Re: Unworthy - Discuss/Grade Thread <SPOILERS>
Lots of spoilers in this review....
Boy, Starfleet doesn’t come off looking too great in this one, huh? A new assignment and instantly everyone is obsessed with who’s crushing on who, prompting even Torres to admit – in a moment funny for perhaps the wrong reasons – that Voyager is feeling like a Klingon romance novel. Not to mention, our Admiral turns out to have been a species 8472 for this whole time, Zimmerman sees nothing wrong with putting a holographic crew member on a mission where no one knows she’s a hologram (does this seem problematic to anyone else?), and Eden sees nothing wrong with committing fraud to protect an officer of admittedly high value but certainly without any official reason to necessitate such treatment.
Really, Eden in general is just not too impressive in this book to me, as it seems like she doesn’t really do… anything. Torres shows up? That’s cool, she can stay. Seven shows up? That’s cool, she can stay. Chakotay might be a traitor? We’ll wait on that, no need to act soon. Her husband is a traitor? Huge epic confrontation in the shuttle bay… at which point she lets him go. Torres and Chakotay hanging around with nothing to do? Promote them. It really seemed like Eden mostly existed to cause the obvious and necessary plot points to move in the correct direction at the author’s convenience, rather than due to internal motivations of any particular variety.
Now, that all said, if she’d been more strongly characterized before this book I might not have those complaints, as certainly if a more established Captain like Picard or Janeway had made all these choices I wouldn’t have found them unbelievable. But after Janeway’s passing, I was looking for a strong and powerful character to be in charge that I could really root for, and Eden just hasn’t emerged as that person for me yet.
That said, in Full Circle, Beyer similarly struggled with getting the plot layed down in expressly logical terms, and with so much going on here it’s not a surprise that she took a few shortcuts to get it all moving in the right directions. Her strength doesn’t run in that direction, but rather towards character arcs and interplay of personalities; the Joss-Whedon-like creation of family (found family, rather than biological family, is a distinction he’s fond of making and one that makes sense here as well). And in that category, the book positively excels.
With the notable exception of Eden, every main character both original and from the show (including, surprisingly, Neelix!) is given an absolutely perfect and absolutely fascinating story in this, and I believed every bit of all of them. Special notice goes to Cambridge and Seven, as I found those scenes just about the most thrilling pure-character scenes Trek has offered lately, and well really just to Cambridge in general because he’s awesome. I think I need a short story about him being Chaotica now.
I also loved Torres’s characterization and interaction with Conlon, and found her promotion to be a great idea. Kim being all freaked out and spazzing works for me too, and as a previous commenter mentioned, I wondered if it wasn’t perhaps motivated by a general sense of abandonment and not just Paris’s lack of trust.
Additionally, the idea of the Indign (though I have no idea how to pronounce the name - some help, Kirsten?) was a fascinating one, and though I’m a bit bummed that we don’t get to see more about the Caeliar, it was certainly a story worthy of the first new status quo novel. I like the cliffhanger too. And Batiste being an 8472 was also pretty cool – it added a resonance to the Eden/Batiste romance, of them both searching for a lost home, that made a weird sense to me, and built organically off of earlier Voyager plotlines. And while it was awfully convenient that we happened to clear the center seat for Chakotay again, I’ll allow it; going from Golden’s stuff to this new status quo had to be a hard damn thing to work out, logistically, and I think it was handled well overall.
In the end, I can’t help but view this as a trilogy – the first half of Full Circle being the old status quo, the second half being the painful transition, and Unworthy being the new status quo – and seen in that light each of the three elements is different and uniquely compelling, though none is without flaw. Full Circle felt undeniably more epic than Unworthy, but it might have just been a result of putting the first two books in one; Unworthy definitely keeps up the high standards, placing Voyager on equal footing with all of the other Palmieri-launched series. Though I wouldn’t call Unworthy in particular a standout entry by the standards of any of them, it was satisfying and full of interesting stories and ideas. Eight out of ten, and I’m eagerly awaiting sequels (and I hope Beyer comes back to do a few of them, someday!)
Though neither Full Circle nor Unworthy are without their share of flaws, Voyager has finally made it to the same high standards as the rest of the Trek-lit universe, and it's about time.
