PUBLICATION: Star Trek: S.C.E. #28, Pocket Books, June 2003
CREATORS: Keith R.A. DeCandido
STARDATE: None given, but following Wildfire, at the same time as Balance of Nature)
PLOT: Captain Gold is cleared of wrongdoing in the Wildfire disaster and returns to his (very large) family in Bronx. He takes the time to personally call - or physically call on - the families of his dead crew members. he's thinking of retiring. Meanwhile, Sonya is home in Puerto Rico where she is also at a crossroads in the wake of Duffy's death, thinking of asking for a transfer so she never has to see the da Vinci nor Gold, who she blames. They both visit Duffy's mom on the same day where she explodes, then learns the truth of Duffy's sacrifice and blames herself for not responding to his marriage proposal sooner. Gold disabuses her of the notion and together, they start assembling replacements for the lost crew. All except the Second Officer who they leave in Scotty's hands. He's picked a Tellarite who comes highly recommended. As the book wraps up, the survivors of the da Vinci meet for dinner at Gold's house before setting off on the new and improved USS da Vinci.
CONTINUITY: Admiral Ross is both running the inquiry into the Wildfire disaster and officiating the memorial for the lost Starfleet crew. At the latter, Scotty plays the bagpipes as he did in ST II. Miles O'Brien and his family dropped by to pay their respects to Duffy's family. Scotty mentions Matt Franklin, the young engineer who wasn't so lucky in the transporter buffer (Relics).
DIVERGENCES: None.
SCREENSHOT OF THE WEEK - Sonya and her sister Belinda walk down the beach.
REVIEW: Some important and poignant chapters of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers saga, dealing with loss and survivor's guilt in an emotional way, even though you couldn't say there's a traditional Star Trek plot here. We meet Gold's family - so big you can't keep it straight, though the Klingon son-in-law is a hilarious addition - and there are estrangement problems there, but the book can't possibly give Gold an arc on that score. That's perhaps realistic, but it's not "plot". Similarly, there are problems in Sonya's family, especially with the older sister who, like Bashir's dad, has never been able to find her niche and expresses some jealousy about Sonya's realized ambitions, but she's kind of let off the hook for the things she says because that's not what the book is about. Rather, both groupings are background and color for what's really at stake - our heroes' dilemma concerning their careers in the wake of a painfully disastrous mission. In the final chapters, when their paths converge, we get an entirely emotional climax. DeCandido, one of the architects of the S.C.E. series, is the perfect choice to add this much to two of the line's principal stars, and it's a shame we don't actually get more. In a few brief strokes, he creates the portrait of two dissimilar families (though Sonya's is perhaps a bit similar to Corsi's only three chapters back), each impacting the leads' attitudes over time and in this particular moment. You can tell I'm well invested in these stories because I welled up several times, so no action plot? Who cares?
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