763. The ChoicePUBLICATION: Star Trek #33, Gold Key Comics, September 1975
CREATORS: Unknown (writer), Alberto Giolitti (artist)
STARDATE: 17:01.02 - Follows issue #31 (Season 3).
PLOT: The Enterprise investigates the possible site of the Big Bang where the laws of physics immediately shut down. Technology here works through willpower instead of energy. This allows Kirk to take a pod out into the void where he finds a mysterious cylinder. Inside, he finds another Kirk! This Kirk explains that the universe expands and contacts on an endless cycle and that history is doomed to repeat itself. He's from the previous cycle and wants to break it as only a man with free will can. He tries to kill our Kirk with a rapier-phaser-willpowered second Enterprise combo, but our Kirk wins... and DOESN'T kill him. As a phantom 2nd Kirk informs him, that was the choice that wasn't made in previous histories. All those other universes had Kirk dead in his 30s. The horror... the horror. They escape the void and Kirk ponders the imponderable - what if he somehow made the wrong choice?
CONTINUITY: None really, but the story has many similarities with TNG's Time Squared.
DIVERGENCES: None.
PANEL OF THE DAY - Fencing, it's not just for Picard
REVIEW: A story with a lot of interesting ideas, even if they're a little scattershot. It's left up to the reader to make sense of the other Kirk's history and motivation. The action scenes are fun. The guest-starring Lt. Nova is cute. The scientific principles referred to seem legitimate (though not the accessible Big Bang bubble). If only it were a little more rewarding. Still better than the run of the mill Gold Key comic.
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