Shinzon desires to liberate the slave world Remus and reintegrate it into Romulan society and re-conquer the Neutral Zone as a way to eventually conquer the Federation. Shinzon is essentially an inverse Picard, growing up (through accelerated genetic processes) a slave while the real Picard rose to prominence within Starfleet. The Enterprise is lured to Remus by Shinzon, who acquires B-9 and uses him to entangle the Enterprise. Data considers B-9 a long-lost brother and attempts to improve him by transferring his own memory engrams to the android, but this fails. Later, Data sacrifices himself to save the Enterprise and defeat Shinzon; the crew thinks Data is lost, but it turns out B-9 may have retained some of the memory engrams after all. Riker takes command of the U.S.S. Titan and departs with his new wife, Deanna Troi. Dr. Crusher takes a position at Starfleet Medical.

Other cast members?

Tal'Aura: A member of the Romulan Senate. During a session of the Senate (one of the first scenes in "Nemesis"), she leaves the room on a pretext. Yet, she leaves a small, silver box behind on her desk which wraps the room in a glowing energy jacket a moment later. That way, every kind of life in the room is erased, and the Romulan Senate gets killed. Senator Tal'Aura is in fact a true ally of Shinzon.

Donatra: Commander Donatra is a key figure in the movie. The attractive Romulan has a dry sense of humour and a cold, calculating intellect. She is a subordinate of Shinzon and shows strong interest in him, but he refuses her. Donatra also is the commander of the Warbird 'Valdore', which belongs to Shinzon's fleet.

Hiren: Praetor Hiren is the president of the Romulan Senate. He is a qualified politician in his sixties, and he is convinced to the very end that the military is not going to decide the political course of Romulus. Hiren is not willing to make compromises but rather wants to banish Shinzon and the Reman back into the dilithium mines as quickly as possible. But before he gets the possibility to do so, he painfully looses his life in the bomb attack on the Senate.

Viceroy: The assistant of Shinzon is an elderly Romulan officer who is respected by his own people, but he is closer to Shinzon. But yet, both seldom have the same opinion, which is why there are some minor conflicts between the two in the movie.

Commander #1: The Romulan Commander, whose name is never mentioned in "Nemesis", is a member of the Romulan Senate. He is present at the session of the Senate shortly before the bomb attack and suggests that the Romulans unite with the Reman in order to be able to fight the Federation. But Praetor Hiren doesn't want to hear about it.

Commander #2: Another Romulan Commander we learn almost nothing about in the movie. He discusses the fusion of the Romulans and the Reman with "Commander #1", which is not supported by any of the other Senate members.

Full Script Review... By Robnhud for TrekWeb

In the beginning, Shinzon essentially murders the entire Romulan senate with a weapon he has developed, using Thalaron radiation, which essentially destroys organic matter, a microscopic amount could kill everyone on the Enterprise in a matter of seconds. A small box-type device is planted in the Senate chamber, sprouts legs like a spider and suddenly a bright beam of green light shoots up from it and cascades all around the room. This leaves the senators puzzled before their flesh starts to melt away and we see them all die horribly.

After the introduction of Shinzon, the ‘Next Generation’ cast is introduced in the wedding ceremony scene of Riker and Troi. The wedding reception scene isn't overly long to my perception, 5-6 minutes at best. This is where we first see Picard showing signs of aging, not physically but mentally. He talks of Riker serving as his "trusted right arm for fourteen years" and he is genuinely sad to see everyone go, it's at the beginning that we learn of everyone's new posts: Riker and Troi will be going to the Titan, Geordi and Leah Brahams have hooked up, and Beverly is going off to Starfleet Medical. The only thing which may irk people is Data singing "Blue Skies" during the reception and everyone getting up to dance. This is important later with the plot line about the long-lost android brother of Data, B-9, but unfortunately it is a little too familiar to us, with Data singing a song playing an important plot point in the last film, Insurrection.

They find B-9 after getting sidetracked to the Kolarin system (Kolarin 3 to be exact), which is close to the Romulan border, while on the way to Betazed for the completion of the Riker/Troi wedding festivities. We later learn that Shinzon found B-9, who's been passed off from species to species because he's so damn annoying (he has a vocabulary like a 4 year old) and scatters him across the desert for the Enterprisers to stumble upon. This is where Picard takes the 24th century military jeep for a spin and Data mentions that he is baffled by the human predilection for piloting vehicles at unsafe velocities. This sounds a little like a mid-life crisis but it works here and doesn't seem forced. They find B-9 scattered around the surface and the last piece they find is his head, which is functional. The head talks to Data and says things like "Why am I looking at me?"

I didn't get a feeling that the Data/B9 angle was explored to its full capacity, which naturally seems to draw somewhat of a parallel to the Picard/Shinzon and Romulus/Remus brotherhood angles. However, after Shinzon uses B-9 to lure the Enterprise into his plan (which, if you’re confused, is to get Picard's blood, kill him and then everyone on Earth) B-9 remotely becomes an “inside agent” ala Geordi visor in Generations or La Forge in the TNG episode where he was brainwashed to act as an assassin. When B-9 is activated after being reassembled, Shinzon is able to beam Picard off the Enterprise. This thread eventually culminates in a spectacularly-written escape sequence from the Scimitar (Shinzon’s powerful Warbird) where the Data/B-9 doppelganger factor comes in handy.

Data (pretending to be B-9) tells the guard holding Picard in the Scimitar brig that he has to take him to the Bridge... being the dumb guard that most bad guys are, he lets them go. Picard and Data escape in a small shuttle called a 'Scorpion'. Shinzon catches on and raises the force-field around the shuttle bay door. The Scorpion then crashes through the front doors of the shuttle bay and races through all of the Scimitar hallways only to bust out of an observation lounge window and escape back to the Enterprise.

Another important baddie is Shinzon’s Viceroy, who is unnamed in this draft of the script. He is almost more developed than Shinzon himself. As a Reman, the Viceroy is described with the rest of his race as “nosferatu-like” in appearance (vampires with exaggerated facial features and long finger nails; also see Shadow Of The Vampire). The backstory on the Remans is scant, but essentially we are presented with the notion that the Romulan crest is a bird grasping two worlds in its talons... one is Romulus and one is Remus; the latter is a slave world where the inhabitants mine dilithium for the Romulan Empire and can only live on the dark side of the planet because the lighted side is too hot for habitation (explaining their horrifying physical abnormality).

The Viceroy has been with Shinzon since when he was a boy, a scene we see early in the film where a boy we later learn is Shinzon is presented before the Romulan Senate. When Picard, Riker and Troi meet with Shinzon under the pretext that the villain is the “new Romulan Praetor” (remember the coup in the beginning), Shinzon takes an obvious attraction to Troi, who is then telepathically “raped” by the Viceroy who uses his telepathic abilities (unique to this individual, not all Remans, apparently) to allow Shinzon to enter Troi’s mind. This telepathic rape almost makes the Viceroy more menacing at times than Shinzon himself. This also provides Troi with a meatier role later in the script as she turns the tables on the Viceroy to help locate the cloaked Scimitar. Unfortunately, the other characters, Worf, Crusher, Geordi - don’t get as pivotal treatments.

Riker is given the task of taking care of the Viceroy. Remember how cool Number One was in Generations when he just said, “Fire!”? Well, he gets in a really cool line where he is about to kill the Viceroy and alludes to Remus with, “Don’t worry… hell is dark” (referring to the Remans hatred of the light). The script seems littered with these sorts of setups and payoffs that make the final act an especially exciting read and help mesh things together more completely than the other The Next Generations feature plots.

Another factor is the humour. There is only one instance where it felt a little forced and out of place (I won’t go into it here because it would take too long to explain), but otherwise the humour worked really well. Specifically, during the reception scene where Worf is feeling the effects of a certain blue Romulan beverage. Worf is the 'comic relief' in this movie. Deanna had a cute scene in 'First Contact' but it wasn’t humour; the comedy was mixed with Data in 'Generations' and fell flat in 'Insurrection' but it works well with Worf here. Yes, Deanna takes the helm and no, the Enterprise does not suffer the same fate as the Enterprise-D.

Now, to discuss the much anticipated third act. Central to the grand finale is the best-written space battle for any Trek movie to date, blowing Khan out of the water. The Scimitar is a real behemoth, and Worf describes it as having, “Fifty-two disruptor banks, twenty-seven torpedo bays, primary and secondary phased shields...”

We later learn she can fire while cloaked and the battle at the end is reminiscent of The Undiscovered Country’s battle against Chang’s Bird of Prey. Multiply that by ten and throw in the Enterprise/Romulan Warbird fight in Shatner’s book 'Spectre' and there you have it. I really don’t want to go into detail of that fight, which as written is easily the most ambitious space battle for a Trek film, but let me say that as previously revealed, the Enterprise takes a Severe beating that leaves half the bridge torn apart and exposed to space. The Scimitar literally rips through one or two Romulan Warbird's it’s fighting as well.

In a word... awesome. It’s a dog fight between two Romulan Warbird's and the Enterprise vs. the cloaked Scimitar. The first thing that happens is that the Scimitar rips through the first Warbird like tissue paper and it seriously cripples the second and leaves it floating dead in space. All the while the Warbirds and the Enterprise are firing phasers and photon torpedoes in all directions looking for an explosion. But the fight between the Enterprise and the Scimitar is what takes the cake. The Enterprise takes a hell of a beating and the front half of the bridge is literally blown away, sucking the helmsman out into space. For the second half of the battle, the Enterprise dog fights much like using the front windshield of a car, no computer viewscreen! In a last ditch effort, and with Picard knowing he must not let Shinzon reach Earth, the Enterprise rams the Scimitar. The saucer section gets stuck in the middle of the ship and Shinzon orders the Scimitar to beak loose and shake it free. Logan describes it as two scorpions locked in a heated battle. I really don't want to give away more than this because it will Really spoil a great fight.

To close, as I stated before, this has the potential to be the, dare I say it, best Trek movie ever made. My one and only real complaint is that the script falls a little short; coming in at 109 pages, this June 2001 draft feels like a 1:45 movie, and if the script is under two hours going in, it'll be difficult once it reaches the editing booth. The script doesn’t need to be rewritten as some have posited, but additional pages devoted to Shinzon and the politics surrounding Romulus, Remus, and the Picard-replacement plan would go a long way toward balancing the script. Some scenes on Remus, in particular, might help place some of the villain’s backstory on screen (as it should be) rather than brief references in the dialogue that leave the character too shallow.

Also, keep in mind that while none of this information has been confirmed officially by Paramount, the draft that goes before cameras in October may be significantly different that the one reviewed. Story, characters, dialogue, plot, title are copyright © Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved. Star Trek is an exclusive trademark (TM) of Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.

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