Star Trek: Picard season one showrunner Michael Chabon has been sharing Some Notes On Romulans and I am eating this up with a spoon:
Traditional Romulan compounds — Romulans live in kinship units — are built at the center of a kind of hedge maze whose outer perimeter is often contrived to look like a “natural” grove of trees, as if, within, there were no houses at all. Once you reach the house itself, you find a false “front entrance”; all Romulan houses are entered from the back. Even in big cities, modern housing megastructures have false front entrances, and are surrounded by some kind of token or symbolic maze, often a pattern in the paving stones. No visitor to a Romulan compound must ever arrive uninvited — it’s unheard of — and all visitors are asked to don a ceremonial blindfold (often of the finest materials) and are guided by their hosts into the compound, after being turned around the ritual three times. It is the height of rudeness to ask a Romulan for his address. It’s rude to ask a Romulan almost anything remotely personal. […]
I've not been following rumours about Star Trek: Picard season 2 so I have no idea whether this is a sign that we're due to spend some time with the Vulcans' cousins in season two, or simply a case of Chabon clearing out notes from season 1 so he can move on to the next project now he's not being showrunner for the show's second season.
Either way, this is impossible to ignore if you're remotely interested in the continuing journeys of Admiral Jean-Luc Picard.
(For the record, it'd be good to have Picard reunite with his two Romulan "domestic staff" who we met back at the family vineyard on Earth, before he headed off-world in season one. They seemed to have stories to tell, not that they ever would, and who knows where that could lead?)
[Via @hondanhon]