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[REVIEW] - Star Trek #29

Villordsutch

Lieutenant Commander
Red Shirt
28sofma.jpg


I love my Star Trek. People who know me from long ago will recall how much love I had - so much so I didn’t have a girlfriend until I was 18. I didn’t need one as I had a shrine in my bedroom to worship Trek and at the head of the shrine was a signed picture of Riker (which I still have). That being said I did have one hate nesting in my Trek Love - not Wesley Crusher, I’m talking The Animated Series. It was dire with poor stories and even worse animation. To me, it was a mockery of everything I held dear. There was nothing on my shrine dedicated to the Animated Series.

Now issue #29 of Star Trek (Parallel Lives - Part 1) reeks of the Animated Series. It’s steeped in everything I despised from The Animated Series with its rather empty story and in this issue we have an awful gimmick that if it wasn’t for the fact I’m reviewing this comic I wouldn’t have entertained it whats...

Full Review can be found here - http://www.flickeringmyth.com/2014/01/comic-book-review-star-trek-29.html
 
Well, if you start a review for a new comic by telling us how much you loath Filmation's TAS, those of us who treasure our fondness for TAS will assume we are going to enjoy this comic.

"Lazy writing"? I cannot imagine any professional writer choosing to be "lazy", especially when licensed tie-ins go through such a rigorous vetting process. Surely lazy writing is the kind of essay a school student hands in to a teacher when he/she would rather be out on the sporting field, or playing a computer game?

Uninspired writing? A story not to your discerning taste? Perhaps. But I doubt "lazy". Or is it full of typos and plotholes?
 
The story (what there is) is extremely poor and uses nothing more than let's swap genders gimmick and to heck with even attempting to fix the problems within the new time-line. As a reviewer I disliked it a lot, yes there will be some that enjoy this nonsense and they're more than welcome to it. Here's hoping Pt.2 is far more enjoyable.
 
Does the Enterprise look just like the alternate reality's? Are there other differences setting the genderverse apart from gender-swapping and uniform style? Do we get to see other ships beside the Enterprise?

So excited for this issue. :bolian:
 
Have you ever read The Procrustean Petard by Sondra Marshak & Myrna Culbreath from the 1978 anthology Star Trek: The New Voyages 2? Sounds like the author(s) of this new comic might've been inspired by that story.
 
so basically it's the same identical story of the movies just with the genders reversed?

I haven't read it yet but I think it would have been funnier and more original, IMO, to just temporarily change the genders of the characters of the regular universe so that they'd get the chance to experience the other gender for some days...

anyway, these parallel universes (like the mirror verse comics) seem to further establish that the reboot reality is separated from the tos one. In fact we are seeing other parallel realities that share similarities with the reboot one, not the tos one (or at least are more similar to the reboot reality than tos)
 
Anyway, these parallel universes (like the mirror verse comics) seem to further establish that the reboot reality is separated from the TOS one. In fact we are seeing other parallel realities that share similarities with the reboot one, not the TOS one (or at least are more similar to the reboot reality than TOS).

Not necessarily. There are multiple realities closely related to the TNG era ("Yesterday's Enterprise", "Parallels", "Q&A", Myriad Universes), for example. "Watching the Clock" suggested new timelines branch off all the time even if their existence isn't permanent. This notion is supported by the Sphere Builders observing multiple possible outcomes of current events (ENT "Countdown"/"Zero Hour"). Voyager's journey spawned into three main branches ("Places of Exile").

My point is that each timeline may spawn a more or less permanent other timeline, which would be entangled to some degree. When Nero went through the black hole, there were multiple possible outcomes (Star Trek, "Mirrored"). As a result, there may be thousands of TOS-related universes existing independently of the "new" alternate realities. Thus, the alternate reality in the movies is a 'mutated' spawn of the TOS-family of timelines. :vulcan:
 
The conceit IDW asserted in "Mirrored" (which is not the same as my DTI model) is that there's an infinite number of parallel universes, so that any reality you can imagine, no matter how bizarre or arbitrary, actually happened somewhere. Which I suppose is a tolerable idea as long as the timelines don't interact. My problem with the "infinite realities so everything happens" idea is that if there's an infinite number of universes, the odds of locating any given one are one over infinity, i.e. zero, so you'd never be able to reach a given one from the universe you started in. That's why I prefer the branching-histories model for stories in which two or more timelines interact. In order for there to be a nonzero chance of them interacting, they need to be connected somehow, to be part of a finite sheaf of histories branching off from a common origin and thus sharing common traits. In other words, they aren't actually separate universes, but different quantum probability states of a single universe. In that model, you wouldn't have all the characters just happening to be the same except for having opposite genders, because that's not a logical outgrowth from a common origin; it only makes sense in the infinite-realities model.
 
I feel that the concept of parallel realities is easier to understand than to explain to people. It's kinda challenging (but fascinating for this reason too) because from a non in-universe perspective we always think about tos as the default and main reality because it's the original one and the one we watched first, but truth is that from an in-universe perspective none of them really is. The reboot and tos realities are just two "possibilities" of an infinite number of possibilities.
 
Does the Enterprise look just like the alternate reality's? Are there other differences setting the genderverse apart from gender-swapping and uniform style? Do we get to see other ships beside the Enterprise?

So excited for this issue. :bolian:

Sheets are blue and the female uniforms (bar Scotty) are more slimming.
 
I haven't read it yet but I think it would have been funnier and more original, IMO, to just temporarily change the genders of the characters of the regular universe so that they'd get the chance to experience the other gender for some days...
Now that would have been a great idea. A real missed opportunity there.
 
Now that would have been a great idea. A real missed opportunity there.

There were several chapters of Alan Dean Foster's "Star Trek Log Ten", in which Kirk's former exchange student roomate, the Klingon Kumara, returns (previously in "Log Seven"). Several of the Enterprise crew get temporarily bodyswapped, including Uhura into Kirk's body.
 
I just picked up the issue. Have only riffled it so far, but the art looks really fun. Even Keenser gets gender swapped.

Have you read the whole comic by now? Are there any more significant changes beside genderbending? What other characters, places and ships do we see apart from the Enterprise? :drool: The sneak peek includes Adm. Thomas, Kessen and Campor so far, and mentions this reality's Kelvin.

I cannot persue the comic myself yet as it won't be available in my country for several months. :cardie:
 
Is Nero female in this reality as well?

And if so, what do they call her? Poppea?

No name or reference to (the likely female version of) Nero. We were only shown that a ship named Narada came through the "lightning storm" in space the same number of years ago that it happened in ST '09 and that
Jane's mother assumed command for eight minutes and lost her life saving newborn Jane. Also, a reference is made to the older version of female Spock, presumably of the same gender.
 
No name or reference to (the likely female version of) Nero. We were only shown that a ship named Narada came through the "lightning storm" in space the same number of years ago that it happened in ST '09 and that
Jane's mother assumed command for eight minutes and lost her life saving newborn Jane. Also, a reference is made to the older version of female Spock, presumably of the same gender.

Do we get to see the alternate Kelvin, or is the ship only refenced?
 
No name or reference to (the likely female version of) Nero. We were only shown that a ship named Narada came through the "lightning storm" in space the same number of years ago that it happened in ST '09 and that
Jane's mother assumed command for eight minutes and lost her life saving newborn Jane. Also, a reference is made to the older version of female Spock, presumably of the same gender.

Do we get to see the alternate Kelvin, or is the ship only refenced?

Only one panel, interior of the bridge. Identical to a shot from the '09 movie (but with a gender swap, of course).
 
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