Spoilers My thoughts on IDW's Star Trek: Year Five 1-24#

Well, I just finished the 24th issue of STAR TREK: YEAR FIVE.

I haven't read STAR TREK: YEAR FOUR and didn't realize it existed. I only picked this up because I was told about by Literary Treks and was interested in a Gary Seven appearance. It turned out to be a lot more than that since he was the central antagonist of the entire series.

I didn't know what to expect here with the stories that were picking up the rest of the Five Year mission. I technically have always considered the Animated Series to be the "real" continuation but also note that there's some argument for 25th Anniversary and Judgement Day games. After all, there's no reason not to consider them so since the original cast plays such a role.

But at heart, really, I don't think canon is quite as important as people make it out to be [BLASPHEMER- Trekkie horde]. After all, as DC's Elsewolds said, "This is an imaginary story but aren't they all?"

I think the art is really good in this with the use of the medium allowing things like the Tholians to play a bigger role in the story that they aren't outside of things like the novels or Star Trek Online. I really liked them in Vanguard and while they don't have the same role here, they're similar enough that I actually liked the attempt to make peace with them that will never happen in the Novelverse for arguably good reasons.

I feel like the medium sadly cuts short some interesting plotlines like the idea of Harry Mudd running for President of the Federation. It is almost certainly a dig at Donald Trump and frankly there's few others who could fill that role in the TOS period but I doubt anyone would ever vote for him. Then again, I feel the same about a certain real estate mogul so what do I know. I would have wanted to get more into the "Originalists" story, though. I like how they were not human centric bigots but bigots of the original races because their identity had expanded.

The use of Gary Seven was an interesting choice as an archenemy because he and ISIS really do have the kind of Khan-level energy to be antagonists of note. A face-heel turn by them is questionable but I accept it for this story. I sadly wish we'd gotten an insight into why Aegis' leadership were suddenly spouting mass genocide of the universe to be replaced by the Tholians. I kept waiting for a trick to be revealed.

This is actually something that the comic suffers from which is what I call "Institutions are Evil" in comic books. The Guardians of the Universe in Green Lantern have often been depicted as authoritarian dictators and fascist because, well, they don't want the heroes being anything other than rebels. In this book in addition to the evil twist of AEGIS, we have Surak being revealed to run re-education camps and other evil. It feels like a bizarre twist just for the sake of making Spock bigger by going against his religion/philosophy's founder.

Cool work in tying in the comics' events to STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE. though.

 

I couldn't really get into Year Five. For one thing, it was bizarrely inconsistent in its treatment of the Tholians, initially showing the Enterprise crew and the Tholians interacting together in a Class M environment, then belatedly remembering that Tholians need a super-hot environment to survive, but then seeming to go back and forth between the two.

 

And why did the Enterprise crew never ask Bright Eyes what their real name was, even after they translated the Tholian language? We know from Loskene that Tholian names can be pronounced by humanoids. "Bright Eyes" seems kind of demeaning.

 

Charlton Heston would agree...

 

It hasn't been my favourite. For me to consider it canon I'll need a Parallax/shapeshifting imposter/mind control level explanation for Gary and Isis' heal turn.

Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, actually.

 

I admit I was expecting the revelation that he was receiving orders from the Leviathan, the interstellar version of Hydra to their SHIELD.

 

Issue 17 does imply that Isis used some form of mind control to convince Gary to come around to her way of thinking:

 

But who'd be mind controlling her to mind control him?

 

The suddenly evil Aegis who, I presume, like the Guardians of the Universe are randomly evil because authority=bad.

 

Yeah, they never gave a clear explanation for why the Aegis wanted to stop humanity and other civilizations from destroying themselves, only to wipe them out at a later point in time.

 

Yeah, I kept assuming his "signal" had been hijacked by someone else.