1002. The Hero FactorPUBLICATION: Star Trek: The Next Generation #4, DC Comics, January 1990
CREATORS: Michael Jan Friedman (writer), Pablo Marcos (artist)
STARDATE: 42361.8 (follows the last issue)
PLOT: The Enterprise-D pursues the empty robot ship that has captured an away team and placed it in stasis for later dissection. Worf and McRobb escape stasis, however, and are faced with a variety of robotic creatures, each more deadly than the next. In one encounter, Worf prevails but is seriously wounded, leaving McRobb to find the inner hero and disable the ship somehow. He finds the engine room, but is unable to affect anything, so he draws a robot creature on a merry chase until it crashes into the engine bloc, stopping the ship. Good thing, because one of the Enterprise's dilithium crystals has cracked and it too had to stop. The away team is freed and McRobb's arc has it reached its apex.
CONTINUITY: None.
DIVERGENCES: None, though Picard's baseball reference is suspect.
PANEL OF THE DAY - Klingon vs. giant robot mantis: No contest.
REVIEW: McRobb's coward-to-hero arc is pretty cliché (quite frankly, I'd rather one of the regulars take care of the heroics), but one thing it does is make Worf look good. Comics are good at presenting heroic action, and Friedman has clearly chosen Worf to be his resident superhero. If TNG had had a hefty stunt budget, maybe Worf would have been this cool, but he hardly ever was (until DS9). In the comics at least, Worf can shine by fighting robots in fun and violent ways AND he's the one who gives McRobb the key pep talk. The shipboard stuff is well executed, though necessarily dryer. There IS an (inadvertently?) funny scene where Data is ordered to go down to Engineering to help Geordi keep a cracked dilithium crystal in one piece, but he comes across McRobb's wife and has a long, calm conversation with her until she faints. And then back to Geordi - the crystal's cracked! Geez, Data! Learn to prioritize!
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