test content
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc

What really happened after the Romulan Attack on Khitomer?

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
edited April 2012 in Ten Forward
People may remember this incident - it's the reason Worf grew up among humans.

The story as far as I know goes like this:
1) Khitomer is the place where the peace treaty between Klingons and Federation is made in response to the Praxis incident. At this time, there are plans for resettling Q'onos, and all predictions indicate the Klingon Empire will fall soon.

2) Some time later, around the time of the Enterprise C, Khitomer is attacked by the Romulans. Many Klingons die, Worf is orphaned and seperated from his brother. Supposedly, the father of Duras did betray the Empire to the Romulans. The Enterprise C is one of the first responders to the attack and destroyed by the Romulans.

3) In an alternate timeline, the Enterprise C did disappear during the battle with the Romulans and the Klingons never found out it was involved trying to defend their colony. As a response, the Klingon launch a massive war campaign that allows them to conquer the Romulans and, around the time of the Enterprise D, threatens to destroy the Federation.

My questions:

Duras Motivations and Plans
  • What did Duras actually have to gain by betraying the Romulans?
  • Was he actually brainwashed or tortured?
  • Did he not care for his people and just wanted a positin of power in the Romulan Star Empire (wasn't a seat on the Klingon Council not enough for him?)
  • Did he want the two Empires to unite and have the War be brief, with all his loyal allies joining him and the Star Empire?

Romulan Motivation and Plans
  • What did the Romulans hope to accomplish?
  • Were they expecting to conquer the Klingon Empire as a whole or just a few colonies?
  • What role did Duras play for them?
  • Where they aiming for an alliance with Duras loyalists?
  • Did they misjudge the Empire's military capabilities? After all, in the alternate reality, the Klingons broke the Khitomer Accords and isolated itself from the Federation, and then conquered the Romulans and were supposedly in the process of breaking the Federation's back?

Other Questions
  • How diid the Klingons react? Full Scale War?
  • How did the conflict end so "quickly" in the alternate timeline with both Empires and the Federation mostly "stable", where the alternate timeline has a massive war between Klingons and Romulans and Klingons and Federation?
  • How well the Klingons recover so well after the Praxis incident? Federation Engineering too good for its own good?

Some of these questions to me indicate plot holes and apparant inconsistencies. At the minimum,it'S something that probably should be fleshed out a little (did any novel do this?)
Post edited by Unknown User on

Comments

  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2012
    im not sure it really needs fleshing out really but if you want it my theory would be that duras's father wanted power. he used the romulans to attack khitomer to try and destroy the house of mogh. in the way of the warrior we find out the mogh helped an old klingon in their blood fued with the house of duras. this attack was probably revenge and with his greatest rivals out of the way his influence in the council would increase. he would make sure the council did not attack the romulans back and just let the incident pass. probably arguing that their great enemy the federtion should be dealt with first and they could not affotd to stretch themselves against both factions.

    the romulans could have been looking to expand their territory and would have taken this area as payment. they most likely would have betrayed the house of duras and eventually began to take more and more territory now their foot was in the door.

    edit - got mixed up on my history - will add a bit more in a sec.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2012
    Ummm, the Enterprise C was not destroyed at Khitomer.... it was destroyed at Narendra III. :p:o
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2012
    Ashur1 wrote:
    Ummm, the Enterprise C was not destroyed at Khitomer.... it was destroyed at Narendra III. :p:o

    d'oh of course it was. im getting my sneaky romulan attacks mixed up.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2012
    Duras's motivations are easy: Power. Everything shown or mentioned of the Duras in canon, spanning three generations, boils down to one protracted scheme to engineer a Duras chancellor - a council seat wasn't enough, and more than once that scheme involved Romulan help. They have few friends in the Empire, even less outside of it. The Romulans didn't need to brainwash him, only dangle a carrot.

    There's a lot of ways it could play out, but I don't think any of them would involve the empires uniting, or Duras leaving the empire. One possibility is engineering a crisis and then colluding with Duras to reach a solution nobody else can that appears to be greatly to the Klingons' favor, with Khitomer being the sacrificial lamb to provide that crisis, conveniently disposing of one of Duras's enemies at the same time, with no blood or dishonor on Duras's hands.

    The Klingons get what appears to be a victory over the Romulans at the cost of a colony world or two, Duras gets his power, and the Romulans give some token "loss" but gain enough blackmail material to turn the new chancellor into a puppet, because they need only say the word to plunge the Empire into civil war. As long as Duras or his descendents are in power, they can't so much as look sideways at the Romulans, and if a Romulan agents passes along the words that an unprovoked attack on the Federation or the Cardassians would be appreciated, he'd be forced to comply. And if the Klingons get rid of him, things go back to the status quo and the Romulans have lost nothing, but two chancellors have vacated their offices and two internal conflicts have rocked the Klingon Empire in a fairly short span, meaning they come out ahead anyway.


    Now, things fell apart. We don't know it all, but we do know that Duras never got his power, his daughters and grandson carried on in pretty much the same way he did, scheming and getting themselves killed, never getting their power either.

    This is probably why the war ended so quickly. The Romulans weren't after an open war. It's not their style - they like their sneak attacks, but much prefer watching their enemies kill each other, and then sweeping in when things have already gone to hell and conquering what's left. They very well could have withdrawn, surrendered after a short conflict, even staged an internal retaliation against the "traitors" responsible to distance themselves from the mess. However they did it, it's in their style to avoid an open war with an unweakened enemy.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2012
    hmm, i dont know when the alliance between the feds and the klingons was officially signed, which makes it tricky to judge romulan motivation.

    also in the alternate timeline i dont remember the klingons conquering the romulans? that only happned in 'all good things' i dont remember the when it said in yesterdays enterprise that they conquered the romulans and then attacked the feds?
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2012
    hmm, i dont know when the alliance between the feds and the klingons was officially signed, which makes it tricky to judge romulan motivation.

    also in the alternate timeline i dont remember the klingons conquering the romulans? that only happned in 'all good things' i dont remember the when it said in yesterdays enterprise that they conquered the romulans and then attacked the feds?

    You´re right about that. The Romulans were only mentioned to be conquered by the Klingons in All Good Things. :)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2012
    hmm, i dont know when the alliance between the feds and the klingons was officially signed, which makes it tricky to judge romulan motivation.

    It was stated in "The Way of the Warrior" (DS9) that the alliance between the Federation and Klingons had been in effect for "twenty years." Now, assuming that's exact years and not a round number, and given the episode I mentioned takes place in the year 2372, that means the formal alliance between the two powers would have been finalized in 2352 or thereabouts.

    And Romulan motiviations regarding the allience between the Klingons and Federation isn't hard to deduce; they want it dissolved. The greatest threat to the Romulans was a union between their two greatest enemies. They had fought the Federation a couple centuries before (to probably what was a Korea-esque stalemate) and had been in a state of Cold War since. The Klingons, meanwhile, were another expansionistic empire like the Romulans, so it's not hard to see what drives that rivalry. An alliance between the Federation and Klingons would no doubt be seen as a threat to the Romulans' own interests and a serious barrier to Romulan expansion. So it's not surprising that the Romulans take any opportunity they could to drive the alliance apart.

    The big question comes as to what Romulans were doing/thinking when the Dominion managed to drive a wedge between the Klingons and Federation (albeit temporarily).
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2012
    But the attack on Khitomer was not some secret attack that the KLingons couldn't trace back to the Romulans. It does't seem a reasonable or expectable reaction of the Klingon Empire to launch a war on the Federation in response to a Romulan attack. No, the expected reaction is that the Klingons will retaliate against the Romulans.

    In the alternate timeline, the entire war seemed to be started based on the fact that the Enterprise C was accidentally moved forwards in time - there is no indication that was the Romulan plan.

    Meta-Wise, I find it more likely that the writers didn't really think the whole thing through. Ignoring that, it seems too far fetched that the Romulans expected that they could throw any Federation help for Khitomer out of the timeline and them attacking a Klingon colony would somehow leat to a Federation-Klingon war.

    Maybe they really just wanted to conquer Khitomer. But why did they fail to conquer it? And if they failed, why wasn't the Klingon response harder,
    especially when in one alternate timeline, they turn out to be strong enough to beat the Federation.
    Or did we just never hear about the conflict that erupted afterwards? is this simply an unwritten chapter of the Klingon/Romulan relations? (We don't know all that much about the timeline betwen TOS and TNG, really, only a very few tidbts)
Sign In or Register to comment.