Star Trek Countdown #2 (Spoilers)

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Re: Data in Countdown....SPOILERS...

As for Data, he graduated from the Academy in 2345; at the time of his death in NEM, he was therefore a 34-year veteran, and was a full commander

Not yet. Data still wore the rank pips of a Lieutenant Commander in NEM. I'm just sayin'.

(True, he was to become Enterprise's XO. But he could still be a LCDR and do that.)

 

[Therin of Andor]

Re: Star Trek Countdown #2

I don't see why these comics were necessary at all.

Because they are fun?

I read issue #2 last night, on the train home from the CBD to collect it, and it was the best time I've had reading an IDW comic since "Spotlight on Andorians".

Data's my favourite character. The way he was killed off in NEM disappointed me. I should have been shedding tears, but the direction (by Stuart Baird) left me cold, and that earlier "toast" scene had been left for the bonus DVD features.

I understood Pocket's reasoning for not turning B-4 into Data, because it seemed an obvious way to go and they were trying for something unexpected, but I'm loving that IDW have chosen to try it. 'Cos I also secretly harboured hopes that B-4 might be capable of more.

 

[Christopher]

Re: Star Trek Countdown #2

^^But if B-4's just been overwritten by Data, then he's not capable of anything, since he's dead. Essentially, the ghost of Data has possessed his corpse.

 

[JoeZhang]

I finally read the issue yesterday after I posted this and I was kind of surprised by something I wish I had said when I posted. Of course I don't think anyone else has noticed it but I might be wrong about it. When we first meet Picard, he asks Data how is his ship. Data of course says my ship with his eyes wide about it. I don't know but about that but I think Picard is on some covert mission and Data is not really the captain. Also cause of what Picard is wearing, looks like a different verison of the FC and so on uniform.
Just a thought. I wasn't wrong about Nero losing his wife. I'm just wondering what he learned about Kirk through, that makes him want to go back in the past and kill him.

I am actually hoping that this is the case. Maybe it has to do with the undercover Starfleet crew, working on the problem of the supernova.

That doesn't make any sense - he went undercover to solve a problem they only just now know about? I think people are reading too much into that single line of dialogue.

 

[TJ Sinclair]

If the first issue got a B, this one gets a D-. There are several glaring typos -- a misspelling or two, some grammatical pronoun confusion, a couple more things -- that any two-bit editor should have caught, not to mention the overly-simplistic plot and characterization, with science more akin to the original Battlestar Galactica than Star Trek. An earlier post compared it to the wonky science of the Gold Key era, and that's not far off the mark. After reading issue one, I was really afraid that would be the case.

And come on guys, you know Data's only back for the marketing reasons, and plotline shorthand. The Data ex B4 bit was to be expected, continuing one of the greater cop-outs from Nemesis.

In fact, I'd say nearly the entire ouvre of IDW's Trek comics boils down to "plotline shorthand." It's a waste, and a complete disappointment.

 

[C.E. Evans]

Re: Star Trek Countdown #2

But if B-4's just been overwritten by Data, then he's not capable of anything, since he's dead. Essentially, the ghost of Data has possessed his corpse.

Personally, I always considered B4 to be a blank slate. If he had any kind of life prior to Nemesis, it had long since been erased prior to his recovery by Picard and company...

 

[elaithin]

Re: Data in Countdown....SPOILERS...

I could see option (A) working, however. In the hands of a skilled author, it could even be a beautiful, Flowers for Algenon-esque story of B4 becoming just self-aware enough to voluntarily sublimate himself so that his 'brother' might live again. Perhaps he feels guilty over what he did in NEM, despite the fact that his actual responsibility is limited by his disability, and one sacrifice redeems the other.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

This, this right here, is what I've wanted to see ever since Nemesis.

 

[Ronald Held]

IN ST Online, they seem to have taken the same path with B4 into Data and Ambassador Picard.

 

[JoeZhang]

IN ST Online, they seem to have taken the same path with B4 into Data and Ambassador Picard.

I'd go further than that, the comic seems to use the back-story of the game as it's back story. It's also where the uniforms are from.

That mission becomes the legendary captain’s final one for Starfleet as well. After a personal request from the president of the Federation and a great deal of personal reflection, Captain Picard resigns his commission with Starfleet. After a three-month sabbatical in France, Picard takes his place as the Federation ambassador to Vulcan.

After a personal request from the president of the Federation and a great deal of personal reflection, Captain Picard resigns his commission with Starfleet. After a three-month sabbatical in France, Picard takes his place as the Federation ambassador to Vulcan.

Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge requests a long-term leave of absence from Starfleet to work on personal projects, including a plan to build and test his own starship designs. But his first project is to assist the team at the Soong Foundation studying the Soong-type android B-4. With his help, on Stardate 62762.91 the team unlocks what it calls the “Data matrix,” successfully accessing the personality, knowledge and memories of Data, who had downloaded this information into B-4 before his destruction in the Battle of Bassen Rift.



The Data persona asserts itself over B-4’s more primitive programming, and the android is able to assist the Soong Foundation team to upgrade the positronic brain and recreate the emotion chip invented by Dr. Noonien Soong. The team is confident that their work will be completed in months.

I guess the next entry - 2385 - will cover Data becoming Captain of the Enterprise. There is also a hint that the holo-emitter will become wide-spread during the game's main time period of 2408.

 

[Elemental]

Sorry if this has been asked already but I haven't read issue 2 yet so wanted to avoid spoilers. Is it planned that the novel series are going to incorporate the story from Countdown as something having actually occurred? I know the comics are taking place further into the future than the novels are at but I wondered how things were planned on being dealt with.

 

[TJ Sinclair]

^^And from that to Captain of the Enterprise in two years? If the Countdown writers are indeed using the backstory of the game, as it seems they are, then it clearly makes more sense that the comics take place around 2408, despite the stardates.

I'm more curious now as to why the writers are tying this series in with ST Online. Simply a marketing decree, or is there going to be a concerted effort to create closer ties between the game and the "new" franchise?

I really wish there had been a clearer guiding hand behind this comic. If you're going to tie it in with STO, get the freaking timeline right. Vulcan has a Praetor? Early solicitations for the issue referred to the "Vulcan Empire." I'd assumed that was simply a bad blurb, but that's how it looks like the writers were treating them in the comic.

Kurtzman and Orci aside, it's clear the writers of the comic book do not know Trek well, and are getting confused.

^
The comics and the novels are from two different publishers, so aside from times when they are directly working together like the New Frontier comics, it's highly unlikely that Countdown will have any impact upon Pocket's novel line.

 

[captcalhoun]

since events in Countdown are some time away, i doubt it's even been thought about.

 

[Therin of Andor]

If you're going to tie it in with STO, get the freaking timeline right. .

The comic seems to be teasing us, on purpose, so the timeline is not yet clear. Converting stated stardates into precise days, weeks and years, using a web-based stardate calculator, is something squarely in the domain of Star Trek fans, and the more continuity-avid novelists. No one ever said that every licensed ST tie-in would maintain that method of calculation. Many novels and comics have been published where the stardates are little more than a selection of random numerals and a decimal point. The Timeliner's timeline in "Voyages of Imagination" is full of projected stardate corrections.

The comic sets up an air of mystery. Spock mentions being on Romulus - as a resident - for 40 years. That s already at odds with its stardate. Had they wanted us to pin this date down to a particular year yet, he'd have used a typical Spockian decimal point at least.

So maybe in ST's future they even calculate stardates differently. That has happened before: between TOS movies and TNG.

 

[TJ Sinclair]

The comic seems to be teasing us, on purpose, so the timeline is not yet clear.

I'd say it's not clear because O&K had one period in mind, and the writers of the comic/IDW editorial had another in mind (to tie in with STO).

Converting stated stardates into precise days, weeks and years, using a web-based stardate calculator, is something squarely in the domain of Star Trek fans, and the more continuity-avid novelists.

No one's trying to pin it down to anything more than a year. Since TNG's premiere, the basic stardate formula of 1000 units = 1 year has remained unchanged. It's a convention of the production office, passed on to the licensees.

Many novels and comics have been published where the stardates are little more than a selection of random numerals and a decimal point. The Timeliner's timeline in "Voyages of Imagination" is full of projected stardate corrections.

Aside from a typo in the Q-Continuum triology that added an extra digit, the novels of the modern era have been more or less consistent in their use of stardates. Most adjustments in Voyages of Imagination are the result of info from subsequent canon productions requiring a retcon of the printed work.

The comic sets up an air of mystery.

That's one way of putting it.

Spock mentions being on Romulus - as a resident - for 40 years. That s already at odds with its stardate.

A point that I myself, and several others, have already made in other threads relating to Countdown. The forty years comment seems to be clearly referring to "Unification," which means Countdown is set circa 2408. That makes most sense, given the plot developments, but is at odds with Orci and Kurtzman's statement that the comic takes place "a few years after Nemesis." I'm willing to bet that they provided the range of stardates in their story treatment, and the writers didn't want to be bothered with the details.[/quote]

Had they wanted us to pin this date down to a particular year yet, he'd have used a typical Spockian decimal point at least.

So maybe in ST's future they even calculate stardates differently. That has happened before: between TOS movies and TNG.

But it has remained - in concept - consistent since TNG came around. Every time a "futuristic" novel has given us a stardate, they've been at least a somewhat different format instead of just a contuation of the current system.

These writers clearly do not know or understand Star Trek and probably only saw Nemesis and "Unifcation" to get a barebones background crash course for the most relevant plotpoints. It seems they couldn't care less about stardates, or plausible psuedo-science beyond a third grade level, or even characterization. Using background from Star Trek Online is most likely an editorial mandate, and has confused the hell out of the original intent of the comic, which was to put a cap on the TNG timeline and build a bridge to the new film. It's a confused, poorly-written, and even-more-poorly-edited mess.

 

[Therin of Andor]

No one's trying to pin it down to anything more than a year.

No one? Within seconds of IDW putting up sample pages of issue #1, several fans had raced to the stardate calculator websites (which I didn't even know existed), or used their own prowess, to expose the precise year, month, day and hour of ST XI's 24th century prologue.

It's a confused, poorly-written, and even-more-poorly-edited mess.

Maybe, but I'm here to say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading issue #2 the other day. I wasn't jotting down incorrect stardates, or continuity breaches, just enjoying the comic's story, artwork and characters.

 

[Christopher]

Using background from Star Trek Online is most likely an editorial mandate, and has confused the hell out of the original intent of the comic, which was to put a cap on the TNG timeline and build a bridge to the new film.

Actually the STO history page that includes Picard becoming an ambassador and B-4 becoming Data was only posted three days ago. So it would have to be STO that's borrowing from Countdown, not the other way around (except probably where the uniforms are concerned).

 

[Therin of Andor]

So it would have to be STO that's borrowing from Countdown...

"Have to be..."?

 

[Christopher]

Probably would have to be. I suppose it's possible that the STO people wrote all this months ago and shared it with the comic authors in advance, but given the relative timing, and given the precedent of STO's history pages borrowing elements from the novels before, it seems more likely that STO is borrowing from the comic.

 

[Ronald Held]

I can believe tbat, or perhaps it is being coordinated
via Licensing?

 

[Christopher]

...or perhaps it is being coordinated
via Licensing?

If it were, I think the books would be involved as well. The Licensing department is in the business of approving content and ensuring its consistency with screen canon, not dictating creative content. Any crossover elements are most probably something the creators of the tie-ins chose to do on their own initiative.