The Captain is a Romulan. In a series of dare-you detente maneuvers, the Romulan Empire has theoretically opened its borders to the Federation but retains very tight control over where their “exchange students” actually get to go. The Federation has allowed Romulans to participate pretty freely in its institutions while scrutinizing them in the best of Big Brotherly traditions. This Captain is the first to opt for StarFleet and the Federation has given her a ship to command.
The Captain is a spy and it is revealed in the first episode that she is expected to obey the orders of the Romulan Empire first and foremost, although she is to continue to be a good spy and deflect suspicion wherever possible, and for that reason has a lot of leeway to make her own assessments…to an extent unusual for the Romulan High Command to tolerate, she has the option of refusing Romulan orders but she’ll have to account for her reasoning and her judgment will be scrutinized carefully whenever she does so. The Captain is, at the outset, a spy loyal to the Romulan Empire.
Through her eyes, and through her secret encrypted communications with the Romulan Empire, we get to experience a hostile critical perspective on the Federation and its activities. The show’s episode writers get to use the Romulan perspective to either serve up valid crits of UN / US / Western Cultural activities or to represent invalid perspectives critical of same as foils to demonstrate the validity of same, as they see fit. Not that every show need have a 21st century parallel, but the opportunity exists.
The show’s development trajectory gets to play first with the notion that the Captain is experiencing mixed loyalties and is being won over to the Federation way of seeing things, and then, when that starts to wear thin in the beginning of the 3rd season, they hint that maybe the Federation’s BigBrotherly scrutiny has long since picked up on her spy status and that there’s perhaps a scripted element to her discovery of the general superiority of the Federation way of doing things, and she starts to question whether she is a creature of free will or a puppet, and, if puppet, whose? Thus she starts to become her own nonconformist Captain, not particularly loyal to either system, playing them off against each other, and to an increasing extent doing what she thinks is right.
Her main female foil is her Communications Officer, a relatively elderly native of the TransCaribbean on Earth. A woman of mixed Indio, Hispanic, Portuguese, and Black ancestry and the most imposing sense of supersecretary-type competence, she’s been in StarFleet for half a lifetime and just knows how to get things done whether the “things” are technical or administrative or pertain to personnel management. She has worked under 6 previous Captains and tends to regard then as precocious children, whose intentions must be honored but who cannot be assumed to know how to actually get things done and that’s what people like her are for. She’s a mix of perpetually cheerful and perpetually cynical. And she rags on incompetent people, stupid regulations, and badly designed communications systems.
Her First Officer is a formal but not unemotional Andorian gay male. He takes the social equality of gay people for granted because a higher percentage of Andorians are gay and it isn’t and never was a “marked” social status. He’s a dedicated student of formal studies and has occasional intense fights with the comm officer over the values of formal versus informal learning processes.
The Weapons & Defense guy is a newbie who stumbled across an unexpected facility for making them work faster and better and more efficiently and under more ridiculous constraints than anyone else ever could when the former Defense guy got phasered in the 3rd or 4th episode. He’s a young guy, totally geeky, and gets very excited about what he’s just figured out how to do. He’s inclined to pump his fist into the air and shout “Yes!! Yes!! Ooh Baby!! Oh yeah!!” and things like that when asked to perform the impossible and he figures out how to do it in a couple of hours. When some huge monumental project is asked of him, with lots of details, and then he is asked how long it is likely to take before a working model can be made available, he is inclined to glance around and ask “What time is it?”
The ship’s doc is a Vulcan. (Or the Vulcan is a Ship’s Doctor, depending on how you look at it). The doc is dedicated to a protocol of medical ethics that value patient self-determination, and tends to lay out the information and probe as to the wishes of the patients. In typical Vulcan fashion, the doc is not adept at exploring feelings pertaining to the making of these decisions and is unable to comprehend why being presented with all of the relevant information is not in and of itself sufficient to yield a decision. Mostly people like the doc for the reputation for complete honesty and for laying out the facts with nothing held back though. The doc has a good rapport with the Andorian 1st Officer, but is also respected by the Comm Officer. The Captain thinks the doc may be a counterspy placed to watch her. The doc is intrigued by Romulan anatomy. They tiptoe around each other making delicate insinuations and innuendos which are subtle and not easy to catch, and it becomes a game for them, always trying to imply something with a double meaning when talking with each other while keeping a straight face.
