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TNG: Unification Review (1 of 3)

Opinionated Next Gen Episode Guide kicks off its look at Unification. Spock is now an ambassador, just like Sarek, his father, so of course two experienced trained diplomats on the same side don't get along in the slightest. Picard will have to go and find Spock on Romulus to try to figure out WTF.

Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spock! Spo- not yet?! 8)


Three-parter? Chuck's going all out here.

I remember when this came out originally. Part 2 couldn't air quick enough. I really wanted to see Data vs. Spock. I still wish they should have had a Logic Showdown of some kind.

I felt the same way. Talk about a cliffhanger.

Part 2 up, suffering from the usual problems of middle parts, but solid enough.

Captain Seafort wrote:Part 2 up, suffering from the usual problems of middle parts, but solid enough.

Yeah. This part is Chuck bridging a two-parter, so I feel this is mostly summarizing what's going on.

Part 3.
Interesting comparisons between Spock and Data, and also Spock and Sela. And Putin might be a TNG fan.

Love the reference to Ukraine and Crimia.

I remember debating thia out with Rochey back in the day, if it would work or not.

Answer: it bloody well shouldn't, given that their strength was barely greater than that of the Irish Volunteers during the Easter Rising.

If I remember right, my point was that it is unlikely, but it was with in the realms of possibility if done exceptionally well. Which from what we saw, it wouldnt be.

The idea of a forced unification being accomplished with a couple of thousand troops is a bit absurd. I figured the best the Romulans could hope for was that the Vulcans wouldn't take them on directly as they're pacifists, and the Federation would back down from taking them on in order to avoid a full scale war. I can't imagine either of those things actually panning out for the Romulans, but I can imagine them being ignorant/willfully blind enough to talk themselves into believing it.

The Vulcan ships carried 2,000+ troops (according to Troi). There was one accompanying warbird which decloaked to destroy those ships. I had reckoned that there were more cloaked ships with the fleet with troops onboard, though absolutely nothing in the episode points to that. But it makes sense that there would be.

2,000 troops to capture and hold a core UFP planet seems suicidal. The troops could be obliterated from orbit by Starfleet or merely transported off the planet if there were only one ship protecting them. The Bren fleet which attacked SF was all but decimated--a fleet, not one ship. A similar response would surely happen at Vulcan, war footing or not.

How many troops does it require to take and hold a planet? Were there ever any numbers given during the Dominion War about that?

Not really. It would depend hugely on the planet, of course. Many planets have relatively modest populations - in TOS habitable planets with just a small team of scientists on them were quite common, whilst more developed planets like Deneva had a population of a million. Founder planets seem to run rather higher, of course - Vulcan in the alternate timeline had a population of six billion, IIRC.

So for some planets a platoon would probably do, for others it would be like D-Day times fifty.

One datapoint we did get... in The Changing Face of Evil, the planet Septimus III was defended by the Cardassian Eleventh Order - a reserve force of "old men and walking wounded" which was 500,000 strong. The entire lot of them were slaughtered when the planet was invaded by the Klingons.