872. The Stars in Secret InfluencePUBLICATION: Star Trek #48, DC Comics, March 1988
CREATORS: Peter David (writer), Tom Sutton and Ricardo Villagran (artists)
STARDATE: 8983.2 (follows the last issue)
PLOT: It's Konom's bachelor party! It's all fun and games and Nancy Bryce dressing up as an Orion slave girl, until McCoy, Scotty and Chekov all spike the punch separately. After that, we have Sulu seducing M'Ress with a sonnet, Konom shouting abuse at his bride-to-be, and a racially motivated brawl breaking out. When Kirk walks in, he is hit in the head by a bottle thrown by Bearclaw. He's dressing down the participants when a distress call comes in from a Klingon science station that has just been attacked by a Starfleet ship...
CONTINUITY: Orion slave girls... turning Starfleet boys since The Cage.
DIVERGENCES: The stardate is unexplainably set back (this isn't to mesh better with the upcoming ST V, which occurs even earlier on stardate 8454.1). Konom states that Klingons don't have bachelor parties, though Worf's wedding puts the lie to that (somewhat).
PANEL OF THE DAY - Nancy Bryce, the 23rd century's She-Hulk
REVIEW: It's Peter David's first ever Star Trek work, and it's noteworthy that he starts with a character development issue, making the characters his own. Some of his choices are odd (but Sulu SHOULD grow have a new interest every once in a while). There's a lot of fun to be had with the grand sages of alcohol, Scotty and McCoy, too. He keeps working on the redeeming of Bearlcaw, but introduces a cloud on the wedding couple's horizon. The attacked Klingon outpost subplot is introduced as a counterpoint, and we'll see where that goes. Seeing as Peter David would go on to write some pretty high profile Star Trek novels in addition to a LOT of Trek comics, I can't wait to see what he cooked up first.
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