“If you want to change the world, change yourself.”: Redemption II

Last time on Star Trek: The Next Generation...

“The point of convergence where it all leads back to. Perhaps not the greatest moment, but the defining one. In the end, it all comes back to redemption. We will redeem. We will be redeemed...”  

“The first image that strikes me is, as is always the case with Star Trek: The Next Generation, that of a starship. It's the image that defines “Redemption” for me: That of the Enterprise being escorted by the Bortas, the first, and archetypal, Klingon Attack Cruiser...” 

“The Klingon Civil War is something I remember much more vividly than it actually plays out onscreen. My memory is that of a breathtaking spectacle of cunning military strategy and dramatic shootouts in the depths of space. In practice, we get a couple old Bird-of-Prey models flitting around Gowron's Attack Cruiser interspersed with stock footage from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and 'Yesterday's Enterprise'. Today I sort of laugh at the slight bombast and pretension of the whole thing, but it's ever so fun to watch again. It's the Klingon characters themselves who I think really make it work: The way Robert O'Reilly, Michael Dorn and Tony Todd play their parts they totally sell the gravity of the situation, implied silliness and all. It's the first and last time the Klingons can really work this way, before they fully devolve into irrelevant, if occasionally adorable, self-parody. 

This is also of course a Ron Moore script, Moore now firmly established as the go-to Klingon and Romulan guy. Thankfully, we get him in 'world building mode' instead of 'angrily slagging off the Enterprise crew mode' or 'being misogynistic mode'...” 

“And as if to reassure us that the show is in fact aware of what this moment signifies and the responsibilities it now has to take on, its final scene cuts to Denise Crosby stepping out of the shadows, and then the fade out.

Tasha Yar is back.”

And now, the conclusion...

So to start off, can we just talk about the new intro credits for a bit? I've already mentioned they're very possibly my favourite memory of the show, so I tend to notice when they change, even if only slightly. That microsecond stutter in the starfield where Wil Wheaton's portion of the credits were hastily cut out following his departure in “Final Mission” that used to happen in the latter half of last year seems to have been fixed over the break, so it flows more seamlessly now. But more importantly, the logo now materializes through a video tunnel effect instead of swooping in from opposite ends of the screen. This somehow manages to accomplish what many had deemed impossible-Making the show look *even more* 80s than it already did. I love it, but not as much as I love the swooping. No explanation seems to have ever been given for the change, which only lasts for the duration of this season, before the intro sequence settles on its final form in Season 6: A hybrid using the cleaner editing of this sequence with the logo from seasons 1-4. Therefore, I posit that it was a special one-time change to celebrate Star Trek's 25th Anniversary, of which Star Trek: The Next Generation will be the master of ceremonies.

Right then, Commander Sela.

She is, quite naturally, the main attraction here. Also apparently something of a deeply baffling character for a lot of people: Of “Yesterday's Enterprise”, the episode which lays the groundwork for Denise Crosby's triumphant face-heel turn here, Jonathan Frakes memorably says “To this day I do not understand 'Yesterday's Enterprise'. I do not know what the fuck happened in that episode”. Meanwhile Michael Dorn, ostensibly the star of tonight's episode in question, said this on the recent Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 5 Blu-ray box set: “I don't understand the Sela thing, I don't understand 'Yesterday's Enterprise'...I don't understand any of it.”

And truth be known Commander Sela cannot be called Star Trek: The Next Generation's most elegant bit of narrative, brilliant though she may be, and she walks a somewhat strangled path to the screen. For those of you reading who might be as confused about this admittedly messy bit of time travel chicanery as Jonathan Frakes and Michael Dorn above, here's basically what the show says happened to get us to where we are now. In the episode “Yesterday's Enterprise” from the third season, the immediate predecessor to Captain Picard's ship travelled 24 years into the future through a temporal rift. Because this Enterprise, officially the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-C, was supposed to have been destroyed protecting a Klingon outpost in the Narendra system from a Romulan attack fleet, its failure to do so causes an alternate timeline to be created where the Klingons declared war on the Federation, feeling that they had been betrayed and left to die.

In this alternate timeline, Tasha Yar did not die at Vagra II and continued to serve as the tactical officer of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D, which in this version of events is a front-line battlecruiser. Although Alternate!Picard wants to keep the old Enterprise to help turn the tide of the war, Guinan, who because of her special powers is uniquely sensitive to timespace and is aware the current timeline is improper, convinces him to send it back to fulfill its destiny and restore the timeline. Alternate!Tasha, having learned from Guinan that she is dead in the “correct” timeline and that she died an empty, meaningless death, elects to go back in time with the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-C to give it the best possible chance of success an the chance to die a hero's death. Also, because she had fallen in love with one of the ship's officers, one Lieutenant Castillo, who unfortunately bears no relation to Edward James Olmos' character on Miami Vice.

“Yesterday's Enterprise” came about in part because Denise Crosby was looking for some way to come back to Star Trek: The Next Generation as she missed working with her best friends and had been impressed with the new direction the show had been taking under its subsequent creative teams. After it aired and reflecting on how enjoyable it had been to work on, she began thinking about ways for her to come back again somehow, and maybe to become an annually reoccurring guest star like John de Lancie, Majel Barrett and Dwight Schultz. What Crosby eventually came up with was the idea that Tasha and Castillo had a daughter who had been raised completely Romulan, and that this character, named Commander Sela, would come back to challenge Captain Picard and the crew of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D in the restored timeline. She actually drafted up a spec script and pitched the idea to Ron Moore, who promptly, in his own words “rolled [his] eyes” and sat on it for the majority of the fourth season.

So yes, this means the B-plot to “Redemption II”, and a large portion of the backstory for all the overblown Klingon Civil War nonsense we've been dealing with for almost two years now, was actually written by Denise Crosby. At least the central idea was hers.

Moore changed his mind when drafting up this two-parter and the episodes leading up to it, as he knew he needed the Romulans to have some actual investment in the plot instead of just dispensing programmatic shiftiness on demand, so he dug up Denise Crosby's old pitch, punched it up and wrote it into “Redemption II”. One thing Moore did change from Crosby's original pitch was making Sela half-Romulan, the product of a forced marriage between Alternate!Tasha and a lecherous Romulan general, to which she agreed in exchange for the lives of survivors from the destruction of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-C. Logistically, Moore claims, it wouldn't make sense that Tasha and Castillo would have had time to conceive Sela. You may or may not find this worth taking note of depending on your personal feelings regarding the Duras Sisters and Jenna D'Sora.

So there's quite a lot to discuss here. The first of which is, Holy Shit is Commander Sela ever goddamn amazing. Seriously. She's always been one of my absolute favourite characters since I first began watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, even from before I started projecting onto Tasha Yar. And every time I get up to “Redemption II” I worry I'm going to be disappointed, because I'm always at least a little disappointed seeing Denise Crosby play Tasha, even in “Yesterday's Enterprise”. But the gulf between Crosby as Tasha and Crosby as Sela is like night and day: As Tasha, you always get the sense she's uncomfortable with her material and how to approach it because she was so badly miscast while at the same time immediately aware from the outset of the magnitude of her responsibility as a role model (though I do seem to recall her finally nailing it in “All Good Things...”).

But with Sela, a character of her own creation, Denise Crosby really comes into her own: She's an absolutely imperious presence, easily standing toe-to-toe with Patrick Stewart's Jean-Luc Picard. We've gotten hints that Stewart and Crosby have good chemistry together before, but this is really the first opportunity we get to see how strong that chemistry really is and how well Crosby could have acquitted herself to the cast dynamic had she been given a chance. Furthermore, the effort she put into creating Sela is plainly on display, as it's very easy to see how she's a person Denise Crosby has really taken the time to get inside the mindset of and has zealously taken to inhabiting. The result is the first proper “antagonist” Star Trek: The Next Generation has probably ever had, in the sense of a fully realised and sympathetic character who can stand on equal footing with the protagonists. And “Redemption II” gives Sela plenty of opportunities to demonstrate this: My favourite parts of this episode are the back-and-forth strategizing between Captain Picard and Commander Riker and Sela and her first officer, particularly when Sela correctly guesses Picard's feint and responds with one of her own.

Another reason Sela is such a strong character is her backstory and motivation. The time travel nonsense handily obfuscates the true reason she offers such a serious challenge to the material existence of this version of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which is that she understands the show's nature as performative philosophical fiction. This is something that only Q, Guinan and the bridge crew (especially Captain Picard) have ever shown to be capable of before, and even Q and Guinan haven't been doing a whole lot of that in the years since “Q Who”. But here, just like them, Sela understands the relationships between the various roles in the text and metatext and can manipulate them to shake up the status quo.

The in-universe explanation for Sela as “the half-Romulan daughter of Tasha Yar from a negated alternate timeline” may well be completely ludicrous, but it still links her in some way to the counterfactual and Tasha Yar. There are other ways history could have gone, and Sela is here to remind us of this fact once again. From her very first appearance she invokes Tasha, and thus she stands in for her in the metafictional artifice: This isn't some petty Romulan higher-up fucking around with the Klingon Empire and the Enterprise for shits and giggles, this is a battle-hardened Tasha Yar furious at her betrayal by the Star Trek: The Next Generation TV series roaring back from the narrative ether to take her revenge by showing us just how much we lost by cutting her out of our lives.

Before Sela beams aboard the Enterprise, Guinan joins Captain Picard in the observation lounge and begins to explain to him, and the audience, what happened in “Yesterday's Enterprise”, but doesn't seem to really want to commit to the story. She tells Jean-Luc that “everything that's happened is [his] fault”, which diegetically makes no sense because if it's anybody's “fault” it's the fault of the alternate Captain Picard from the timeline that no longer exists, or the alternate Tasha, or even Guinan herself since she's the one who convinced the Captain to send them all back in the first place. (Ron Moore is, it should be said, profoundly disinterested in keeping the technical details of his sci-fi narrative straight here: He waffles a lot on how much Guinan should remember from the alternate timeline and just generally seems to want to pretend this part of the story doesn't exist, to its detriment).

And yet the fact that it is Guinan delivering these lines should give us a clue as to what's truly going on here, because it was Guinan's actions that signaled to us in “Q Who” that a bottom-up narrative restructuring was happening and that we should read it as a performance about the show's material and ethical struggles. And between her and Sela, it doesn't take Captain Picard long to recognise that he's in “Encounter at Farpoint” and “Q Who” mode again, and immediately knows what's happening. And ever the honourable and selfless performance artist, he takes the fall yet again. Just as Worf willingly became the scapegoat for the High Council in order to protect the Empire, so does Captain Picard once more take responsibility for the failures and misdeeds of Star Trek by facing the wrath of Commander Sela himself.

The rest of “Redemption II” sadly is nowhere near as interesting to talk about. The Klingons are now completely and utterly laughable Space Viking stereotypes or Tolkien Dwarves (they even knock their heads together) and are pretty much ruined as a culture, although it is worth pointing out that we do get to see the first light-skinned Klingon here in Kurn's rival. The Duras Sisters are unwatchably bad, even worse then they were in Part 1. Any scene with them in it is basically pantomime. Data's story in the C-plot is quite good, but there's not a whole lot to comment on there apart from it being a good character study of who he is and his style of command (namely, carefully observing a situation and responding with an emulation of a command style he think his crew will respect).

What is worth remarking on is the entire body of the work in toto: It's frequently commented on that “Redemption II” could have easily been three different episodes, and while that's true, what's really fascinating is that it doesn't feel busy or confused at all as a result of this. It's actually a really strong testament to how professional and workmanlike this team has gotten and how well they finally seem to understand Star Trek: The Next Generation's style of narrative. The fact that each one of these plots could have merited episodes unto themselves but *didn't* is crucial-We're expected to be able to recognise how this series operates as naturally and instinctively as the crew do so we can read the plots basically through shorthand.

If I were to nitpick I would say that sadly it's the Sela plot that suffers the most from this approach, which is unfortunate, though understandable, given Ron Moore's reticence towards and lack of comfort with it. Moore never does quite manage to make the link to “Yesterday's Enterprise” effectively, and there's one particularly baffling scene near the climax: In what would have otherwise been the only highlight of that excruciating seduction scene with Worf, Sela videophones the Duras Sisters and orders them to withdraw and leave the rest to her, barking “Face it Lursa! You've failed!”. Thing is, Worf was in the room the whole time and can plainly see what's going on, and he's given absolutely nothing to do but stand around staring dumbly at the monitor! Now bear in mind Worf had never seen Commander Sela before so you'd think he'd have at least a *little* reaction to seeing that the Romulan mastermind behind the Klingon Civil War looks uncannily like his former comrade, but no. Even Michael Dorn can't seem to be bothered to play off of Denise Crosby.

But that is, as I said, nitpicking of an episode I otherwise absolutely adore. Is it silly? Oh my yes-Ron Moore has now cemented himself as the purveyor of silly, self-indulgent realpolitiking things, and this is certainly up there. But it's a lot more than that thanks to Denise Crosby-We redeem ourselves in the eyes of others by striving to change and improve ourselves, and to make up for our past transgressions. Star Trek: The Next Generation brought Tasha Yar back, and even though she's not exactly in the same form we remember, that still speaks volumes. This episode lives up to its name by telling a story about Star Trek's own redemption, which of course can only be attained by bringing back Tasha and reaffirming its commitment to utopian conflict resolution. And more than that this is just fun: I had a blast here, which is a damn sight more than I can say about the last three seasons of this show.

We've finally arrived in full now. All eyes will be on Star Trek: The Next Generation this year, and at no other point in its history has it ever deserved it more.

Myriad Universes: Thin Ice

How well do we really know Commander William Riker?

Conventional fan wisdom certainly seems to think it knows him pretty well. He's the dashing rogue, the adventurous away team leader, the Casanova space age sex tourist. He's Star Trek: The Next Generation's version of Captain Kirk, and he does all the things we loved seeing Captain Kirk do in the Original Series. Though if this is the reading afforded to him by conventional fandom it must be a relatively recent one: Round about the time Enterprise and the final Next Generation movies were being made, Riker was seen as one half of a double act with Deanna Troi and calling them anything other than lovers fated by destiny to be together forever was unthinkable. And when I was growing up with Star Trek, Riker was joked about and dismissed as the pointless guy who skulks around the bridge barking “Shields up, Red Alert!” once an episode.

None of these, I would submit, manage to adequately convey who Will Riker really is. Obviously Will isn't useless, so I'm not even going to address that one. The Kirk stuff...Just isn't true. Not even remotely. yeah, there was probably a little bit of that very early on in the show when the lineage to Will Decker and Star Trek Phase II was the clearest (maybe in episodes like “Justice” and “Angel One”), but any trace of that was gone by mid-season. The only episode I can clearly think of where this is explicitly a theme is “Up the Long Ladder”. Maybe some hints of it in later stories like “The Vengeance Factor” and “First Contact” if you want to argue them that way, but “First Contact” at least strikes me as pretty clearly a subversion of the Captain McGoldenPants trope. As for his relationship with Deanna...I'll actually come back to that a little later on.

“Thin Ice”, DC's Star Trek: The Next Generation Annual for 1991 (not to mention the final reprint in 1994's The Best of Star Trek: The Next Generation), is a very Riker centric story. It is, actually, precisely the sort of thing that we would call a “Riker Story” were this a TV show episode and what we might imagine Michael Piller's team would be highly supportive of. But the TV creative team has had a very tough time getting a grasp on precisely who its characters are and it's just now starting to figure this out: On a good day, we might get something like “Sins of the Father” and “Redemption” for Worf or “Data's Day” for Data, but we're just as likely to get “The Loss” or absolutely anything involving Geordi La Forge on an off day. Also, the TV team thinks “Remember Me” and “Night Terrors” are rubbish and praises “Final Mission” to high heaven, so that doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Michael Jan Friedman, by contrast, has always had a far more reliably comfortable grasp on his characters. With “Thin Ice” he goes back to what is in many ways the ur-Will episode, “The Icarus Factor”, and what he does for him here feels like a far more natural evolution of the character we know and recognise. Now “The Icarus Factor” was a troublesome episode, let's not forget, though mostly in terms of structural mechanics stuff, and given this was a second season episode and that the second season happened to coincide with a crippling Writers Guild strike that pretty much shut all of Hollywood down for a year, some of that can be forgiven.

Thankfully “Thin Ice” doesn't come anywhere near directly invoking “The Icarus Factor” (not because the episode is especially bad, but because, quite frankly, fuck fanwank. Although Friedman did seem to like it enough to give Will's dad Kyle a cameo in The Star Lost and pen a sequel to “The Icarus Factor” in a few years' time) the kernel Friedman takes from the earlier story is the idea that Will doesn't like taking a lot of unnecessary risks. And thus, we set up the fundamental philosophical debate between him and Captain Lyrinda Halk of the USS Marco Polo, a genuine daring rogue always willing to take a chance for the good of her people and the mission, and maybe to show off a bit too. Lyrinda is also, it turns out, Will's Unlucky Childhood Friend from Alaska.

Having known each other since they were kids, the two of them grew up together and were often at odds over their contrasting personalities. Lyrinda was always more outgoing, brazen and extroverted, while Will was more cautious and introverted (honestly, I think she overwhelmed him a bit). They even went to Starfleet Academy together, though they had a falling out when Lyrinda, while under Will's command in a training simulation, took it upon herself to beam aboard a starship trapped in an asteroid field and pilot it clear of danger herself, in spite of Will's plan to slowly edge it to safety from afar. They didn't see each other again until they met on shore leave when he was stationed on the Hood and she was on the Fearless. It was here Lyrinda finally confessed her long-held feelings to Will, feelings he had been completely oblivious to before. She admitted she had tried to give up on him after the Starfleet Academy incident, rationalizing that they were two different sorts of people, but never fully could.

Yet even though she still tracked him down in Alaska and it seemed like Will had finally begun to reciprocate, Lyrinda stopped the affair from going any further because she thought being involved with a fellow officer would be impractical: Either one of them would have to settle for not being captain, or they'd always be worrying about each other in a distance relationship. This was the last time the two of them had spoken to one another until the Enterprise picked up a distress signal from the Marco Polo, under her command, crippled by a relentless squadron of robotic defense drones left behind by a mysteriously vanished people with technology far beyond that of the Federation. As his crew works feverishly to save not only the Marco Polo but themselves as well from the returning drone ships, Will shares with us his memories of Lyrinda through flashback.

“Thin Ice” is already an incredibly intimate and moving story on the surface level and once again strikes a perfect balance between (proper) character interiority and science fiction, but its real brilliance lies in how Friedman expertly takes advantage of narrative subtext. It's what goes only implied that's every bit as riveting and heartwarming as what's told to us: There is, for example, a blink-and-you'll-miss it reveal just for the minutiae geeks that Lyrinda and Data must know each other even though they don't interact in the story proper: After having graduated the Academy with top honours and before she was posted to the Fearless, Lyrinda had served with distinction on the Trieste. This means she and Data are actually former comrades as that was his post prior to the Enterprise and they would have been serving on it at the same time. Through this, and building on Lyrinda's textual relationship with Will, Friedman is able to subtly position Lyrinda as a heretofore unseen, yet legitimate, member of the Enterprise family.

Which is just about as masterful an exploitation of Star Trek fan's eye for continuity as exists, and it makes Lyrinda Halk the final form of Friedman's trademark narrative device. Yes, she's a canon foreigner, but the way she's so deftly woven into the fabric of Star Trek: The Next Generation's tapestry here she's by the end of the story completely inextricable from it. She's so, so much more than the one-off character she becomes and deserves so much more of a legacy than that. Katherine Pulaski, Guinan, Doctor Selar, Alyssa Ogawa, Keiko O'Brien and Ro Laren weren't aboard from the start either, but you can't think of the starship Enterprise now without them. And yes, I'm putting Captain Lyrinda Halk in that same category.

(“Thin Ice” also sees a major turning point in the style of the comic book line: Pablo Marcos is replaced on art duties this time by Matt Haley, Carlos Garzon, Juliana Ferriter and Bob Pinaha: Together they craft an altogether far more photorealistic, yet still artful and evocative, look for this story that nicely compliments its romantic and intimate atmosphere.)

And there's more here than just the bait for continuity hounds. There's also the fact, which hadn't occurred to me until I re-read this story in chronological sequence, that this is coming either alongside or in the wake of The Star Lost. Which gives an entirely different weight to certain lines of dialog, especially near the start. Early on Deanna Troi tries to caution Captain Picard about letting Will lead the away team to save the Marco Polo given his personal stake in the mission. But not only does Jean-Luc permit it, he also asks Will to dig up all the information on the sector he can, something Data could have done impartially and instantaneously. Why? Captain Picard tells Deanna, and us, “I think he's earned it, don't you?”. Out of context it's a nice acknowledgment of how decorated Will already is on the Enterprise, but in the context of where this story actually falls, this comes *right after* The Star Lost...A story where Will and the rest of the crew aboard the Albert Einstein were flung to the other end of the galaxy and that he was comatose for about 95% of.

So he's “earned” this mission not just in a diegetic sense given his history to date or what he went through in The Star Lost, but also an *extradiegetic* one because the character of Will Riker was *barely in* The Star Lost, which was a story mostly about Jean-Luc, Deanna, Worf, Selar, Wesley and Nigata. So, we were about due for a Riker Story (and indeed if you can cast your mind all the way back to “The Lesson”, you'll recall Will walked out of that one with a bit of egg on his face. Here he gets a meaty dramatic plot to sink his teeth into and look heroic in as well as a passionate and adorable love story). And in one more nod to The Star Lost, Captain Picard tells Deanna, in regards to his odd orders concerning Will, “you're not the only one who can empathize”, which is an elegantly understated callback and coda to the respective story arcs of those two characters in the recently concluded serial.

And as much of a Riker Story as this may be, we really can't forget Captain Halk in our assessment either, whose story this is as much as it is Will's. “Thin Ice” is nothing if not if not a treatise on how paralleled these two really are, and this is a theme woven into every fiber of the narrative body here. The opening moments set up the tacit implication that Lyrinda made captain first because she's more aggressive and more of a risk-taker, and yet there is also the fact Will has numerous times turned down promotion to remain first officer of the Enterprise because he knows that's where he belongs. But “Thin Ice” also raises the possibility that he may also be doing this to prove to himself, if not Lyrinda, that he is indeed the person who would be willing to make that compromise. That he doesn't need to be captain. That career advancement and competition isn't everything to him, just like he tried to articulate in “The Icarus Factor”. And perhaps it's the case that Will might just know, deep down, that Lyrinda is more cut out for the captain's chair than he is.

But even though Will and Lyrinda talk about how contrasting their personalities are, we always get the sense that the two of them are probably more similar than they let on and more similar than they frequently like to think they are. In the Alaska scene, it's Will who does savvily point out that Lyrinda seems to be the one unwilling to take a risk, while later on in the Enterprise sickbay Lyrinda confesses to Captain Picard that she's afraid she “took one risk too many” in taking on the robot fleet, and praising Jean-Luc's first officer for being “by the book”. Funnily enough, at the same time, it's Commander Riker who reassures the crew of the Marco Polo that their captain will be fine because of her unshakable tenacity, resolve and strength of will. And indeed, he's only able to get them and his away team to safety in the end by making a pretty big gamble.

It would be wrong to say that Will Riker and Lyrinda Halk “complete” each other because they are both utterly whole individuals (and I personally think that's an incredibly dangerous sort of rhetoric to use anyway), but you could say that they compliment one another and I think the way in which they do makes their relationship, for me at least, one of the most memorable and mesmerizing in all of Star Trek: The Next Generation. If I were to ship Commander Riker with somebody, there's no question in my mind that it would be Captain Halk. The thing about Deanna Troi is that her love story with Will is and always has been a part of their shared past-It ended (amicably, it should be stressed: At least at this point nobody is trying to sell it that their relationship “failed” in some way) and they moved on to different stages of their lives. Because of Star Trek: The Next Generation's utopianism, they can reshape themselves as close friends and confidants. They remain empathically linked and still probably know each other better than almost anyone else, they're just not romantic lovers.

(In fact “Thin Ice” even gives Deanna a scene that implicitly points this out: As she's browsing Captain Halk's biography and service record she talks to us about what a tragedy it would be to lose her, not just because Halk is a skilled and valued captain, but because she's also a hell of a lady. Deanna is clearly impressed, sees how Will could have bonded with her and approves.)

But while Will's relationship with Deanna may have ended, his relationship with Lyrinda halted. It was interrupted and came to an abrupt stop, and there's a big difference between those things. There was no closure for either of them, and you just know he and Deanna worked these sorts of things out a very long time ago. But Lyrinda disappeared from Will's life, came back, and then just as quickly left again. Now though the Enterprise has given them a reunion, and it seems like they might have a chance for a new start. And even though we continue to trek forward, our past remains with us. It will always be a formative part of who we are, shaping us as people through experience and forever guiding us through memory. Accepting and coming to terms with it helps us do the same for ourselves.

Myriad Universes: The Star Lost Part 5: Homecoming

It's not an epic conclusion to The Star Lost, nor is it an unexpected one. The ship works. Wesley figures out how to pilot it. Worf and Darios bring everyone home, even the “hostiles”. There's a heartfelt reunion, and the family is “once again whole”. There is, you could argue, a teeny bit of playing for time and space as the ship travels so fast the crew ends up in Klingon territory, unable to communicate their intent and with their engines about to overload. Of course, the Enterprise happens to be the nearest Federation starship and is called in to investigate at the request of the Klingon High Command. But this is a serial, and serials end up getting stretched. It's fine. It works.

But as we've been learning over the past few months, it's not the plot itself, epic or otherwise, that's what's important here. In fact, The Star Lost seems to tacitly play against our assumption that it is-“Homecoming” opens up with the destruction of Lanatos by comet impact. Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher console the Lanatosian governor, who's still sore about their decision to bring along the Skriiti instead of the Lanatosian monuments. Beverly says that “Planets are balls of mud – things. They can be replaced. When a person is gone, he's gone forever”. And it's here I might start to disagree a little bit with the story's broad-strokes ethics. I get the sentiment Friedman is trying to go for, but from an animist perspective that's simply an indefensible argument. Land, and “land” can come in many different forms, has life energy and we are all bound to it in some way. You could argue the book tries to hedge against this with the governor's rebuttal, but he's a racist and not at all sympathetic.

It's not a huge issue and I'm surely nitpicking, but it's not something my perspective allows me to let slide.

That aside, what's interesting to me is that in any given TV episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, that scene on the bridge with Jean-Luc, Beverly and the Lanatosian governor would have been the *conclusion* to the story; the denouement. Here though, it's just the lead-in and the meat of “Homecoming” is still to come (of course it is, as the Lanatosian stuff is and always has been a secondary story thread). That says something about not just the scope of the story we've been watching unfold for the past few months, but also where its heart is. One thing I really love about this issue from this point is where it places its little cliffhanger beats: As soon as the Lanatosian mess is resolved, Deanna Troi politely reminds Captain Picard to promote Data and Burke, the relief tactical officer who has been covering for Worf since the disappearance of the Albert Einstein. He's interrupted when he tries to do this by the reveal of the plot twist with the Klingons and this is addressed at several points during the story. And each time when it happens, the action cuts back to the Einstein crew.

In other words, the tense race against time to the conclusion isn't to save Lanatos, to get to the alien ship before the Klingons make a preemptive strike or even to save it from self-destruction. It's to get Worf and Commander Riker back on the Enterprise before Captain Picard is forced to promote Data and Burke.

“Homecoming” is a special extended length issue, and it uses that time wisely to further emphasize how the Einstein story and the Lanatosian story are reflections of each other, and also gives all the characters more time to express their feelings. Deanna, who has spent the majority of this series providing support for everyone else, finally gets to confide in the Skriiti, who sense her loneliness. There's a wonderful scene where they say that they can sense a “sadness inside” and Deanna, immediately assuming they're referring to themselves, attempts to counsel them. But they respond that it's not in them, but in her. There's more of Captain Picard dealing with his guilt and moving beyond it, which becomes the key to the climactic reunion. And rushing back to the Alpha Quadrant at top speed, Wesley and Nigata deepen their relationship as they work together to bring everyone home safely. And this time, she gets to provide emotional support to him as he develops doubts about his ability to pilot the alien spacecraft. It's the single healthiest and most positive relationship Wesley Crusher has ever had with anyone.

Even Doctor Selar gets a meaty role, serving as Worf's “Number One” on the team and proving herself to be more than capable of filling the Beverly Crusher, Science Officer and Katherine Pulaski, Chief Medical Officer roles both for its dynamic.

That said we also do get more straightforward and physical action this time than is often the case for the comic line: A good deal of the first few acts is Worf, Wesley, Nigata and and Darios punching and shooting their way through wave after wave of Romulan and Ferengi mooks in their attempt to escape the starship construct. It's eminently reminiscent of the very earliest Star Trek: The Next Generation comics from 1987 when Tasha Yar was slicing and dicing her way through a bunch of giant robot mechs, and perhaps even all the way further back to Aliens. It's silly, but endearingly so. This does get subverted later on though, as Worf and Darios remind each other that the best course of action is not to leave anyone behind, even those who would position themselves as their enemies. And anyway, this has always been a part of the comics after all, and it is deserving to see a little of that here. It's more than earned it.

Because the other thing about “Homecoming” is that this is DC's contribution to Star Trek's 25th Anniversary, a singularly auspicious celebration that was in many ways a kind of annus mirablis for the franchise. This is the one year where Star Trek's past, present and future potential all coexisted simultaneously for one magical confluence. We'll address the TV series' contribution in time, of course, and the year was also marked by such events as the launch of the Playmates toy line and one of the best, most influential Star Trek video games ever made. And behind the scenes, Rick Berman, Michael Piller, Gene Roddenberry and Brandon Tartikoff were secretly planning something unprecedented. But here in the land of four colour pulp magazines, we get a special confluence of our own-Michael Jan Friedman and Pablo Marcos have stepped up tot he plate showing they're more than capable of standing alongside the very best of the best their Hollywood counterparts can offer without sacrificing any of the little nuances and eccentricities that make their medium special.

It's very fitting that The Star Lost be the story from this series most heavily associated with the 25th Anniversary, and that it should make a reappearance in 1993. This is a story whose images, atmosphere and iconography have haunted me ever since, and it's one whose material worth and merit absolutely lives up to those memories. There's a dreamlike and timeless quality here that seems to have tapped into the collective zeitgeist: We exist here in Star Trek: The Next Generation's victory lap, in overtime for the Long 1980s. There's a blossoming sense of ecstasy and confidence that seems poised to take over the world. Somehow, someway, against all odds, we've made it. Let's give in to the energy and go for one more round. 

Star Trek: The Next Generation is about to pull a hat trick.

Myriad Universes: The Star Lost Part 4: The Barrier

This section of The Star Lost really does feel like it's from another story. In fact, when I first rediscovered this miniseries, it thought it was another story: Stumbling upon the cover for this issue while browsing through the archives of DC's Star Trek: The Next Generation immediately caught my interest and I picked it up out of curiosity, only to find it was actually Part 4 of The Star Lost.

In any other context, “Deanna Troi uncovers the mystery of a culture of mer-people and its thinly veiled institutionalized power structures of oppression and discrimination” would be grounds enough for a science fiction story unto itself-Indeed, even the Animated Series did an episode that was broad-strokes similar. But while that episode took its central sci-fi conceit (ocean planet inhabited by civilization of mer-people) and went no further than that, here it's a subset of the far larger and grander tale we've been seeing unfold for the past few months. What this does is touch on a central divide in attitudes about how science fiction ought to be approached and once again shows how Star Trek: The Next Generation, particularly this Star Trek: The Next Generation, is transmuting the genre into something more holistic and universal.

The mere fact that one of this very series' own predecessors took a similar conceit and expected it to carry an entire story is a revealing demonstration of just how much science fiction has changed in only the past 10-15 years or so. “The Ambergris Element” figured all it had to do was present a neat sci-fi concept (“Hey look! Ocean planet with mer-people!”) and its job was basically done. Now, the fact “The Ambergris Element” was also a spectacularly incoherent piece of shit penned by the single worst writer ever to job for Star Trek is actually beside the point here: What I want to focus in on here is the assumption that the most important thing was the central speculative idea and that everything else was just window dressing and irrelevant details. This is a very traditional (read Hard SF) way of going about doing science fiction, and that simply isn't going to fly anymore for a lot of very good reasons. You can't get away with this these days, and quite frankly, you shouldn't be able to.

That's not to say we have to abandon the speculative and the fantastic; this is still science fiction after all and there's no point in doing science fiction if you're not going to engage with that on some level. But what we're learning now is that the speculative has to be treated as a manifestation of the themes, energies and emotions of the larger work, not the be-all and end-all unto itself. We're getting right back to what was so terrific about “The Lesson” (or indeed Dirty Pair, or any other hallmark of Long 1980s storytelling), where abstract images and concepts are used to highlight new dimensions of stories instead of obfuscating them. But the fact these two issues seem to stand on their own a bit is also indicative of the care and time Micheal Jan Friedman and Pablo Marcos have taken to meticulously build up The Star Lost to a slow burn: The business with the Lanatosians and the Skriiti (the name the friendly sea serpent people refer to themselves as) isn't so much a typical Long 1980s Star Trek B-plot as much as it is a secondary thread to the miniseries' overarching plot.

In some ways, this feels traditional, almost Original Series-esque, actually: Deanna knows Data is working on the Lanatosian relocation project with her, so she and her fwllow captives to cause a series of vibrations Data's keen hearing will be sure to pick up. Sure enough, Data finds them and, once beamed back aboard the Enterprise, Deanna fills Captain Picard in on what went down beneath the Lanatosian waves. It turns out the Lanatosians see the Skrriti as primitive life forms beneath them, despite the fact they they are in fact sentient and quite intelligent (merely possessing a different sort of intelligence). The Skriiti were hunted for sport such that they're nearly extinct and, when they predictably fought back violently, the Lanatosians used this as an excuse to label them vicious thugs and to further justify their segregation of them. The Lanatosians than tried to conceal the knowledge of the Skriiti's existence from the Enterprise crew knowing that their aquarium tanks could not hold all of them plus their momnuments as well.

This gives us two more killer quotes: After Data and Deanna subdue their Lanatosian captors, Deanna informs them

“You may leave if you like – Which is more of a choice than you gave us.”

While, when met by predictable outrage over the negotiation table, Captain Picard informs the Lanatosian government that clearly sentient life forms take priority over religious artefacts, no matter how sacred, he indignantly declares

“It would be the gravest of injustices to sacrifice intelligent beings for the sake of a pile of stones. And frankly, given your appalling disregard for the value of life – You should consider yourselves fortunate that I am not leaving you behind.”

You could almost imagine a scene like this playing out in one of the better above-average Original Series episodes, but you could also see it happening in one of the mediocre episodes of the Star Trek: The Next Generation TV show. And what's immediately astonishing here is how well the crew has adjusted to a new set of roles: In this issue, as in the last one, Deanna is basically playing the Commander Riker role, leading the away team, getting action scenes and getting into heated, impassioned arguments with the antagonists. Data is playing an amalgam of his traditional role, as well as Deanna's old one and bits of Wesley's (and his own) Deus Ex Machina problem solving.

It's narrative tricks like this, as well as gentle reminders like Jean-Luc's “I've already lost the crew of the Einstein. I'm not about to lose Deanna as well” in the book's opening act that keep us aware things aren't quite entirely in balance right now. And yet paradoxically, it also shows us how capable and mature the whole Enterprise crew is such that they can double up on each other's roles like that: It's competency porn, yes, and the best kind. It's just like those old moments on Raumpatrouille Orion where everyone on the ship had to be intimately acquainted with every single station and everyone looked after everyone else to the death because the only people they could rely on were each other. I wish we could've seen a few more moments like this on TV as it would have gone a long way towards giving these characters the humanization they deserved.

(Hell, there's even an episode coming up that basically portrays the crew, especially Deanna, as buffoonishly incompetent when forced to work outside their specialty.)

This book is for the survivors. Over in the starship construct we're basically just killing time recapping what we learned last month, so there's not a lot new to talk about. That is, until the end, when the anti-Federation side of the colony launches an invasion on the pro-Federation side. First of all, it's a Trekkie's dream as we get to see cultures we haven't seen in a long time, like Andorians and Tellarites. But more importantly, it's another manifestation of the masterful touch this creative team has on science fiction narrative. As the battle for the station rages, Wesley and Ensign Nigata huddle in a corner waiting it out. Nigata is frightened that they'll die here alone and unremembered and asks if that scares Wesley. Though he hides behind the demeanor of a model Starfleet officer, he confesses that it does. Nigata leans in and kisses him, phasers aflame behind them as they embrace.

Worf meets a fellow Klingon from the other side in combat. “How strange – A Klingon fighting with the enemy!” he says. To which Worf replies “I was just thinking the same thing of you!”

To be concluded.

Myriad Universes: The Star Lost Part 3: Trapped

Life goes on after loss.


Captain Picard says as much as he sets the stage:

“We have barely had a chance to mourn the deaths of our comrades before we find ourselves in the throes of another mission: This time, to aid in the evacuation of the Federation member-planet Lanatos, which is headed for a collision with a rogue comet. The Lanatosian, a water-breathing people, are of course space faring– but their capacity to remove their entire race in the time still left to them.”

It's this middle section of The Star Lost, this issue and the next one, that I remember the least. The imagery of the first two issues is embedded within me so deeply I can't separate myself from it, and I distinctly remember how this story ends from a recent re-read of it I did on my own personal time. But the events of this pair of issues are a bit of a fog for me...well, more so than the rest of The Star Lost at any rate. There was a planet of mer-people I think...but they were up to no good. And there was Deanna Troi leading an away team mission in a diving suit...and she shares some telepathic link with a culture of friendly sea serpents.

But that, as it turns out, is all concerns for next time. Although we do indeed get to see Deanna beaming down in Starfleet Scuba to poke around a bit, this issue is largely about setting that up. In the process of relocating the Lanatosians, Deanna expresses concern to Captain Picard that she thinks they're hiding something important from them (especially as they seem oddly more concerned with moving a bunch of ancient statues than their own people). Jean-Luc has her go down to the planet and investigate, but requests she refrain from referring to herself as ship's counselor. Instead, she should refer to herself as Lieutenant Commander Deann Troi, head of the away team overseeing the relocation process. As the Captain says, “Hardly a lie, though we don't usually refer to you that way”. Before she goes, she gently reminds him that he needs to fill Worf and Commander Riker's positions on the duty roster.

Lest you think they are gone and forgotten, the crew of the Albert Einstein are in an interesting predicament of their own at the other end of the galaxy. As the shuttle approaches the starship construct, it gets snared in a tractor beam and dragged towards the structure. But just as the crew is trying to deal with that, a second tractor beam shoots out from the other end of the construct and tries to pull it in the opposite direction. There's a tug-of-war match between the two tractor beams for a bit before the second one ultimately wins out. This turns out to be a good thing, as the starship construct is soon revealed to be a colony of refugees from the alpha quadrant whose ships, like the Albert Einstein, were sucked into a time-space anomaly and deposited here and is firmly divided along pro- and anti-Federation lines.

Thankfully, the crew ends up in the pro-Federation side of things (though Worf gave their new hosts pause as they hail from a time before the Klingon-Federation alliance) as our heroes are informed by their new friend Darius Appolene, a Betazoid. Darius goes on to tell Worf, Wesley and Doctor Selar that not long ago another ship came through the disturbance, and though its occupants did not survive the journey, the ship's warp drive is still in perfect working order and could provide them a way back. Yet the construct's tractor beams are too weak to reach it, so Darius hopes the Albert Einstein and its still functioning impulse can tow it closer. And for good measure, he has them bring the comatose Will Riker to a sickbay facility where Selar and her team can provide better care for him.

It's with a story like this where the comic book line's debt to earlier forms of serialized storytelling becomes more evident. With the addition of plot developments like the starship construct colony and especially the mystery on Lanatos it almost feels like another story has begun here. Indeed, this issue even ends with Deanna getting locked in a cave Scooby-Doo style: Following a telepathic hunch, she finds the aforementioned friendly sea serpent people, who it turns out the Lanatosians are keeping sealed away for some reason. Now that she “knows too much”, she gets trapped in there with them. You almost expect to hear the Doctor Who stinger lead into the letters to the editor page. And yet it doesn't feel like The Star Lost is trying to pad itself out: That minor dual meaning of the title “Trapped” aside, it dutifully develops the threads it had already begun, just adding some new ones.


(Just an aside, this would bother me a lot more if I didn't know for a fact Deanna and her new friends think their way out of this situation instead of standing around waiting to be rescued. Doctor Who this ain't. Hell, the Star Trek: The Next Generation *TV show* this ain't.)

But if it's a weakness it's as much a strength, as this issue is another good example of the real fortes of doing Star Trek: The Next Generation in this medium. Lanatos is an incredibly imaginative world, from the designs of the planet itself to its society of mer-people to its off-putting fixation on totemism and materialism. All concepts which, building off of “The Lesson”, will come back later on in The Star Lost to further highlight and reinforce the ethical themes the story is exploring. Again, not only is this something the TV show could not for practical and logistical reasons do, its a further plea for science fiction to wed its ideas and imagery more closer to its politics, its storytelling and its heart.

And there's another way in which “Trapped” builds upon and adds nuance to the themes of The Star Lost. Life goes on, even after tragedy. It's not like the Enterprise has given up on the Albert Einstein, but it's also not like “The Tholian Web” where a similar situation was met with outrage, anger and blame. Star Trek: The Next Generation is older, wiser and slower than its predecessor; far more aware of and in tune with concepts like aging, flux and impermanence. It's odd, even though this Enterprise is only four years old and Kirk's was supposed to be over twenty, this one feels much more weathered, learned and experienced. This crew are a seasoned and mature group of travellers. They know people will enter and leave their lives, because they've seen it happen before, and this makes it far easier for them to cope. Life continues. New adventures will happen. Yet even so, Captain Picard isn't ready to promote Data. Geordi still misses Wesley. Pangs of memory and regret still make their presence known to your psyche every so often. Such is life, where the past stays with you always.

“And if there's a bit of gray and a wrinkle or two, so much the better.”

Myriad Universes: The Star Lost Part 2: Mourning Star

Captain Picard stands at a podium in the middle of a large sunlit grassy meadow. He's addressing a gathering of the crew, seated in fold-out lawn chairs. There are empty seats.

Jean-Luc is introducing the official eulogy for the missing crewmembers. His hand has been forced, as despite searching all hours for days, the Enterprise can find no trace of the vanished shuttlecraft Albert Einstein, and Starfleet can't justify postponing its mission indefinitely to look for it. Such services are intended to serve as a formality to remember the departed and to help the survivors work through and accept their guilt. But the Enterprise crew doesn't need that. Beverly Crusher, whom we might expect to be the most affected by this, puts it succinctly: “If he's dead, he died helping others. Isn't that the best way?”. And if it hadn't been Wesley, than it would have been someone else, and Jean-Luc still would have had to deliver the awful news. And yet even so, she still sheds a tear. Deanna Troi, ever refined and composed, has a feeling the crew's comrades are still alive, and she can sense that Jean-Luc does too. But she concurs that there's no basis to continue a formal search, so she goes ahead with the preparations.

Condolences are broadcast across known space. Kyle Riker laments losing his son so soon after reconnecting with him. After her new captain breaks her the news, Doctor Katherine Pulaski returns to her patients, but says she's going to need a lot of time to herself afterward. Selar's parents cope in their own way. And on Betazed, Lwaxana Troi is absolutely devastated. Even though her own daughter was not on the shuttle, she feels the loss as strongly as if it were that of her own children. The Enterprise has left its mark on her.

Captain Picard, Deanna Troi and Geordi La Forge deliver the eulogies. Jean-Luc for Will Riker, Deanna for Worf and Geordi for Wesley Crusher. This is at once entirely unexpected for one more familiar with the TV series, or at least the received historical reading of the TV series, yet it also feels eminently natural and right. Deanna speaks of Worf's pride in his ship and the his family aboard it, a pride that turned into a very powerful love. Geordi shares a memory of Wesley, and he retells it in the manner of one recalling an especially vivid dream. Jean-Luc Picard's speech to his crew begins to reflect the conflicted feelings of his inner monologue he shares only with the audience, slowly becoming one. He wonders how much he really knew the people they have gathered to remember, especially Will, even though he sat next to him every day. He fears he was always too busy for them and that he never got the chance to tell them how proud he was of them and how much he liked them.

Now the crew is gone, and Captain Picard is left alone. He calls up holographic images of Will, Worf and Wesley and tries to tell them what he was never able to tell them before. He muses on the irony of them standing before him in this manner in the same way Tasha Yar did to all of them. But he can't say what he needs to say, because he can't accept that any of them are truly dead. And yet there's utopianism even here, even apart from the way the crew handles grief with such impeccable grace and dignity: Captain Picard's steadfastness would feel like denial if we didn't know he was right. We know the crew of the Albert Einstein are still alive and the comic line can't kill off major characters permanently. We know this story gets a happy ending-It's what happens in between where we can learn things.

It is, of course, the same holographic meadow from “Skin of Evil”. But it's this story I associate it with, not that one. That placid green and sunlit field gently rolling off into eternity. The camera pans overhead, looking down on the somber Enterprise crew gathered around a podium as birds and squirrels mull about in the trees above them. The meadow's sun-kissed warmth contrasting with the elegiac feeling permeating the entire land. Although truth be known, after I lost this story and I stopped watching Star Trek: The Next Generation the first time, I forgot what a holodeck was and that the Enterprise had one. I didn't think about it much, but I guess I figured that meadow was an actual place onboard the Enterprise, as if its hermetically sealed high-tech world just...faded away at some point on the ship and transitioned to some mystical Otherworld. Liminal spaces within liminal spaces.

When I was younger I would often imagine Star Trek: The Next Generation stories of my own, and sometimes I'd send the crew on holodeck adventures too (though after I'd gotten to the point when I remembered what indeed the holodeck was). This was always the programme I would send them into. I couldn't tell you why I did that.

Echoes of “The Tholian Web” from the original series are audible to me as I read The Star Lost this time. Once again, we have the Enterprise crew forced to give their comrades up for dead, despite no-one being able to accept it. But anger and denial where the emotions that categorized that story. This time, it is grace and elegance. There are, of course, the obvious “Skin of Evil” parallels, but I don't even really consider “Skin of Evil” worthy of proper comparison. I'm also reminded of “The Bonding” in the way the story examines the process of loss and grieving, albeit in a far more visceral manner as these are our heroes and friends, not a one-off guest character. As Will Riker once said, we feel loss more keenly if it is of one close to us.

It's not the first time Star Trek has handled this theme. It will be far from the last, even in Star Trek: The Next Generation. But this I think may be its most poignant and profound statement on the matter. I'm sure my own biases and predispositions are showing through here, but they can't help but show through when I'm made to write about this kind of story. That's the nature of the work I'm doing, that's part of who I am and part of what this job entails is trying to articulate that somehow. These characters have meant more to me over my life than any other, and writing this book, especially now, feels a bit like I too am going through the process of coming to terms with this and letting them go. I suppose in a sense it's deeply fitting that The Star Lost bookends both the beginning and the end of my association with Star Trek.

On the Albert Einstein, Worf tries to console Nurse Faraday, who confesses to him that she feels regrets about the way she's lived her life. But Worf reminds her that her life is not over, and that “this is a time for courage, not despair”. When Faraday confides that she feels very scared and that such courage might come easier to someone like him, Worf shares with her a saying he learned from his adoptive parents: That courage is “the mastery of fear – not absence of fear”. Mark Twain, naturally, through a Klingon lens. And sure enough, Wesley picks up a space station with signs of life. Utterly unknown life, of course, but life nonetheless. Worf advises caution, but has the crew proceed with first contact anyway, a move that garners grumblings and side-eye from the junior officers. And naturally it's Selar who reminds them that Worf is both Klingon and a Starfleet officer, and that he makes decisions from both sides of himself.

What the crew of the Albert Einstein find, however, is jumbled, twisted mass of mismatched starships tangled together in the depths of space.

Myriad Universes: The Star Lost Part 1: The Flight of the Albert Einstein

I'm no comics scholar. I've said as much in the past, so those who are way more knowledgeable about the subject are free to correct me, but I personally don't recall trade paperback reprints of current monthly comics to be that big of a thing in the Long 1980s. There were more traditional graphic novels and omnibuses that collected rare and out of print issues, but to my knowledge it wasn't so common to see compilation editions for lines that were still in circulation. From my admittedly limited experience, that didn't start to become a standard part of the industry until sometime around the dawn of the 2000s.

Having said that, in 1993, with three years of life still left in the line, DC's Star Trek: The Next Generation started to release trade paperbacks. There were of course things like that Best Of... collection we've been talking at length about, but the real curiosity amongst these trades was one of the earliest: The Star Lost, collecting issues 20-24 of the monthly series, five books that comprised what amounted to Star Trek: The Next Generation's summer event miniseries for 1991. No other story arc had been collected and reprinted before The Star Lost; this was the one miniseries about which DC's editors said “You know what? This three year old run of issues is good enough that it deserves to be seen again” and put it on bookstore shelves to stand right alongside more “proper” science fiction novels.

And it is, and it does. Believe me, it really does. 

The Star Lost is imprinted on me like any regular episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, probably more so, in fact. I owned this trade paperback, possibly one of the first Star Trek books I ever got, and if I stretch my perception back I can almost remember pouring over it over and over again with nervous trepidation in a dark corner of my bedroom, which is the only way to properly approach a story like this at that age. For years The Star Lost was a story that truly haunted me: I long, long ago lost my copy of the book to who knows where who knows when, and in the decades that followed my memory of this part of my history with Star Trek: The Next Generation faded away. Nobody archived or preserved the licensed comics, and none of the official literature ever addressed them. The Master Narrative of history all but effaced this story to me to the point I would almost feel like I had imagined it.

And yet The Star Lost was a story whose images refused to leave me no matter how much time would pass-An offhand recollection of some crewmembers stranded in a shuttlecraft somewhere in deep space, or of Captain Picard giving a solemn oration in a sunlit green meadow, or of Jerome K. Moore's eerily morose and unsettling cover art for the trade omnibus. Images whose lurking presence within the deepest recess of my psyche reminded me of the gaps in my memory and life story that I was forever unable to completely fill in or fully bring closure to. As I grew older I thought I knew everything about Star Trek: The Next Generation, what it meant to me, how it shaped me and the impact it had on my identity, and yet even so there was the errant thought or whisper of a dream reminding me that there was more to that than stodgy fandom academia could articulate. The Star Lost kept calling to me; a fitting title for a story that is well and truly lost. A part of my past so primordial I had all but forgotten it, yet a part that refused to be forgotten.

For years I would try to track it down off and on, perusing all the outdated old listings and gift catalogs I'd kept long after my affiliation with Star Trek had ended in the hopes of coming across some indication that this story really had existed and that I hadn't just imagined it. I could remember that even then I knew this had been something deeply powerful and incredibly special, and it agonized me not to be able to validate those fuzzy, nascent, half-remembered emotions. But it wouldn't be until 2008 and the release of GitCorp's landmark DVD-ROM compilation of every single Star Trek comic book and trade paperback published up to 2002 that I would be able to fully engage and make sense of it all. I believe one of the first things I did upon getting the disc was to make a beeline straight for the DC section and file through their collection of scanned omnibuses to look for that one cover that, even though I hadn't set eyes on it in decades and barley remembered what it looked like, I knew I would recognise it immediately.

For indeed, The Star Lost really had existed. And it was even better than I could possibly have imagined.

The trade version of the story opens with an introduction by Ron Moore, of all people. Moore talks about his fandom of the original Star Trek, how it felt like a family he could go on adventures with, and relates again the story he loves to tell about how he came to work for the Star Trek: The Next Generation TV series. He then goes on to say how much of a fan he was of the Star Trek: The Next Generation comic series, as it gave him a chance to be part of the audience again and see someone else's take on the characters he now worked with and had come to see as a family as well. In light of comments Moore has made in more recent years, I do now have to wonder how sincere he was actually being here. But regardless, The Star Lost is not Ron Moore's Star Trek: The Next Generation and is flatly incapable of being that for a great deal of reasons. No, this is as masterful an example of Michael Jan Friedman's touch as exists. 

The Star Lost opens essentially declaring that it's a breed apart. Like “The Vengeance Factor”, it begins not with a “Captain's Log” exposition scene, but with a cold open. But instead of having the crew beam in, we get an establishing scene on a planetary colony in the grips of a debilitating plague. A mother is comforting her convalescent daughter. “Are we going to die, momma?” she asks. No, the mother reassures her: Help is on the way-A gigantic starship full of “lots of doctors and medicines to make us all feel better”. The girl wonders how she knows this if she can't see it. She fears that there are “so many stars” that the ship might “go to the wrong one”. But her mother knows the big ship can never get lost, “no matter what”. It's not until two pages in that we see the Enterprise at high warp, “flying as fast as it can”, just as the woman promised, with Captain Picard explaining the situation to catch us up.

It turns out there are two colonies on two different planets, and no-one is quite sure where the plague started. To get the medicine to the colonists as quickly as possible, the Enterprise takes Doctor Crusher and her team to the one with the larger population, while Commander Riker and Doctor Selar lead a team to the smaller one onboard the shuttlecraft Albert Einstein. Joining them are Worf, Wesley Crusher (who will be manning the conn), Nurse Faraday, Doctor Marino and ensigns Gold and Nigata. Beverly's team arrives just in time to save her colony, but on route to their destination the Einstein encounters a massive spatial anomaly and is violently flung to the other end of the galaxy. Will is badly injured during the encounter and is left comatose and near-death and, to make matters worse, Wesley reveals the journey burned out the shuttle's stardrive system, leaving them in completely uncharted and unfamiliar territory with only impulse to guide them.

Back on the Enterprise, the crew barely has enough time to process the shock of their friends and family disappearing before they have to race at top speed to save the second colony. The rest of issue one looks at how different people react to and deal with the disaster: On the Einstein, the junior officers are visibly shaken and begin to despair, but Worf and Selar quickly jump to raise their spirits. Selar points them that “There is nothing you or I can do to improve the situation” and asks “is it logical to dwell on it?” before reminding them that “Commander Riker's condition is something we can do something about” and that they should “try to focus on that fact – and ignore extraneous data”. Worf, now the de facto leader of the expedition, rallies his troops like a general, boldly declaring that they're still alive, and that they “still have food, and life support, and [their] wits”.

Obviously Faraday, Marino, Gold and Nigata will be looking to Worf, Selar and Wesley for strength, guidance and support throughout this ordeal. It's the same narrative device Friedman has used in the past with characters like assistant chief engineer McRobb. But Friedman also knows that even though his main cast are ideals, they're also still real people who have real emotions: His characters have no difficulties conveying this, and he has no difficulties writing them this way. Back on the Enterprise, Deanna tries to console Geordi by saying that “No one is more resourceful than Will Riker”, but she's visibly nervous herself. And of course, Captain Picard must take it upon himself to tell Doctor Crusher what's happened. Beverly appreciates the thought, but has to get back to briefing her staff on the plague situation. As she leaves, an obviously tormented Jean-Luc tells us

“I have informed Doctor Crusher of her son's disappearance. In some ways, she is taking it better than I am. It's been over ten years since I had to tell her of her husband's death. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. Now, I face the prospect of being the bearer of bad news again. Worse news– the worst a mother can imagine. I wish it were me on that shuttle instead of Wesley. I would sooner face death myself than have to witness Beverly Crusher's pain a second time.”

At the opposite end of the galaxy, at the helm of the Albert Einstein, Wesley Crusher picks a heading at random and sets off.