So What Are you Reading?: Generations

[Christopher]

After my last post I finished up issue #3 of the Malibu DS9 series, and I enjoyed it. And then I read the two part story line in issues #4 and #5, which had a another pretty big mistake that had to be a typo or something, because it doesn't even fit what the early episodes established. In it the DS9 crew is dealing with a new Gamma Quadrant race that Dax and O'Brien came through the wormhole with, and at one point one of the aliens wants to blow up the wormhole, and then they're talking about how without the wormhole it'll be 60-light year journey back to their home planet. I double checked on Memory Alpha, and the wormhole jumps across 90,000 lightyears, which is pretty far off from 60. I'm wondering if perhaps it was supposed to take 60 years to get home, and he or an editor got the time and distance mixed up and accidently added "light" to the "years".

I had a bigger conceptual problem with that storyline. Sisko was reluctant to give asylum to the escaping slaves because he thought it would break the Prime Directive, but that doesn't make sense. The PD forbids imposing your choices or policies on another culture, but it doesn't forbid offering humanitarian aid when it's directly requested. And given asylum to escaped slaves wouldn't have changed the culture they escaped from. So there was no reason it should've been a Prime Directive matter at all. We saw several TNG episodes where Picard granted asylum or was open to doing so, like "Half a Life," "The Mind's Eye," and "The Masterpiece Society." And O'Brien said in DS9: "Captive Pursuit" that Sisko would grant Tosk asylum if he requested it.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I had a bigger conceptual problem with that storyline. Sisko was reluctant to give asylum to the escaping slaves because he thought it would break the Prime Directive, but that doesn't make sense. The PD forbids imposing your choices or policies on another culture, but it doesn't forbid offering humanitarian aid when it's directly requested. And given asylum to escaped slaves wouldn't have changed the culture they escaped from. So there was no reason it should've been a Prime Directive matter at all.

I remember writing a letter to Malibu about that very thing. It was very long for a letter to a comic -- three pages, IIRC -- so I understand why it wasn't published.

 

[Christopher]

It's too bad about the asylum/PD thing, since I recall that being a pretty good story otherwise. Mike Barr's run on the DS9 title, like his earlier run on DC's TOS comic, was all too brief.