Reviewing the Stardate Collection (Vols. 1-2)

[BigJake]

Hello, everyone! It's a bit odd that I haven't had the occasion to wander into this particular forum in all my time on TrekBBS, but I'm glad to have the opportunity to rectify that.

On a recent thread in the SNW forum, @Turtletrekker introduced me to IDW's The Stardate Collection (specifically the volumes containing the Star Trek: The Early Voyages comic, which had come up in discussion). In a curious mood, I decided to seek them out, and have been reading them in ebook format. This seems like the most appropriate place to assemble my thoughts on them; perhaps they'll be useful to other curious souls.

A couple of notes before I get started. I'm not reading this material in the hopes of stacking it up against SNW and seeing which prequel is "better," because for my money the difference in medium makes the styles in storytelling difficult to meaningfully compare and (moreover) I'm not especially interested in that sort of exercise. However, sometimes comparisons between certain story beats or tropes will suggest themselves, and I'll mention them.

Volume 1 also contains some material chronologically "prior" to the Early Voyages -- which is the whole conceit of the Stardate Collection, everything is organized by the stardates of the stories rather than in order of production -- and although that material wasn't my primary attraction here, I'll be reviewing it, too.

I'll rate each issue in its own post on a five-star scale, with five being the best. Without further ado, might as well get into it. (EDIT: Starting, of course, at the top of Volume 1.)

THE REVIEWS FOR VOLUME ONE

SHAKEDOWN (STAR TREK: CREW #1) (Rating 4/5)
THE BOTTLE (STAR TREK: CREW #2) (Rating 3.5/5)
GHOSTS (STAR TREK: CREW #3) (Rating 2.5/5)
SHADOWS OF THE PAST (STAR TREK: CREW #4) (Rating 4/5)
THE ENDS OF ETERNITY (STAR TREK: CREW #5) (Rating 5/5)

THE VULCANS (STAR TREK ALIEN SPOTLIGHT) (Rating 2/5)

FLESH OF MY FLESH (STAR TREK: EARLY VOYAGES #1) (Rating 5/5)

 

[BigJake]

SHAKEDOWN
STAR TREK: CREW, ISSUE #1

The basic premise of this short series is that it's the backstory of Number One from The Cage. A version of this character is known to television audiences these days as Una Chin-Riley, but she doesn't have that name here... and beyond that, they go to great lengths to avoid mentioning her name.

See the initial post for links to all the reviews to date.

Summary:
We arrive on the eve of the shakedown cruise of a vessel that is not yet christened as the Enterprise, starting with a proper glory shot of the magnificent Constitution-class ship in space dock. The comics' budget mercifully does not stretch to an admiring fly-around, so we go straight into the story by the second page.

We're introduced to this series' version of Dr. Boyce, who's in an irritable mood. Why? Well, that's because of the puzzling -- but still seemingly innocuous -- mystery that a few of the crew of cadets who've been assigned to this duty seem to be avoiding their routine physicals, despite not being notable troublemakers.

As the cadets take their quarters, they're gossiping about who the skipper for this shakedown cruise is set to be. Scuttlebutt has it that it's Admiral Rasmussen -- "that old dunsel!" as not-yet-Number One playfully calls him -- an old and tired warhorse of the service for whom this is a "last hurrah" for a man with no more to give to Starfleet. It's he who tells us, in the form of an address to the cadets, that we're about to be with a skeleton crew of sixty on the future USS Enterprise when she's commissioned. The launch is "premature" for some reason, but never mind: "Let's light this candle!"

I won't go beat-for-beat through what follows. The general gist is: we discover that the unusually-evasive cadets have actually been murdered and replaced with disguised Klingon agents, who work to sabotage the ship while a hidden Klingon vessel attacks it, aiming to disable it and haul it off as a prize. This kind of heightened Klingon activity turns out to be why the ship is being rushed into service in the first place, and Admiral Rasmussen and Cadet Number One wind up working together to thwart the enemy and save the ship.

This calls for the ultimate sacrifice from one of them: Cadet Number One volunteers but it's Admiral Rasmussen who ultimately leaps into the breach. He knows the kids call him "that old dunsel" and that's not how he wants to be remembered. He goes out in a blaze of glory, the Klingons are beaten and the ship is saved... and Cadet Number One refuses a special commendation for her valor and ingenuity, because she wants the Admiral to have complete (albeit posthumous) credit for the outcome.

When she leaves the soon-to-be-Enterprise, she signs her artfully-unmentioned name on the inside of a panel that a maintenance crew is working on. She's certain she's coming back to this ship one day.

Overall Thoughts:
I really like the sketchy but expressive artistic style of this series. When it needs to be detailed and impressive, it delivers, but I think the looser style of its treatment of its human (and Klingon) characters works really well. Every panel doesn't need to be a painting, especially not in an actioner like this one.

I'm not sure if I'm as fond of its wordiness. There's a lot of people delivering lengthy speeches in the midst of performing tasks that shouldn't permit them, and while that's a thing you make certain allowance for in a comic book format, this does push those limits a bit.

The overall story seems (interestingly) to hint at the kind of oncoming conflict with the Klingons that is somewhat nebulously part of the backstory of Original Series Trek. I feel like we can see the seeds germinating, in material like this, of the Klingon War storyline we'll eventually get in NuTrek shows. In the meantime, we get some Dastardly Schemer Klingons in this outing in fine old TOS style.

I quite liked this, on the whole. Cadet Number One comes across as a compelling and driven character with heart and conscience who could do nothing other than what she does after Admiral Rasmussen confides in her his fear of being remembered as a "dunsel." (As we know from The Ultimate Computer in TOS, this is a redundant part that serves no purpose.) The set-up and payoff here is fun and satisfying.

Odd Quirks:
Starfleet having a weirdly elastic notion of what to use cadets for is a decades-old tradition at this point, and it's certainly manifest here. From the Eighties onward, cadets and interns and interning cadets keep turning up in places in Trek where no sane organization would actually risk cadets. But that's just the price of admission for a story like this one.

I quite enjoy all the contrivances employed to keep from naming Cadet Number One (which is my ad hoc referent for her; here she's just a brave but nameless cadet). I'm not sure I wouldn't have preferred that they simply buck up and name her, but it's a fascinating shell game and clearly a conceit they decided upon before setting out on the voyage.

Score:
4 out of 5 stars. It's a surprisingly action-heavy outing for the concept, a satisfying treatment of the subject matter, and overall good fun in its particular lane.

I do feel like it's not very hard to work out where in general it's going from the first moment Dr. Boyce mentions missing cadets -- and I feel like way more alarm should, technically, be raised about this given what we learn about why the shakedown cruise is "premature" -- but on the other hand I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly it steps on the gas once it gets going and keeps us at full throttle right to the end. It's definitely worth a read.

 

[BigJake]

THE BOTTLE
STAR TREK: CREW, ISSUE #2

See the initial post for links to all the reviews to date.

Summary:
Basically, this is a "disaster episode." We go straight into the action with our unnamed heroine (let's tag her Numera Una) on a spacewalk with a fellow Starfleet hand, repairing an old warhorse of a ship called the U.S.S. Fortune. They're under the gun, literally, in the midst of a space battle with an unnamed alien enemy.

No sooner have we established this premise than a red alert hits and, swiftly, disaster strikes as the ship starts soaking up ion cannon fire. The hull is breached! Explosive decompression ensues! Our heroine and her companions have to watch helplessly as one of their crewmates is sucked out into space... and so it begins.

We flash back to a bit of setup for this whole scenario. The Fortune was lured to its current location by a fake distress signal from a colony that, it turns out, had already been destroyed. The enemy had cleverly disguised this fact with a massive holographic illusion, and when a landing party beamed down -- Numera Una with them -- they discovered this when they saw a vision of all the colonists standing together, weirdly still, none of them reading on the "bicorder." As if they were just empty space... and so they were, dissipating the moment one of the party tries to touch them.

From this point, we alternate between Numera Una and her friends trying to cope with the disaster on the Fortune and a further flashback setting up the spacewalk we see at the beginning. We eventually learn that the Fortune's primary hull has been destroyed and the bulk of her crew killed. Una and her crewmates work out a way to escape to the planet below while luring the enemy in to take a final shot that will ionize the planet's atmosphere and produce a massive explosion that will hopefully take them out.

This gambit could potentially, of course, kill everyone on the planet as well, but they have to risk it. The Fortune goes out in a blaze of glory, the atmosphere is set aflame... and seventy hours later, the surviving crew emerge from hiding, having lived to tell the tale after all.

Overall Thoughts:
The high-tension premise makes for a petty solid disaster/survival outing. The various challenges that Una and her companions have to surmount as they try to work out what's happened to their ship and how they're going to survive are engaging, and watching our heroine work her way through them is good stuff on the whole.

The art is, again, excellent... but there's a couple of pretty key plot points that clearly came from working backward from a cool visual and do not actually make sense on their own. It strains credulity in the extreme that a simple hologram fools the Fortune's crew as completely as it does. I get that she's an old ship and they're not using equipment as advanced as we'll later see in Trek shows -- flagged by the reference to a "bicorder" -- but even so, it really feels like someone should twig to the ruse long before actually touching the hologram.

(Which then dissipates why? Apart from dissolving into the cool visual of the real, destroyed, version of the colony, I couldn't say.)

This is a bit of a nagging point, and it's rather convenient that the enemy's ion cannons have an "ionizing the atmosphere" effect that allows our heroes to sucker them in and destroy them, or get them to destroy themselves (I feel like this is another ruse that someone in the scenario should be able to spot, this time on the enemy side). But that said, these plot logic problems don't detract too much from the real meat of the issue, which is the survival story.

Odd Quirks:
Our heroine is presumably not a cadet any longer. I don't think we actually find out her rank, or if we do, it's passed over in such a way that I just missed it. The conceit where somehow nobody ever has occasion to use her name is less noticeable here, thanks to the dire circumstances that immediately overtake everyone.

It's interesting that the enemy aliens here are also nameless. Presumably not Klingons? (EDIT: It does occur to me that this could be tying in another famous adversary that apparently is the focus of another Byrne mini-series. Hence also, perhaps, the guile of the holographic blind trick.) Other than that, it doesn't really matter: the real focus is on coping with the disaster, which I think is a good call.

I smiled at a reference in the early going to the design of the suits they're doing being from "the late 20th century;" clearly, that would be a fictional Trek version of the late 20th century. We are committing to the past century basically being alternate history, which after all has been Trek tradition ever since it was decided that the Eugenics Wars happened in the 90s, and that's going to be relevant to later issues.

Score:
3.5 out of 5 stars. A different reader who is less bothered by hitches in plot logic could easily score it higher. Still good stuff, at any rate.

 

[Turtletrekker]

Regarding the art, John Byrne is one of the biggest and most influential artists in comics history. X-Men first became a monster hit during his tenure as artist, he had a legendary run as writer / artist on Fantastic Four and was handed the keys to revamp Superman by DC after Crisis on Infinite Earths cleaned the continuity slate. His writing has always been hit and miss for me, but there's no denying his influence as an artist.

 

[BigJake]

Regarding the art, John Byrne is one of the biggest and most influential artists in comics history. X-Men first became a monster hit during his tenure as artist, he had a legendary run as writer / artist on Fantastic Four and was handed the keys to revamp Superman by DC after Crisis on Infinite Earths cleaned the continuity slate. His writing has always been hit and miss for me, but there's no denying his influence as an artist.

My Comics Nerd Card is decidedly Class 7 (that's a learner permit in Canuck terms), but none of this surprises me. I'm only notionally familiar with Byrne's name, but I can see in this series why he's a big deal.

 

[BigJake]

(And the issue 2 review of Crew is up.)

 

[DarrenTR1970]

The thing to know about John Byrne's run of IDW Star Trek comics is that he's going to be introducing several minor plot points throughout his series that are going to be picked up on in a different series.

For example, a plot point in his Assignment: Earth mini-series is going to be concluded in his Leonard McCoy: Frontier Doctor mini-series.

The same goes for the Crew series. He's dropping hints at upcoming mini-series, that's going to have you going back and re-reading these issues once they're brought up later.

 

[BigJake]

Good to know. I may not get that far, but if I should, I'll keep an eye out. Thanks.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

The best reading order would probably be
Assignment: Earth mini-series

Crew mini-series

Alien Spotlight: Romulans one-shot (takes place immediately before Balance of Terror)

Romulans: Schism mini-series Issue #1 (takes place immediately after Balance of Terror)

Star Trek: New Visions photo-comics (takes place during the FYM)

Romulans: Schism mini-series Issue #2 (takes place during Year Four of TOS FYM)

Romulans: The Hollow Crown mini-series (takes place during Year Five of TOS FYM)

Leonard McCoy: Frontier Doctor mini-series (takes place between the end of the FYM and the beginning of TMP)

 

[BigJake]

GHOSTS
STAR TREK: CREW, ISSUE #3

See the initial post for links to all the reviews to date.

Summary:
This outing finds our heroine -- now a Lieutenant -- on a mission with the crew of the U.S.S. Ventura, a small but respectable ship tasked with investigating a situation in the Neutral Zone. They've been sent to relocate an isolated colony to a safer destination outside the Neutral Zone, but have beamed down to find the place mysteriously deserted.

The colony looks like something out of a Museum of American History, and everything is weirdly immaculate: as if it's carefully maintained, but like nobody actually lives there. More weirdly yet, Lieutenant Una's tricorder shows that all the trees -- though superficially resembling species from Earth -- are, genetically speaking, carrots.

As the landing party sights a large cemetery with five hundred or so headstones, which matches the number of original colonists, things get weirder yet. As they contemplate investigating the cemetery, the colonists themselves show up out of nowhere, claiming to have been "at the auditorium for services" when they first arrived.

The colonists seem affable but don't scan as human, but they claim to be able to explain this... and then lure the landing party to a featureless building that supposedly contains "all the answers you're looking for." They promptly shut them in... and a complicated game of deception begins when copies of the landing party make their way back up to the Ventura and start trying to take over the ship!

As the struggle for the Ventura is joined in orbit, Lt. Una discovers the planet's secret: the colonists are androids being commanded by a sophisticated robot named D-12, who confronts her but decides to tell her the whole sordid tale of how all this came to be. D-12 recounts how the original colonists gradually died out and this once-primitive machine -- souped up by one of the colonists, who was a genius roboticist -- took on the task of creating the colony its originators had dreamed of and peopling it with their android replicas.

D-12 then reveals its intention to abduct the crew of the Ventura to populate the colony, and quietly crash the ship somewhere nobody will ever find it. Lt. Una says no to that particular plan and zaps the robot with her tricorder's power pack(?!), all the androids go offline, and that's that. We wrap it up with Lt. Una getting a much-coveted transfer, and opening up a box with a shiny new Enterprise sigil!

Overall Thoughts:
This is a much more classic "Star Trek episode" style of set-up and adventure. It comes complete with exactly the kind of "set" we might have seen the Sixties show recycle from the backlots of some other production, a mystery premise that sets up the Horror of Androids (we have tended to forget that back in the Sixties and Seventies, Androids were always a horror trope, but Byrne clearly had not forgotten), and some lovely bits of weirdness like the carrot trees.

This all gets us a thrilling power struggle against the machines -- which really is fun while it lasts -- and a confrontation with an enemy who is comprehensible, even somewhat sympathetic, but who still must be opposed. Which really has the potential to be classic Trek fare.

Unfortunately, the delivery of a lot of this is awkward and the resolution sucks all of the air out of the whole premise. Once again we have a Starfleet landing party that's almost ludicrously gullible: the situation in which they tamely allow themselves to be locked into a dark building just really calls their competency into question. I mean... come on, guys.

The main antagonist then shows up to deliver an obliging info-dump and, although it mercifully isn't defeated with Logical Contradictions -- the way Kirk and company would've done it -- the fact that it's defeated with a tricorder's power pack of all things is somehow even lamer. Frankly, it feels like a bit of a waste of what could've been a genuinely exciting scenario... although to be fair, I do suppose that fully teasing out this material in a more satisfying way might have required a two-parter. Still, it's a bit of a letdown.

Odd Quirks:
None particularly worth mentioning. A little chronological weirdness, perhaps: I think what's implied in this story is that the Romulan Neutral Zone has been recently established, and that's why the Ventura is sent out? But wasn't the Neutral Zone established many decades before this time period? I might be missing something, but I'm not clear on why it's urgent to evacuate these colonists now. But really, that's more of a nitpick than anything.

Score:
2.5 out of 5 stars. We glimpse some of what this issue's story could potentially be before a less-than-inspiring resolution cuts it off at the knees.

 

[JD]

I did enjoy Bryne's Star Trek comics I've read, Alien Spotlight: Romulans, The Hollow Crown, Leonard McCoy: Frontier Doctor, and Assignment: Earth, but there I do want to give one small warning for any canon nuts. There is some stuff in his comics which contradicts stuff from the non-TOS shows, even though they can out after everything up to Enterprise was over. One thing that really stood out to me was he has an emperor in charge of the Klingon Empire even though TNG has established that there hadn't been an emperor since long before TOS. I think there might have been a few other things like that have popped up too. All I can think is that IDW must have decided he was such a big deal they were going to just let him do whatever he wanted, whether it fit canon or not.

 

[BigJake]

SHADOWS OF THE PAST
STAR TREK: CREW, ISSUE #4

See the initial post for links to all the reviews to date.

Summary:
Our heroine isn't Number One quite yet, but she's getting closer. Maybe we can call her Number 0.7 for purposes of this one.

We start this issue with her long-awaited return to the Enterprise, which smelled like the inside of a tin can last time she was aboard. She meets Christopher Pike -- Commander Pike, not yet a Captain -- as she arrives with a small group of junior officers newly assigned to the ship, and we learn from some casual chatter that there's a TV show (sorry, "holodrama") based on the infamous shakedown cruise we saw in Issue #1.

Lieutenant #0.7 wasn't in it, of course; she's held firm to her policy of making sure all credit went to the Admiral, but word has clearly gotten around in the ranks regardless. Also, she's been reading Vulcan philosophy and quotes a bit of Surak at her new friend about focusing on the future. She checks in on her spacious quarters and then reports to Sickbay for her physical, where she has a very close brush with telling her name to the current CMO (who turns out to be Sarah April)...

... but wouldn't you know, right then, something jolts the ship! Saved by the Random Space Disturbance!

Well, it's not quite "random," but it is unusual. Lieutenant #0.7 runs to the bridge where Captain Robert April is demanding explanations from his science officer, the vaguely simian and incredibly cool-looking Mister Luabba. The ship has passed, apparently, through an unusually powerful transporter beam which our Lieutenant has arrived just in time to trace to its destination. With her shields up, Enterprise won't be caught off-guard again, and the ship sets off to investigate the mystery.

The transporter beam ends at a verdant Class-M planet to which Pike, our Lieutenant, Mister Luabba and a few other crewmen beam down, at a site that may be showing signs of cultivation. Did I mention that one should not get too attached to Mister Luabba? Yes, so: he steps into a trap and dies immediately. Then an Ensign in the party steps into another trap and also dies immediately, and Pike pulls the rest of them out: they've beamed into a war zone!

It turns out that the Enterprise scans had missed a group of five small settlements, all heavily fortified, that are built out of native materials and host about fifty individuals apiece. They hadn't been deliberately looking for them, Captain April explains, and so hadn't spotted them. The planet clearly isn't friendly, but there's a mystery to solve and a couple of deaths aren't going to deter Bob April, so another landing party goes in!

Hijinks ensue with the planetary primitives who are, in deliriously goofy fashion, a miniature subrace of war-bred clones created in the 1960s on Earth and who were teleported here by means of what is clearly an Assignment: Earth tie-in. The locals' hobbies include riding enormous... let's call them Space Turkeys and kidnapping women, which leads to a few complications before the Enterprise manages to extricate herself.

Their report to Starfleet brings back an order, specifically Order Number AG3-721 (I like to think of it as the "F These Losers Protocol"), under which the Enterprise will quit orbit and leave the whole mess to monitor ships that will likely watch the clones kill each other off. And that's it, save for a last bit of Lieutenant #0.7 musing about beloved Assignment: Earth character Roberta Lincoln, who must have been pretty darn cool.

Overall Thoughts:
Don't let my cheeky tone fool you. I quite enjoyed this issue. Yes, it's a maximally goofy narrative that really doesn't go anywhere much, but it delivers a lot of fun not getting there. (Well, "fun" if you're not Mister Luabba, I suppose.) The Space Turkey Cavalry alone is worth the price of admission.

On a more earnest note, we also get some very fun and vivid takes on the husband-and-wife team of Robert and Sarah April. Byrne's take renders them as a confident, sympathetic adventuring duo with whom it would be genuinely thrilling to go into the jaws of death. Combined with a dashing Commander Pike and our ever-winning unnamed heroine, we have a pretty compelling Starfleet crew for this outing.

That doesn't mean we're entirely spared a dose of dramatically-convenient Starfleet dunderheadedness. This time in the form of the orbital scans which could seek out and detect signs of vegetable cultivation but not the fortified villages right next to them. Yeah, apologies to Captain April but I just can't buy that handwaving "native materials" explanation for this; the gorram plants you originally did scan for are surely native materials.

Come on, guys. (And if this was Mr. Luabba's job and he was just bad at his job, well then, maybe that would explain a few things. But I'm still salty he died before we could get to know him.)

The issue is very determined that one should read the Assignment: Earth adventure that this is tying in with sufficient aggressiveness to effectively be an advertisement for. Maybe I'll get around to that. That said, for all its flaws, this is a fun issue.

Some Additional Notes (That Aren't Really "Odd Quirks"):
I should note that I'm not just coming up with a bunch of ad hoc names for our heroine to be obnoxious. Memory Beta and other sources will tell you that Una Chin-Riley appears in these issues, and I think that's a misleading claim. You can certainly head-canon that this is the character from SNW if you choose, but of course Una Chin-Riley didn't exist when these were published. This character, though I think she may actually have in some ways inspired the SNW version, really is distinct.

For example, Lt. #0.7 (as I have rather cheekily dubbed her for this issue) is clearly specifically made to tie in with "The Cage" lore in a way that SNW's Una Chin-Riley is not. We see that in her being referenced as studying Vulcan philosophy, which can only have the purpose of setting up the "logical" persona she was meant to have in the pilot.

(Bob and Sarah April as we see them here also feel like allusions to their portrayal in The Animated Series. It's interesting to see that Byrne has a reputation for playing fast and loose with "canon," and I can see it; maybe that's what he's doing with the conception of the Neutral Zone in "Ghosts". But he also sometimes is just as careful about tying it in when he can.)

Of course the clones hailing from the Sixties does tie in with the Eugenics Wars happening in the Nineties. Which I would almost bet is referenced in the Assignment: Earth adventure that figures prominently here.

Score:
4 out of 5 stars. It's no Assignment: Earth, but it'll do until Gary Seven comes along.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Hello, everyone! It's a bit odd that I haven't had the occasion to wander into this particular forum in all my time on TrekBBS

Well, then let me just say "Welcome!", and I'm glad that you've joined us in this little corner of the board!

I'm enjoying your reviews so far, and looking forward to more!

(Just one small thing I wanted to mention: I think your cover image for #2 is actually the alternate cover for #3. Just FYI.)

My Comics Nerd Card is decidedly Class 7 (that's a learner permit in Canuck terms), but none of this surprises me. I'm only notionally familiar with Byrne's name, but I can see in this series why he's a big deal.

I'm not a comics fan in general, and I'm not into superheroes at all. But I am a Star Trek fan, and my recollection is that Byrne's Star Trek outings were some of my absolute favourite of all the early IDW offerings. (Admittedly, I liked his drawn works better than his photomanip works.) I remember Crew fondly, although it's been a number of years since I've read it, so it's fun to be reminded of the stories while reading your reviews. My favourite of Byrne's work, though, was definitely his Romulans series.

If you haven't heard much about him, you might find it interesting that his family emigrated to Canada from the UK when he was eight, and he lived here for 22 years before moving to the US.

 

[BigJake]

Well, then let me just say "Welcome!", and I'm glad that you've joined us in this little corner of the board!

I'm enjoying your reviews so far, and looking forward to more!

Many thanks for the warm welcome!

(Just one small thing I wanted to mention: I think your cover image for #2 is actually the alternate cover for #3. Just FYI.)

Ohhh, you're right. Good catch, thanks. (... aaand fixed!)

If you haven't heard much about him, you might find it interesting that his family emigrated to Canada from the UK when he was eight, and he lived here for 22 years before moving to the US.

Aha! Canadian claimed. Wonderful news! We'll just bracket out the "moving to the US" part.

 

[BigJake]

THE ENDS OF ETERNITY
STAR TREK: CREW, ISSUE #5

Yes, I'm speed-running the Crew reviews. Hopefully I'm still doing them justice.

See the initial post for links to all the reviews to date.

Summary:
We come in on Captain April remonstrating with still-Lieutenant closer-to-being-Number One. For our purposes here, we'll call her Lieutenant #0.9, and she has apparently been refusing all attempts at promotion for inscrutable reasons of her own. To the point where people who originally came aboard as Ensigns now outrank her!

Puzzling to be sure, but we don't dwell on it. Ensign SPOCK-Spock-Spock chimes in to inform the Captain of a crisis. The Alpha Eridani system has entirely vanished, and for at least a brief moment, all the chronometers on the Enterprise have gone crazy, none of them in tune with any other. Presently, they calm down... but what the eff was that?

The senior officers convene and the Science Officer -- a pretty cool alien design, although he's no Mister Luabba -- reports that there are sixteen other systems that aren't where they should be, six of them within a ten-parsec radius. Sigma Delta is the closest candidate. They go there, it's gone, and Lt. #0.9 sets them on a heading for the next closest vanished system, Persius Minor.

Cut to nine systems later, and they're no wiser. Commander Pike, who presently is Number One, sets a course for the next system singled out by our smooth-domed (and still-nameless) Science Officer: Beta Reticuli. There, the Enterprise runs into a venerable Trek trope: a "hole in space" that pulls them in! The "lithium crystals" cannae give 'er any more, Cap'n!

The chronometers are going wild! The Enterprise is pulled into the future! Time keeps on slippin' (slippin' (slippin' (slippin'))) into the future! Until the ship is dead in space in a black void where The Steve Miller Band* has no musical competition!

* This is purely my interjection. The issue does not actually mention The Steve Miller Band.

"Science Officer" who most definitely is not getting a name -- I feel like this does not betoken a similarly portentous fate for him as with Lt. #0.9 -- determines that the missing star systems are present with the Enterprise in this Not-Really-a-Void. There's something else here, too: a massive spherical construct more than fifty light-years in diameter.

It is impressively featureless, but registers a breathable atmosphere and near-Earth-normal gravity in its interior. A landing party, including Pike and Lt. #0.9, gets ready and one of them questions whether Ensign SPOCK-Spock-Spock is ready for this. We discover that "Science Officer" does in fact have a name -- but that it's some random letters-and-apostrophes bullshit that will probably not be repeated -- and has vouched for SPOCK-Spock-Spock. Good enough for Captain April: energizing!

One of the landing party doesn't appear in the sphere with the others, a random dude named Lavallee. This alerts the Enterprise to an alarming fact: the ship is showing serious signs of the effects of entropy in its future-ward journey. A component of the transporter assembly has simply given out without warning.

Parallel plots unspool from this point. On the Enterprise, the effects of entropy continue to unfold, leading to some pretty serious body horror as the crew's very cells spin out of control and begin turning them into horrific lumps of chaotic, agonized flesh. Within the sphere, SPOCK-Spock-Spock's telepathy comes into play as something assails him, gravity vanishes, and a bunch of weird spheres appear around the landing party.

The spheres have brought star systems billions of years into the future in an attempt to, apparently, battle the heat death of the universe. It's been futile: the systems just go nova on arrival (presumably the stellar version of what's happening to Enterprise). The landing party remonstrates with the spheres about how maybe they should just buck the F up and accept mortality, and how maybe a new universe will spring forth from what they fear, and zzap! The Enterprise returns to normal time.

It comes at a price. They lost a bunch of the crew, and Enterprise is going to need to spend quite a bit of time in dry-dock. But at least star systems have stopped disappearing: the weird, almost child-like Spheres at the End of Eternity seem to have gotten the message.

Finally, we also find out why Lt. #0.9 has been refusing promotion in a last convo with Commander Pike: too much responsibility, too many rules, and also: she wants Commander Pike's job. (Does this make sense? Don't worry about it.)

Overall Thoughts:
I often love Trek best when it's at its weirdest, and Byrne gets that mission at its fullest here. We're on our cosmic, going-to-the-ends-of-the-universe shit here. Everything that happens is of massive cosmic significance and of course, we get our first look at Ensign SPOCK-Spock-Spock, who comes in trailing clouds of glory and ultimately resolves the problem.

There's a lot of cool shit here, including the shades of 2001: A Space Odyssey in the cosmic mystery afoot and the massive end-of-the-universe construct of the Spheres. The dreadful march of entropy on the Enterprise lends some real urgency to the landing party's mission and gives weight to their negotiation with the bizarre consciousness they're forced to interact with. Ultimately, humanity interacting with eternity wins the day in true Trek "bargaining your way out of Some Random Cosmic Asshole's Scheme" fashion.

I loved this issue. It's a really amazing cap on the mini-series, and delivers some stark and fascinating visuals that are worth the price of admission. Its introduction of SPOCK-Spock-Spock is suitably portentous and consequential. Does it make sense of why Lt. #0.9 has been refusing promotion? Not a bit of it, but that's a relatively minor part of the proceedings.

I do believe this is my favourite issue of Crew, and it's not close.

Odd Quirks:
More of a pet peeve than anything else. People refusing promotions Because of Reasons became a venerable trope in TNG and appears here. It makes no sense and I really hate this kind of thing, which panders to fandom sentimentality at the expense of making Starfleet believable as an organization. IRL, organizations that try to promote you are doing so for a reason, expect you to step up, and don't have much patience for failure to do so.

They don't even have to be "military" organizations if you're one of those people who refuse to believe Starfleet is a military (you're mistaken, but we can litigate that elsewhere). This issue doesn't even offer up a coherent reason for Lt. #0.9's choices in this regard. We just know, by the brute force of canon, that she will eventually get Commander Pike's "Number One" job when he finally takes the Captain's chair.

That said, this is a minor part of the overall picture. On the whole, this is a fine culmination to the mini-series.

(EDIT: You know, it does occur to me to wonder why Lt. #0.9's interest in Vulcan philosophy doesn't really go anywhere in this issue, at least not that I could see. She doesn't seem any more or less "logical" than she previously did. Maybe there just wasn't space for it. Anyway, also a minor point.)

Score:
5 out of 5 stars. Leave the past in the past, people, or it will blow up on you. Perhaps literally. And don't let yourself turn into a sphere mining the past to stave off the heat death of the universe. Make better decisions than that.

 

[BigJake]

Overall, the average of those scores nets Star Trek: Crew a 4-star rating. Which I'm fine with. Byrne is clearly one of the greats for a reason. See you all soon for reviews of the rest of this volume.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

If I remember correctly, John gave an interview in the back of one of the comics where he talked about growing up with TOS, Franz Joseph and the Spaceflight Chronology, and how he is not beholden to anything that came after TMP, so, any errors or contradiction that creep in are purely his own because he hasn't watched anything post-TMP.

 

[BigJake]

THE VULCANS
STAR TREK ALIEN SPOTLIGHT

This happens to function as a bit of an intermission in this volume between Byrne's "Crew" mini-series and the first six issues of The Early Voyages. It shows an early Spock mission under Pike's command.

See the initial post for links to all the reviews to date.

Summary:
We open with Pike musing on the ongoing attempt to integrate a Vulcan into his crew. Vulcans have served on ships before, but not on the Enterprise, and people are struggling with the seeming coldness of young Spock; especially the high-strung navigator Jose Tyler.

Tyler really has a problem with the Vulcan's lack of tact about hot-button topics like, say, a hostage crisis at Reebi Station, which apparently didn't end well and which some of the crew were debating what they would do differently. They asked Spock and he tells them the logical thing would have been to let the hostages die: when one of his crewmates mentions he had a brother directly involved, he dismisses it as irrelevant.

Yeah, so that's not great. The jury is clearly out as to whether Spock's going to make it.

Anyway, the Enterprise is now on a diplomatic mission to the planet of Mageffera, home to a mostly-hostile species who are so aggressive that they'd actually developed warp drive and then failed to make use of it because they couldn't see a way to weaponize it. A small group of civilians planetside have asked the Federation to intervene and broker some kind of peace, and Spock will (somewhat controversially) be joining the landing party.

They beam down and, unsurprisingly, are immediately ambushed. One of the landing party is killed before they can repel the attackers, and naturally, Spock and Tyler clash over whether they should take a moment to mourn him (Spock says the logical thing to do is strip his equipment, leave him and get moving). The friction continues as the party find themselves on the run: the Magefferans are jamming signals in a way that makes it impossible for them to beam up.

The Magefferans finally capture them, but there's a surprise outcome: they get a look at Spock's Vulcan detachment and they're super-impressed by it! So much so that they actually do open up to the idea of working with the Federation, so curious are they about this strange stoic power!

We wrap up with Pike and Tyler chatting about the success of the mission, and Tyler still going on -- despite this -- about Spock "upsetting the balance of the ship." Pike essentially tells him to suck it up, Spock has proved his value, and we end on a final log entry where Pike muses about how important Spock is going to be.

Overall Thoughts:
Mostly, this story covers much the same kind of ground as TOS' "Galileo Seven." It's mildly interesting to see Jose Tyler and Pike's Enterprise used as a filter for that kind of conflict-over-logic, and it's also mildly interesting to see Spock of this era just delivered with Vulcan logic "fully-loaded," as it were. Pike-era Spock stories are often preoccupied with the question of when he develops his full commitment to logic -- based of course on his clearly not having such parameters in "The Cage" -- but here we're just ignoring that.

That's all fine, and I like the fiery version of Tyler we see here, but it's only mildly interesting given that, if you've seen TOS, you've seen these basic beats before. What really has the potential to deliver more meat here are the Magefferans and Operation: Get These Dudes to Chill Just a Bit.

That potential seems wasted to me, though. I can see one or two Magefferans being impressed by Spock's stoicism, maybe. But basically the whole species being so impressed by it as to be willing to lay down their arms and negotiate? It's over-convenient to the point of just being silly.

(The Magefferans having developed warp drive but not using it basically just seems to be a convenient way for this concept to play out without disturbing the Prime Directive. Not wild about that either.)

I can't say as I care much for the art style here, either. Byrne is a tough act to follow, and the art isn't bad, but after the free-flowing expressiveness of figures in "Crew," everything here feels stilted and over-defined.

Unfortunately, have to say this one wasn't for me.

Score:
2 out of 5 stars. Pass. I wanted to like this more, but it just doesn't hit for me. Maybe I was just spoiled by Byrne by the time I got to this.

 

[BigJake]

FLESH OF MY FLESH
STAR TREK: EARLY VOYAGES, ISSUE #1

And so we arrive at the main focus of the first two volumes of the Stardate Collection, Star Trek: Early Voyages. This is the big, splashy Marvel Comics excursion into the Pike-era Trekverse, which set out of space dock over a decade prior to Byrne's Star Trek: Crew but which commences in Stardate terms not too long before the events of "The Cage." Our first of six issues in this volume is, of course, "DOUBLE-SIZED FANTASTIC!" Let's get into it.

See the initial post for links to all the reviews to date.

Summary:
I'm not going to do this for every issue, but here, I think the opening splash page deserves some love. It both introduces the series concept and offers tantalizing foreshadowing about the issue itself. And it is DRAMATIC in the finest Marvel Comics style.

From there, we go straight into the action. The Enterprise has been dispatched to investigate the disappearances of a number of small vessels that have turned up, as Pike's log puts it, like "a fleet of Marie Celestes." Their crews have vanished apparently in the midst of daily tasks, with frustratingly half-completed logs left behind, and the abandoned ships themselves are covered in a weird gray slime.

As Pike's log is summing this up, the Enterprise is encountering what appears to be an entirely organic space object that isn't responding to hails. The gang's (mostly) here: Pike himself, a very statuesque Number One, a Spock, a Jose Tyler... and at the comms station, the fresh addition of an E.T.-looking dude by the name of Nano.

The object comes into visual range, and it's something out of a Lovecraft story. It's quite a bit larger than Enterprise, and they rapidly suss out that despite looking like a single organism, it may well be carrying... parasites? Or young? Or maybe it's a ship containing a crew!

DING-DING-DING!

Maybe "crew" is some kind of safe word? It definitely triggers Captain Pike, who immediately goes to Red Alert! He orders all data to be downloaded and launched in a probe for Starfleet just in case they don't make it. We then get a semi-comedic moment when both Number One and Captain Pike try to issue the same order to Mister Nano and then have a wry conversation about it, which, for some reason, they have time for in this urgent moment... but then Nano reports the alien vessel is trying to make contact!

The contact is incomprehensible, but it's "pulsing, heartbeat-soft," and the pace is quickening. No sooner has Nano reported this than a massive energy build-up commences on the alien ship! Captain Pike gives the "Raise shields!" order -- repeating it frantically a couple of times -- but it's clearly too late to stop Some Bullshit from happening as everything fades to white.

We segue from this moment into parallel plot strands. In one, Pike -- who has been abducted by the aliens -- is struggling against the aliens' attempts to probe his mind through some kind of neural link as he relives moments from the recent past, as he took on this command from Captain Robert April. In the other strand, the crew of the Enterprise tries to figure out WTF is going on as the alien ship hauls them away with its Lovecraftian tendrils and has somehow disabled their systems.

These separate plot strands are packed with backstory and present-day information. Through Pike's flashbacks, we meet Doctor Boyce -- a silver fox who in this iteration definitely is not rocking a comb-over -- and Number One (whose surname is "Robbins," apparently, but it turns out prefers to "keep her Christian name out of it" when first meeting Pike and just wants to be called Number One, perhaps an inspiration for the running bit with the coyness about her name we saw in "Crew"), and the Captain's Yeoman Dermot Cusack who obligingly, and in keeping with his role, delivers crew dossiers in one of the later flashbacks.

(In this context, we get the... interesting backstory of Space Maasai Chief Engineer Moves-with-Burning-Grace. We get some tidbits about Lieutenant Sita Mohandas, about the not-particularly-important transporter chief Nils Pitcairn, and so on. All while learning that Dermot is meant to be a charming Irish rogue who can presume considerably on his boss' restraint given his evident efficiency.)

Through it all, Pike is fighting like hell and trying to leverage the aliens' neural link to him to learn more about them, culminating in his escaping the neural link in a scene that's kind of a precursor to Neo awakening to see the real-life infrastructure of the Matrix.

In the meantime, the Enterprise crew is figuring out the enemy and trying to counter whatever is disabling the ship. They eventually work out that some kind of "organic virus" is responsible and manage to counter it sufficiently that they can mount a rescue expedition for the Captain, who has by now learned that the enemy are the Ngultor and are here to Consume Your Biomass to add it to their sublime mode of collective living.

They free Pike, return to the Enterprise, and blow the Ngultor away when it becomes plain that the aliens cannot be reasoned with. The end, more or less. Pike doesn't feel great about having to resolve it all with violence, but it is what it is.

Overall Thoughts:
You'd think the flashbacks would slow things down, but I think the contrivance that ties them into the present-day action actually works better than it has any right to. It's clear that we're kinda-sorta getting a "clip episode" vibe packaged to tie into the action, but it's not obnoxious and the framing device mostly works and segues gracefully into being relevant to the core problem -- and core adversary -- at issue.

The Ngultor are quite cool and creepy, despite pretty clearly having been conceived as the meat version of the Borg (while being less overwhelmingly powerful). The problem-solving and action beats in the issue all come off as entertaining and engaging.

I really enjoy the Marvel Comics of it all. Everybody is HAWT, and that's okay. The art, writing, and composition are visually every bit as bold, colourful, dynamic, and engrossing as they should be. When the proceedings should be pulse-pounding, they feel that way. I'm not sure if I'm as charmed by Yeoman Dermot Cusack as I'm meant to be, but it's a very minor gripe amongst all the action-y, comic-y thrills on display. This is cracking stuff.

Odd Quirks:
I wonder, at certain points, if someone on SNW's production team didn't read this series and draw inspiration from it. Particularly notable is that during the rescue of Captain Pike, we get interior shots of the Ngultor ship that look a lot like the literal guts of the Gorn vessel that we see in Part II of SNW's Hegemony.

Likewise intriguing is that we learn in this issue that Nano is the sole emissary of his species to Starfleet. This is another trope we have encountered in NuTrek, first with Saru on DISCO and then with SAM on Starfleet: Academy. Maybe that's just coincidence... but I think not.

I have... notes about the Space Maasai engineer Moves-With-Burning-Grace. But I'll get to those more fully in a later issue. They aren't worth focusing on here.

Score:
5 out of 5 stars. Richly imagined, visually gorgeous, exciting, dramatic, and tremendous fun. A great start to the series.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Something I really liked about John Byrne's Crew is that it often felt to me like 1950s science-fiction. Byrne wasn't just doing a Star Trek prequel, he was doing a series that felt like it came from a time before Star Trek, something that Larry Niven or Fred Pohl would have sold to Galaxy or If in the late 50s and early 60s. Or, for that matter, something Benny Russell would have written.

As for Early Voyages #1, I love how absolutely mid-90s Marvel that cover is. That's not a criticism; I loved the series, I loved Zircher's art, I thought the storytelling was solid. I'm just noting that that era of Marvel's Star Trek comics could be... very Marvel. Starfleet Academy makes sense when you look at it in terms of a mid-90s, post-Claremont X-Men comic, for example.