be right to pin you down, kill you, and remove them, so that others can live? Surely one life lost is a worthy price to pay? The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, after all.
Ethics are a lot more complex than a catchy slogan.
Yeah but it wasn’t a random uninvolved person, it was essentially an industrial accident that needed unwinding and it just so happened the involved people were trapped in the gears of the machine. Somebody was getting smushed
Spock: “I solved for the Y in my computation … but the variable so devastating: I’m the ex / X”.
Thanks. Now I get it. IIRC the subtitles had “solved for the why” and then the X didn’t make any sense. That is indeed clever.
My favourite Spock bit came at the end during the grande finale. Everyone was singing “we know our purpose, to protect the mission – our prime directive”, and Spock just goes “not exactly”. 😄
Can we talk about how great it is that they keep tinkering with the opening credits for the special episodes? Because I love it every time they do. Fukkin acapella man.
“With directing efforts on shows like “Voyager,” “Enterprise,” “Lost,” “The Americans,” and many more under her belt, she was most recently put in charge of two pivotal episodes of “Foundation” season 2, the Apple TV+ sci-fi series based on Isaac Asimov’s novels.”
I think they fixed the line and added the correct info now. That quote was from the article. Since the title says “new trek” I’m guessing they meant discovery/SNW/Picard as the trek the picked Foundation over to direct.
She directed episodes of both “Enterprise” and Star Trek: Enterprise", which each lasted two seasons. The stealth name change was surprising back then.
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