Star Trek 1013: The Hand of the Assassin!

1013. The Hand of the Assassin!

PUBLICATION: Star Trek: The Next Generation #13, DC Comics, October 1990

CREATORS: Michael Jan Friedman (writer), Pablo Marcos (artist)

STARDATE: 43423.6 (between The Vengeance Factor and The Defector)

PLOT: Planet Domakleion now has two queens who have inherited it and can't agree on who should run it. Picard has been given diplomatic status to help them iron out an agreement. The problem: Domaks are telepaths who regularly use others to do their assassinations for them. Neither queen wants to kill her sister, but one delegate loyal to one takes it upon himself to dominate O'Brien to kill the other queen during transport. He gives himself away when, during a poker game, O'Brien makes a stupid move. Ops officer Forthol calls attention to it later and the assassination is stopped just in time and the baddie arrested.

CONTINUITY: None.

DIVERGENCES: Riker's card game is in Ten-Forward.

PANEL OF THE DAY - I never know when he's sarcastic.
REVIEW: An interesting take on the "court intrigue" story, with some cool visuals of the ghostly villain and nice focus on Chief O'Brien. It could be taken that O'Brien's poker mistake was him fighting through the mind control, being told what to do, but slipping in the mistake just so it could give away the Domak. However, the story never says, which is too bad. I would gladly have spared one of three on-panel explanations of Forthol's observation to make O'Brien more of a fighter. Forthol is more interesting than McRobb was, though again not as charming as some of the TOS series original characters. As for the aliens themselves, they're of course window dressing, but Picard's negotiations are at least well played.