Star Trek 1057: The Belly of the Beast!

1057. The Belly of the Beast!

PUBLICATION: Star Trek: The Next Generation #48, DC Comics, July 1993

CREATORS: Michael Jan Friedman (writer), Peter Krause and Pablo Marcos (artists)

STARDATE: Unknown (follows the last issue)

PLOT: Picard agrees to help the parallel universe's crew defeat the Borg, though part of that crew just commandeered his Enterprise. Reviewing what went wrong the first time, the combined crews decide our Enterprise's plan is still workable, and Picard chooses to lead the mission to the Cube (bumping Worf). The two ships head to Earth where Locutus' Cube is assimilating the planet and attack it with a barrage of anti-matter and slip a shuttle inside its shields. Picard and Data head for the command center to find Locutus, but he's nowhere to be found...

CONTINUITY: See previous issue. Commander Shelby has stayed on as Riker's first officer (The Best of Both Worlds), and Wesley didn't have an Academy to go to (Final Mission). Forgot to mention this last issue, but the Starfleet insignia in the parallel universe are those from Future Imperfect. Geordi's defense of individual drones harks back to the events of I, Borg. The difference between the parallel and our world is that their Riker didn't listen to Shelby's idea of launching an anti-matter spread and causing the rescue shuttle to be attacked, destroying Data and wounding Worf. The restoration of Picard from Locutus may not have worked anyway given that Dr. Crusher remained at Starfleet Medical longer than Season 2.

DIVERGENCES: The title was later used for an SCE novel. If the saucer section was destroyed during the events of The Best of Both Worlds, Alt-O'Brien shouldn't be aware of his wife Keiko (Data's Day) and his daughter Molly (Disaster); both episodes occur much later.

PANEL OF THE DAY - Alt-Worf: No more or less a sore loser than our Worf.
REVIEW: Still an exciting arc on a plot level, though Krause's art could be a little more dynamic in the battle scenes. The "what if" aspects are well thought out. On a character level, Friedman does a good job of confronting the alt-crew with the world and people they've lost as represented by our version of the crew, though here there may be timeline problems (see Divergences).