By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
What if the greatest Star Trek villain’s best moments never actually happened? That may sound like a paradox, but let’s be honest, paradoxes are what this long-running sci-fi franchise does best. And “paradox” certainly describes Romulan Commander Tomalak, whose most memorable appearances in The Next Generation were as a fake hologram in “Future Imperfect” and in an alternate timeline of the series finale “All Good Things.”
In case you need a primer on the character, Tomalak is a Romulan Commander who first appeared in “The Enemy” trying to rescue the crew of a crashed scout ship. He’s basically the Romulan equivalent to Captain Picard…someone who isn’t afraid to bare his teeth when necessary but who ultimately prefers diplomatic solutions. The character was played to perfection by Babylon 5 icon Andreas Katsulas in four episodes of TNG, but in a notable twist, we only saw the “real” Tomalok in half of those episodes.
What does “real” mean, in this case? We first saw Tomalak in “The Enemy,” and he appeared again in “The Defector,” one of TNG’s best Romulan episodes. The character next appeared in the episode “Future Imperfect,” but we found out he was only a hologram via that episode’s wild twist.
“Future Imperfect” was the episode where Riker woke up in sickbay after the cold open to discover that it’s 16 years later and he’s now captain of the Enterprise. Conveniently suffering memory loss, he navigates his duties as the captain of the flagship, including negotiating a Federation/Romulan peace treaty with Tomalak. Eventually, he realizes he is trapped in a simulation by a lonely alien boy and that none of what he experienced (including multiple interactions with Tomalak) was real.
After that, Tomalak only made one more onscreen appearance, but it was a doozy. He appeared in the TNG series finale “All Good Things,” where he and Picard agree to send one ship each to investigate a mysterious spatial phenomenon in the Devron system (he’s particularly tickled that Picard never cleared this plan with Starfleet Command). By the end of the episode, Picard has saved the galaxy and reset reality, but that means that all of his dealings with Tomalak took place in an alternate reality that was soon erased.
As for us, we just love to see Tomalak onscreen and don’t lose too much sleep about whether these appearances were “real” or not. Thanks to the (inter)stellar performance from Andreas Katsulas, Tomalak easily became the most memorable Romulan in all of The Next Generation. And the very fact that his character was so receptive to diplomacy by the end of the series helped dispel any lingering notions of the Romulans as one-note villains.
However, there are few things Star Trek fans love to debate more than canon, and some of them are likely to obsess over which Tomalak appearances actually impacted the show’s timeline (even though, as Strange New Worlds confirmed, that timeline is always in flux). Those fans would be well-served by remembering the lyrics to another iconic sci-fi show’s iconic opening song: “If you’re wondering how he eats and breathes, and other science facts…just repeat to yourself, ‘It’s just a show, I should really just relax!’”
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