IDW Star Trek Ongoing...

Discussion in 'Trek Literature' started by serenitytrek1, Nov 21, 2012.

  1. Pauln6

    Pauln6 Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I've enjoyed the mix and match - some stories were retold, some were re-imagined with only the barest bones of the original plot, some have been single issue characters pieces, ad some have been wholly original. I don't really want them to stick to one over the others.

    Obviously some stories have been better than others but that will always be the case. My main criticism (apart from the sexism obviously) has been that too many stories fizzle out with convenient, neat endings just when they are getting good. I would like is longer stories, like Countdown to Darkness and the upcoming sequel story. I'm looking forward to where they go next year.

    NB: I hope they are going to encounter Chris Chapel again - maybe Korby is able to get a foothold by tricking a less wily captain than Kirk? I hope they don't redraft the Enemy Within to feature Carol instead of Janice - all the women we have need more 'air time' and I don't want them to concentrate all the girl plots into a couple of token female characters. I hope Sulu and Chekov get a bit more development too - Chekov in particular has been under-utilised so far. That might be because landing party membership has largely been copied from season one but it would be nice to see him get a story that suits his character rather than shoe-horn him into a role that doesn't fit just to give him something to do.
     
  2. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    I finally got around to reading the first four TPB volumes thanks to my library. The death toll in the "Where No Man" adaptation is actually eleven -- nine in the barrier encounter, plus Kelso and Mitchell on Delta Vega.


    Thoughts on continuity and other things, with some spoilers for the comics and minor spoilers for Into Darkness:

    1-2/"Where No Man...": Hard to reconcile with the sequel because of the death toll, and hard to reconcile with later issues because it's implied that Kirk has been captain for "less than a year" (which I don't think he'd be likely to say unless it were the majority of a year) while later issues are set just "months" after the film. Also, it seems that the events of the story would teach Kirk more humility than he showed in the sequel. On the other hand, given how much faster warp drive seems to be in the Abramsverse, a trip to the edge of the galaxy happening years sooner almost seems plausible.

    3-4/"The Galileo Seven": If anything, up until the climactic portions this is an even more slavish adaptation of the original episode than the previous story, with all the plausibility issues that creates. Again, the loss of a crewman makes it hard to reconcile with the sequel, even with the dodge I suggested above that the crewman technically died under Spock's command rather than Kirk's. Also the story has some continuity glitches -- the second part refers to Taurus II as "Makus III" and Makus III as "New Paris," and Kirk says at the end that he told Ferris that Uhura was acting under his orders even though he had earlier told Ferris the truth.

    5-6/"Operation: Annihilate": Aside from the early pages, the story is a pretty significant departure from the original, and does more with the George Kirk character. I'd say at this point they decided that faithful adaptations weren't serving much of a purpose. Continuity-wise, I see no problems reconciling it with the film. And I note that Ingraham B was left off of the list of planets previously attacked by the parasites, which works, since in Prime that planet was only attacked in 2265. Evidently in this timeline the parasites skipped Ingraham B and went right from Theta Cygni XII to Deneva, explaining why they arrived 9 years earlier. They're a bit different in appearance and behavior from the flying pancakes we know, though, so maybe they're a different strain of the organisms.

    7-8/"Vulcan's Vengeance": The first fully original story and a sequel to aspects of the movie, though it somewhat takes the place of "Balance of Terror." Since it's original, there are no major continuity questions with regard to Prime, and I don't see any problems reconciling it with ID. EDIT: Oh, wait, there's one inconsistency, which also cropped up in Countdown to Darkness: Sulu has the conn at one point. Perhaps Sulu's line in STID meant that he'd never held the conn in a crisis situation?

    9-10/"Return of the Archons": Okay, here we see the foreshadowing of ID ramping up, since the comic hints at Section 31 (and I couldn't resist interpreting the admiral in the opening scene as Marcus). But the story is... weird. When I first heard about the revelation in this story, I figured the idea was that it had been something that was true in the original episode but just hadn't been discovered by that Kirk & crew; but everything about Beta III in the past and present is so different that there's no way to reconcile them at all. It's an interesting alternative take on the concept, not a bad story in its own right, but too alternative to work as part of a branching history. Also it seems to overstate just how widespread the corruption within Starfleet was, which I'm not sure is consistent with ID.

    11-12/"The Truth about Tribbles": This is the "origin story" for the dead tribble McCoy experiments on in the movie, but the main continuity problem is that the characters never discover the tribbles' name. Spock Prime mentions it in the flashback scene to Delta Vega, but the others forget it for the rest of the story. Yet in ID, McCoy refers to it as a tribble. Also, the story portrays tribbles' reproductive rate as unbelievably fast compared to the original TOS & TAS episodes. It tries to rationalize the accelerated breeding as a response to the stress of a new environment, but then it should've happened on K-7 and the Enterprise too. And it's just too fast to be metabolically plausible. (Also, while the story draws on the Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual's attribution of Iota Geminorum IV as the tribble homeworld, it misspells the possessive as "Germinorum." IDW seems to make a habit of that -- Mission's End misspelled Achernar as "Archernar.")

    13/"Hendorff" aka "The Redshirt's Tale": Sort of an indirect adaptation of "The Apple," and it makes a point of having events happen differently. Though it's mainly fleshing out background for Hendorff and others, a nice little character story that's mostly original. No continuity issues that I can see.

    14/"Keenser's Story": Mostly a flashback to Keenser's origins. Unusual for the comic in that most of it is set in the Prime universe, 3 years before the timeline split, and features Robau and George Kirk. That was nice to see, and no continuity issues occur to me.

    15-16/"Mirrored": Retells the events of the '09 movie in the Mirror Universe, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I guess the idea is that in some alternate version of the Prime universe, Nero and Spock's use of red matter sent them back not to their own past, but to a parallel past. Yet that isn't adequately explained. I guess the handwave was that there's an infinite number of timelines in which all possible combinations of events happen, but I don't find that idea very satisfying. Anyway, since hardly any of the story is set in the regular Abramsverse timeline, there are no continuity issues with the sequel.

    All in all, it seems that a number of the comics have continuity issues with ID or the Prime universe. It seems like it took them a while to find their way, seesawing from too slavish in the first two stories to too divergent in "Return of the Archons," but they've settled into telling mostly original stories built around remixes of ideas from TOS, much like STID itself was.
     
    Last edited: May 24, 2013
  3. Mr. Laser Beam

    Mr. Laser Beam Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    So it's not the actual Mirror versions of Nero and Spock?

    In the MU, Romulus was destroyed not by the Hobus supernova, but by the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance. But Nero's motivation would be largely the same, wouldn't it?
     
  4. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Nope. It's "our" old Spock, or an identical counterpart.
     
  5. The Wormhole

    The Wormhole Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Elderly Spock in the Mirrored story certainly isn't from the MU. Aside from the obvious lack of goatee he talks about the Federation, and remembers the Terran Empire as being from an alternate universe he once encountered. But I really can't see how he or Nero can be from the Prime Universe, so they're likely from a different universe entirely which is similar to the Prime.
     
  6. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    ^Memory Beta's entry for "Mirrored" suggests that, given the way the tale is presented, the entire thing could just be a story that Scotty's making up for McCoy in the frame sequence. Although it would be a heck of a coincidence if Scotty imagined the existence of the Terran Empire.
     
  7. Pauln6

    Pauln6 Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    This is actually the correct application of Many Worlds and no, it isn't particularly satisfying. Essentially you are ALWAYS travelling back into a parallel past and that is what Spock Prime did in Trek09 as well. If it had been his own past, nothing would have changed going forward and the timeline would have played out just like it did in Time's Arrow.

    You can't change the past because it's already happened but if you enter a parallel past, you become part of that past and whatever events you 'change' compared to the alternate timeline you came from would always have happened because you have always been part of that past in that timeline.

    It may be unsatisfying but it sure as hell makes more sense than Voyager's time travel mechanics. Universes don't pop into existence when they branch. Pre-existing but overlapping timelines simply diverge.
     
  8. Turtletrekker

    Turtletrekker Admiral Admiral

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  9. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Not really. MWI doesn't require that every imaginable reality actually happens; it just says that many of them happen. And of course the laws of physics and probability still apply; only things that are physically possible can happen, or things that can validly result from a given set of circumstances. There are lots of possible timelines that can be imagined but that couldn't actually happen without violating those parameters.

    Not to mention that it's a conceit of fiction that the differences between timelines are based on macroscopic, human-scale events like personal choices. In reality, the divergence is brought about by quantum-level effects, and since macroscopic events follow classical physics, quantum divergences between timelines would probably average out to irrelevancy once you got the macroscopic scale, leaving you with an ever-increasing number of parallel quantum timelines that were essentially identical on a scale a human observer could perceive or care about. There would only be certain contexts wherein a quantum-level change could have any effect on macroscopic events -- something like the setup of the Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment where a mechanism is rigged to release upon detecting a quantum-scale event like the decay of a radioactive particle. Maybe in some instances a radiation-induced mutation might happen in one timeline and not another, triggering a small but increasing divergence between species in the two. And once civilization got to the point of inventing technologies based on quantum effects, like transistors and diodes, then quantum differences might begin to have more of a noticeable effect on a human scale. The invention of quantum computers would make it happen even more often. So you'd have a bunch of timelines that were macroscopically identical for most of prehistory, aside from the occasional sheaf that branched off with a different evolution, but once a civilization arose and reached the computer age, the timelines might start to diverge more.


    Err, no, I don't think that's how it works. At least, not in the sense you mean. In any case, the distinction is irrelevant on the scale of personal experience and events, because we're still talking about a history that was identical until Nero came back, and that's very different from the Mirror Universe, which was different from a far earlier point.


    They seem to be forgetting that, as established by "Broken Bow," it was Zefram Cochrane who originally gave the "explore strange new worlds" speech. Although I guess it's possible that McCoy could be unfamiliar enough with the history of spaceflight to be unaware of that.
     
  10. The Wormhole

    The Wormhole Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    As predicted by some, it's more a sequel to Countdown to Darkness than it is a follow-up to STID. Could be interesting.

    I don't get why the Klingons are blaming Kirk for all the deaths in Ketha. Didn't the ships that took the pictures of Kirk notice it was in fact Khan who slaughtered them?
     
  11. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    ^Maybe they figured Kirk and Khan/Harrison were together.

    I just hope there isn't a scene where a Klingon ambassador says "There can be no peace so long as Kirk lives." We've had enough quotes of past movies already, I think.
     
  12. Tommunist

    Tommunist Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    So, if the "After Darkness" storyline picks up right after the movie, do they mean right after the crash in San Francisco or the "One Year Later" bit? If it's a year later, it seems odd that the Klingons would have only known about Kirk's presense on the homeworld so late, or that Kirk would wait that long to question April. However, if this storyline attempts to fill the gap of "what happened in that year's time that had passed?" why is the Enterprise fixed already?

    Hard to tell from just 7 pages, but it's those kind of questions that bug me more than the continuity issues that the comics have had with the two films. I understand and appreciate the film's needs to not get bogged down in exposition and detail that long time Trek fans obsess over, but I figure the comics can sevre that purpose.

    In any event, I (for no reason except to think a five year exploration mission wouldn't happen if the Klingon threat was as bad as April and Marcus would have us think) believed that by the time the five year mision started, the imminent threat of war with the Klingons subsided.

    Of course, for all I know, the Organians could get involved with this storyline before it's over! That said, I like the idea of not knowing how much of this alternate timeline will conform with the general direction the prime one. Especially if Praxis already exploded, and the Klingons found a way to cope without resorting to putting out peace-feelers with the Federation.
     
    Last edited: May 24, 2013
  13. The Wormhole

    The Wormhole Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I'd say it has to take place after STID completely, even after the one year gap.
    Earlier preview pages showed Spock's going through ponn farr. Since Amok Time took place in 2267, then Spock's last ponn farr would have been in 2260, which is the year STID's epilogue takes place.
    Simplest explanation for the Klingons only just figuring things out with Kirk, "Klingon military intelligence" really is an oxymoron. In the Abrams timeline, anyway.
     
  14. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Maybe that "one week later" caption should say "one year later"?

    As for the above spoiler:
    "Amok Time" was clearly Spock Prime's first pon farr, so something would have to be different to provoke it one cycle earlier. Maybe it's because he's in a relationship with Uhura -- a sexually active one according to the comics -- and thus he's more hormonally primed for it or whatever.
     
  15. Allyn Gibson

    Allyn Gibson Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Or maybe Kirk doesn't to to talk to April until a week before the Enterprise launches after its rebuild.
     
  16. The Wormhole

    The Wormhole Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Which never made much sense to me. Spock wasn't exactly a young man at the time.
     
  17. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    That's possible, I suppose. Still, it feels like another case where the comics writer wasn't fully briefed on the details of the movie. Bad Robot's desire for secrecy may be clashing with their desire for canon-consistent tie-ins.


    He was in his mid-30s. Vulcans live to be over 200. So yeah, proportionally, he was stil pretty young. There was also his line "I hoped I would be spared this," suggesting that maybe it had a late onset.

    Then again, in TSFS, the regenerating Spock had his first pon farr in what appeared to be late adolescence. But that was hardly a typical scenario.
     
  18. Stevil2001

    Stevil2001 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    One of the novels-- Sarek, maybe?-- mentioned that Vulcans who spend a lot of time off-planet have their life cycles disrupted, and thus late onsets for pon farr.
     
  19. Pauln6

    Pauln6 Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Lol - yes I don't disagree with any of this, although in theory, there could be universes with different laws of physics, no matter how improbable, or at least universes where the physical properties of the universe are different, even if the same laws of physics are underpinning them.

    Voyager's time travel is not what I personally mean when I talk about MW1 but many people do believe that a branch 'pops' into existence when a divergent event occurs and can be overwritten if someone goes back in time and 'rewrites' that divergent event. I'm still not 100% clear that I understand what Voyager was doing with the temporal police or the Krenim temporal incursions.

    I've always viewed it as the viewer simply jumping tracks with the time traveller and becoming part of the history in the 'new' timeline.

    In fact just because Spock Prime has a history identical to TOS Spock does not automatically mean that he IS from the TOS timeline any more than Mirror Spock Prime.

    For all practical purposes they are the same (unless you are a dimension hopping Klingon I suppose) but a lot of people get worked up about this sort of thing. It's analogous to the transporter as a kill and clone machine I suppose. Alternate versions are different people and in some cases, they won't even be genetically the same, such as NuChekov, and maybe even Kirk's blue eyes if you want to be really pedantic.
     
  20. DarKush

    DarKush Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Why would that even be happening due to Spock's ongoing relationship?

    In any event it's one more thing that makes me curious about After Darkness. I liked the plot of Countdown to Darkness better than Into Darkness and from what I've seen of the previews I think I might like After Darkness better as well.