Star Trek 766: A Bomb in Time

766. A Bomb in Time

PUBLICATION: Star Trek #36, Gold Key Comics, March 1976

CREATORS: Unknown (writer), Alberto Giolitti (artist)

STARDATE: 19:25.9 - Follows issue #33 (Season 3).

PLOT: A murdered scientist is found at the time machine laboratory of a science station, apparently dead at the hands of another scientist who took a powerful bomb back into the past to ransom Earth's history. The time dial is ambiguous, so while Spock attempts to track down the scientist's partner in the present, Scotty and Kirk get sent back into the time stream, Superman-style.
Scotty goes to California in the Old West, falls in with bandits who steal his phaser, and comes up with a red herring. Kirk appears in 1955 Hollywood, confusingly on the set of a Roman epic. He finds the scientist building special effects for the movie, has a chariot chase on the freeway, and discovers that he's only trying to hide the bomb from terrorists in the future. A pawn of the "accomplice" all along, Kirk brings him back to the present with the bomb.

CONTINUITY: None.

DIVERGENCES: Starfleet with a working time machine? I don't think so.

PANEL OF THE DAY - 2001 called, it wants its space station back.
REVIEW: Even the Hollywood section is only an excuse for Giolitti to draw from historical material, so there's basically a western chapter and a Roman one. Adequate action pieces, fairly good incongruous visuals, etc., but it ends very oddly. We never go back to Spock's mission, so it reads like they never caught the actual villain of the piece. Mystifying for one of the done-in-one stories.