So, now I’m a little more than halfway through the first season of Star Trek: Picard, and I have Thoughts.
(Probably spoiler-y.)
And one of those thoughts is how depressing the universe has become. Everyone is sad. Everything has gone poorly. I was so excited to see Seven, but it was just the same.
It hurts to see beloved characters not get a happy ending. And it hurts to see new ones who are broken and confused.
I am a bit grumpy about that.
But!
I am so excited about the Romulans!
I love Romulans. They are my favorite Trek species, and I am so excited that they are getting so much screen time, and that we’re getting to see into their culture finally. AND THEY ARE SPEAKING RIHANNSU ONSCREEN. SOMEONE HAS GONE IN AND MADE RIHANNSU SPEAKABLE and my nerdy heart is so very full.
You see, back when I was a teenager, I spent a ton of time doing Star Trek roleplays in AOL chatrooms. We’re talking hours a week. I was on probably four or five different crews in various positions as various characters, plus there was a chatroom called Ten Forward Lounge, where you could go and hang out and roleplay whenever you wanted.
(Of course, we invariably had storylines going in there as well.)
One of my very favorite characters was a genetically-engineered Romulan Tal’Shiar officer who had been betrayed by her partner, picked up by the Federation and, since she was a child at the time (11, I think) was taken in by a Federation family and went on to become a Starfleet officer (and also a member of Starfleet Intelligence, because why not?).
How’s that for a mouthful of backstory? I was fourteen at the time I created her. But what it really came down to was that I wanted to play a Romulan but there was a dearth of Romulan specific sims (short for simulations), and the few that did exist were either too late or on the weekends, and that wasn’t feasible with school.
So that meant I needed a Romulan character to be in Starfleet, and man, I jumped through hoops to make that happen.
Now, back in the day, the Romulan language (Rihannsu, in Romulan) did exist to some extent–Diane Duane had started in some of her Trek novels and it had been expanded a bit–but we’re still talking about 30 pages when the entire thing was printed out. Which I know. Cuz I printed it out, so I could sprinkle in Romulan words in my dialogue (and also learn all the curse words).
But it wasn’t like Klingon. There was vocabulary and there was grammar put together, but most of the vocab was adjectives and nouns, so you couldn’t really parse together a whole sentence.
So, long story short (too late), I am SO EXCITED to see that it’s become a speakable language. If they put out an official Romulan dictionary and/or make it a course on Duolingo I am so there.
ROMULANS! I love them.
And I also love the Borg, at least old-school Borg, before they got a bit overdone in Voyager. (In my eighth grade tech ed class, when we made CO2 cars, I painted mine silver and put the Borg symbol on the top. And it beat everyone else, bwhahaha.) So the show has lots of Romulan stuff and lots of Borg stuff, and I am 100% there for all of that.
I just wish the characters weren’t so sad and hopeless. Discovery is a bit violent at times, but it still has that hopefulness, the idea that if we work together and make sacrifices, we can make the universe a better place. I hope Picard gets there too.
Watching/watched Picard, squiders? Thoughts? Thoughts about Trek in general (or Romulans in specific)?
(Oh, and that convoluted character I made up all those years ago? Became the inspiration for the main character in my high fantasy trilogy. Ha!)
