1298. Bloodline / A Rolling Stone Gathers No Nanoprobes / When the Stars Come A-Calling / Exercises in Futility / The Legacy of Elenor Dain / The WakePUBLICATION: Star Trek Special, Wildstorm Comics, 2001
CREATORS: Ian Edginton / Andy Mangels and Mike Martin / Ben Raab / Stuart Moore / Christopher Hinz / Jeffrey Lang (writers), Carlos Mota and Keith Aiken / Paul Neary and David A. Roach / John Lucas / Gordon Purcell and John Stanisci / Tommy Lee Edwards / Steve Lieber (artists)
STARDATE: 9498.3 (just before The Undiscovered Country) / 46918.6 (between Second Chances and Descent) / Unknown (a story printed in the Far Beyond the Stars timeline) / 54002.5 (between The Haunting of Deck 12 and Unimatrix Zero) / 42315.5 (between Elementary Dear Data and The Outrageous Okona) / Unknown (just after Generations; after the novel Crossover)
PLOT: In Bloodline, Kirk rescues his nephew Peter on a scientific expedition studying giant scorpions living on asteroids that interfere with transporters. The creatures attack his shuttle, and he and his landing party break off a piece of the asteroid and attach thrusters to it to escape. This goes a long way healing the rift between the Kirks born when Jim decided not to adopt his brother's children. In A Rolling Stone Gathers No Nanoprobes, the Borg attack the mining world of Rockpile to assimilate a carbon/silicon hybrid they've detected. In actuality, the refractive metals have only confused their sensors because of the mix of Horta and humans there. The Horta make quick work of the Borg. When the Stars Come A-Calling tells the story of how Benny Russell came to write for Incredible Tales. In Exercises in Futility, Seven dreams up one solution per second to get Voyager home. Each simulation fails, so she does not mention them. In The Legacy of Elenor Dain, we learn that the original Enterprise once evacuated a colony before a cataclysmic storm. In the end, only two people - an artist and her son - remained on the planet, but only one could be beamed back before the window closed for the next decades. He chose the boy and left the mother. Today, the Enterprise-D has returned to that planet and found the woman's remains, who died only 15 years before. They uncover a cache of her artwork, bringing comfort to her now aged son. In The Wake, both Scotty and Spock visit McCoy's bedside to pay their respects to the recently-killed Kirk.
CONTINUITY: Kirk's nephew Peter appeared in Operation - Annihilate! / Rockpile's minerals help feed the Horta (Devil in the Dark), which appear, and are ferried by the Tzenkethi (The Adversary). The Borg apparently visited the Horta homeworld, but did not realize their were alive and left. / Benny Russell's stories were the object of the dream-like episode, Far Beyond the Stars. Most of the characters from that episode appear. / Seven has been studying the engine modifications of thr Equinox (Equinox). / Flashbacks to the original Enterprise occur not long after The Motion Picture. / Scotty, McCoy and Spock were shown to be alive in the TNG era in Relics, Encounter at Farpoint and Unification, respectively.
DIVERGENCES: None.
PANEL OF THE DAY - Worf and the Horta have a similar sense of humor.
REVIEW: A very good collection of short stories, with art that ranges from pretty good to excellent. The opener, Bloodline, is perhaps the weakest, exploring a relationship we were not previously invested in, and giving most of its time over to action beats (which aren't bad). It doesn't play fair with the reader either, cutting mid-cliffhanger to reveal that everything turned out fine (though I get the lyricism the visuals are going for). A Rolling Stone Gathers No Nanoprobes is a fun bit that confronts Borg to Horta, though its lack of known characters does put us at a certain remove from the story. With When the Stars Come A-Calling, the Special starts to groove. This illustrated story revisits Benny and gives him hallucinations long before Far Beyond the Stars. It's too short if anything, and I can't believe Paramount let him smoke pot! Exercises in Futility is a clever use of Seven of Nine's augmented intellect, and possibly the shortest story in Trek history, taking all of 4 seconds. The Legacy of Elenor Dain is a touching tale of art's power, with quite appropriately some of the strongest visuals in the book. The Wake is equally touching, revisiting old friends and their thoughts on Jim Kirk's death. It's as much a memorial for Captain Kirk as it is for DeForest Kelley himself and nicely illustrated too. Most of the stories have a strong emotional bent tying them together. It works for me!
Comments