Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Romulans

The Doctor said it best to the head Romulan hijacker of the USS Prometheus: "Paranoia is a way of life for you, isn't it?" By and large, the Romulans have been depicted as a treacherous bunch who would stab their own mother in the back for a better share of the viinerine. They've been devious — or should that be Decius? — from the get-go!

In essence, if we extrapolate from "those who march beneath the raptor's wings," the Romulans are the latest iteration of a gaggle of Vulcan malcontents who preferred emotion, nuclear weapons, and exile, to their local lecture on Surakian metaphysics. We perhaps shouldn't expect anything less than duplicity, then, even two millennia or so later!

Scheming Romulans and Romulan schemes played a large role in season one of Star Trek: Picard. After that season had aired, showrunner Michael Chabon shared the treatise on Romulan society he had developed for the show — some of which, like the Qowat Milat, featured directly in it. Interestingly, Chabon proposes that the Romulan "culture of deceit and concealment" may owe its origins, at least in part, to the flora and fauna of the planet Romulus itself:

Legend holds that the basis of Romulans' fixation on deception and the hiding of secrets is the unusually high proportion of mimetic (camouflage-using) native animals and plants that the first settlers of Romulus found on arrival.

Chabon cites one animal in particular — the "warbird" — inspiration not only for Romulan starship design, but also, with its mimetic plumage, for what Chabon calls the "most Romulan of all Romulan technologies" — the cloaking device. Chabon does concede, however, that this might be a "classic Romulan 'cover story'" because, after all, "Romulans are addicted to cover stories."