Star Trek 1319: Year Four, Issue 2

1319. Year Four, Issue 2

PUBLICATION: Star Trek: Year Four #2, IDW Comics, September 2007

CREATORS: David Tischman (writer), Steve Conley (artist)

STARDATE: 6372.2 (follows the last issue)

PLOT: The Enterprise visits icy planet Aarak, which has recently traded vast stores of dilithium to the Federation in exchange for modern luxury. During the visit, Kirk and crew thwart a suicide bomber, a member of the traditionalists who want to return to the old ways. As it turns out, even the royal family is traditionalist. The princess tries to seduce Scotty and put a bad crystal in the Enterprise's engines, but Scotty checks her work, saving the ship. Below, Kirk is involved in a fight that seals off the dilithium mineshaft. The Aarakians will have to sort their problems out by themselves.

CONTINUITY: See previous issue (Arex).

DIVERGENCES: Chekov is on the cover, but not in the story.

PANEL OF THE DAY - Kirk's pick-up lines...
REVIEW: I appreciate that Tischman is trying to do an old Star Trek story using current events (suicide bombers and an insurgency on a planet with important natural resources), BUT... Again, he has trouble fitting that story in the allocated space. The "widescreen" art is very nice, but does limit the number of panels per page, and while I really like sequences like the game of keep-away with a grenade or Scotty's seduction, it's part of the problem. It makes me want to like the series much more than I do. However, such scenes aren't hung on a solid enough overall story. In this case, there's a lot of Prime Directive nonsense going on, so much so that I can't tell on which side of current affairs Tischman is. Is he telling us that the U.S. has no business trying to control Middle Eastern oil? Or is he saying (through Kirk and Spock) that it is justified. In the end, the characters just leave because, you know, the mine's caved in, leaving us with no resolution to the moral dilemma. And is there really a problem on Aarak if the leaders are of the same opinion as the terrorists? It seems like they could just have closed their borders and have been done with it. Why risk Starfleet's wrath by destroying a starship to make their point? If there's any logic behind the terrorist plot, it hasn't been given space to develop. We're left with a frustrating (half-)story.

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