Countdown to Darkness - Review and Discussion

[Kemaiku]

The Enterprise suffers a mechnical failure of the main coolant system, probably done by the crews bringing the torpedoes aboard, hanging around the engineering section unsupervised. Marcus has her sabotaged while still at Spacedock.

 

[ATimson]

Is any of this Harry Mudd stuff (i.e. his daughter) in the film?

Spoiler: Into Darkness

Kirk has a non-Starfleet ship that he gained about a month beforehand during the "Mudd incident". No direct plot/character references beyond that, though.

 

[The Wormhole]

I liked issue #3, right up until the point where April explained how he was able to commandeer the Enterprise. I could not believe that Starfleet copied April's failsafe program from the previous Enterprise into the new Enterprise's computer. My reaction was, "What? How does that even make any foxtroting sense?"

I feel like I've read this particular story before, but I'm having a difficult time placing exactly where.

I felt exactly the same. This is the laziest piece of writing in this series yet. I hate deus ex machina solutions like that. I can not believe that starfleet engineers would be that lazy when setting up the computer systems on the top of the line ships. It's just not believeable at all.
Why would they "copy" it anyways? It's a completely new ship. Just because of the name Enterprise? Ridiculous.

After seeing the movie

Spoiler: STiD movie

This contrivance doesn't seem so far-fetched or out of the blue. From the new movie, we see that Admiral Marcus must have had this back door system installed into every ship: that's how he must have cut the Enterprise's engines on the Klingon border. I always thought it odd that April's secret password was "Caroline" instead of, say "Sara." Now I see that the Caroline password is actually Marcus' selection, probably being his daughter's full first name.

Spoiler: my thoughts on that

Honestly, it's far more likely Marcus had someone sabotage the engines, possibly an agent serving on the ship.