I went into detail when I first reviewed the book, many moons ago. I don't recall all the details anymore, but sufficient to say that I found the central premise untenable, substituting the simple improbabilities of TATV for a series of complex, intricate and thus even more unlikely improbabilities.
The whole thing could quite honestly have benefitted from liberal application of the KISS method.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
The scenario itself made no sense. Why would Tucker need to fake his death in order to go undercover? Deniability? One way or the other, the Federation will say he's gone rogue. If the Romulans have captured a spy and are thus already in a very suspicious mode of mind, 'Oh, we thought he was dead' isn't going to fool anybody. To protect loved ones? Even if the Romulans were interested in reprisals, up to and including complex infiltration missions to assassinate harmless civilians on the human homeworld as a futile act of revenge with no stragetic advantange--which I highly doubt--preventing reprisals means successfully concealing the identity of a person once they've been compromised. If they could do that, then there's no point in faking his death because they would have no way of finding out this man is Charles Tucker in the first place. If the Romulans do have a way of finding out that this is Charles Tucker, then the fact that he's officially listed as deceased isn't going to do fuckall for him or anybody else. That Malcolm would even suggest such a thing was odd. That Tucker would follow him up on it, voluntarily heaping more grief onto his loved ones, I can only attribute to the recent emotional trauma of losing his daughter, since as we say with T'Pol his usual reaction to emotional problems is running away. But under no circumstance should Archer or Phlox have gone along with it, and if I was 31, I'd be hesitant about agreeing to send somebody onto a delicate undercover operation who is being motivated by an emotional trauma, no matter what his engineering expertise.
The execution was preposterous. Of course, one started from a preposterous scenario (TATV), but there were ways of explaining that away without degenerating into the nonsensical house of cards that The Good That Men Do became. For instance, any logical faking of a person's death would have them be incinerated in the blast--spray some DNA and voilà! This also gives you an excuse to 'resurrect' them when they no longer need to be dead--as they had originally planned to do so--without everybody realizing that there was a conspiracy as would be inevitable from the whole getting Tucker to sickbay, pronouncing him dead, pretending to fire the body out into space, etc. Of course, since TATV had that sickbay scene, the book has to jump through all these hoops to explain why Tucker would only be beamed away later, and why the pirate ship would stick around to risk discovery--really, it's like they came up with a scenario and decided to retroactive apply it to the episode with no regard of whether it made sense in the context of the scenes shown on film.
Tucker as a secret agent strains credibility in-and-of itself. We're talking about a man with a proven track record of cultural/biological faux pas when dealing with alien civilizations, a man who is controlled by his emotions (to be polite and not say that he lets his dick do a lot of his thinking for him), a man of such stunning immaturity that he switches ships because he got snubbed by his squeeze. When I think of the character 'Charles Tucker', one of the first words that comes to mind is 'open', maybe even 'naive' (well, actually, 'annoying as all hell' would be first, but that's besides the point). Picturing him slinking about, and blending in with alien civilizations, and engaging in the cloak-and-dagger of the spy trade... this is very far removed from the character I saw onscreen.
But the absolute worst, for me, is the whole date-switching thing. If the rest of the book hurts its own credibility, this breaks credibility's fingers with a hammer, then takes a baseball bat to credibility's spine, kicks in the head a few times for good measure and then tosses credibility's battered corpse off a tall ravine. The sheer size and scope of the conspiracy involved in moving an event forwards six years boggles the mind. For those six years in which Tucker was supposed to be alive and chief engineer of the Enterprise, you have to forge mountains of reports, logs and other documentation over a period of six years; create a false record of his personal life wherever record of such might be left over a period of six years; you have to go in and modify even personal logs and letters to friends and family to insert his presence where logical in case any of those documents ever become public over a period of six years; you have to splice him into visual feeds he would be expected to show up in, public and military, over a period of six years; you have to edit out the person or persons who replaced him as chief engineer out for a period of six years (hopefully they never do anything remarkable), create a false record for them at other postings, and the people who replaced them when they moved to Enterprise, and so on and so forth... It's an insane amount of data that has to be created/modified, and across a massive information network, including cold storage backups. And none of this can help with living memories, all those people who would recall his death happening one year instead of the other, or who met with his replacement(s) during this six year period were his life is being feigned... and for what? I didn't even spot it the first time around, so absolutely irrelevant that it was; somebody had to point out the line to me: 31 thought shifting the date made it harder to discover that his death had been faked. Which is thoroughly stupid. First of all, talk about your complete overractions; the amount of effort involved in the above conspiracy for that worthless result would be like clear-cutting a forest just because you want a toothpick. And if wouldn't make it easier to hide the death: you're creating a massive network of forgeries, fakes and other problems which, if uncovered, will eventually lead an enterprising historian to wonder why all this was done for Tucker in the first place. It's easier to hide a small untruth than a complex of lies. Finally, there's no reason--at least, no reason yet--why anybody would go to such lengths to hide Tucker's involvement in Federation espionnage in the first place. With these kinds of preventative measures, you'd think civilization would collapse if it was discovered that Charles Tucker once served as an intelligence agent--as thousands of individuals have done throughout Federation history, including a whole section of Starfleet devoted to it.
The execution was preposterous. Of course, one started from a preposterous scenario (TATV), but there were ways of explaining that away without degenerating into the nonsensical house of cards that The Good That Men Do became. For instance, any logical faking of a person's death would have them be incinerated in the blast--spray some DNA and voilà! This also gives you an excuse to 'resurrect' them when they no longer need to be dead--as they had originally planned to do so--without everybody realizing that there was a conspiracy as would be inevitable from the whole getting Tucker to sickbay, pronouncing him dead, pretending to fire the body out into space, etc. Of course, since TATV had that sickbay scene, the book has to jump through all these hoops to explain why Tucker would only be beamed away later, and why the pirate ship would stick around to risk discovery--really, it's like they came up with a scenario and decided to retroactive apply it to the episode with no regard of whether it made sense in the context of the scenes shown on film.
Tucker as a secret agent strains credibility in-and-of itself. We're talking about a man with a proven track record of cultural/biological faux pas when dealing with alien civilizations, a man who is controlled by his emotions (to be polite and not say that he lets his dick do a lot of his thinking for him), a man of such stunning immaturity that he switches ships because he got snubbed by his squeeze. When I think of the character 'Charles Tucker', one of the first words that comes to mind is 'open', maybe even 'naive' (well, actually, 'annoying as all hell' would be first, but that's besides the point). Picturing him slinking about, and blending in with alien civilizations, and engaging in the cloak-and-dagger of the spy trade... this is very far removed from the character I saw onscreen.
But the absolute worst, for me, is the whole date-switching thing. If the rest of the book hurts its own credibility, this breaks credibility's fingers with a hammer, then takes a baseball bat to credibility's spine, kicks in the head a few times for good measure and then tosses credibility's battered corpse off a tall ravine. The sheer size and scope of the conspiracy involved in moving an event forwards six years boggles the mind. For those six years in which Tucker was supposed to be alive and chief engineer of the Enterprise, you have to forge mountains of reports, logs and other documentation over a period of six years; create a false record of his personal life wherever record of such might be left over a period of six years; you have to go in and modify even personal logs and letters to friends and family to insert his presence where logical in case any of those documents ever become public over a period of six years; you have to splice him into visual feeds he would be expected to show up in, public and military, over a period of six years; you have to edit out the person or persons who replaced him as chief engineer out for a period of six years (hopefully they never do anything remarkable), create a false record for them at other postings, and the people who replaced them when they moved to Enterprise, and so on and so forth... It's an insane amount of data that has to be created/modified, and across a massive information network, including cold storage backups. And none of this can help with living memories, all those people who would recall his death happening one year instead of the other, or who met with his replacement(s) during this six year period were his life is being feigned... and for what? I didn't even spot it the first time around, so absolutely irrelevant that it was; somebody had to point out the line to me: 31 thought shifting the date made it harder to discover that his death had been faked. Which is thoroughly stupid. First of all, talk about your complete overractions; the amount of effort involved in the above conspiracy for that worthless result would be like clear-cutting a forest just because you want a toothpick. And if wouldn't make it easier to hide the death: you're creating a massive network of forgeries, fakes and other problems which, if uncovered, will eventually lead an enterprising historian to wonder why all this was done for Tucker in the first place. It's easier to hide a small untruth than a complex of lies. Finally, there's no reason--at least, no reason yet--why anybody would go to such lengths to hide Tucker's involvement in Federation espionnage in the first place. With these kinds of preventative measures, you'd think civilization would collapse if it was discovered that Charles Tucker once served as an intelligence agent--as thousands of individuals have done throughout Federation history, including a whole section of Starfleet devoted to it.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
(Was kinda fun though, but I seriously doubt that Jolene Blalock would approve).
