PUBLICATION: Star Trek: S.C.E. #33, Pocket Books, October 2003
CREATORS: Aaron Rosenberg
STARDATE: 53851.3 (frame tale), 52698.1 (main story)
PLOT: The da Vinci finds a large alien ship about to go critical, but the crew who was on the ship during the Dominion War remembers encountering it before. Gomez reviews a reconstruction showing how they dealt with it, at the cost of the previous XO's life once a Cardassian ship shows up.
CONTINUITY: Commander Salek, who Sonya Gomez replaced, was referenced all the way back in S.C.E. #1, and first appeared in #21 - War Stories. Similarly, Soloman is here part of a Bynar pair, 110 and 111.
DIVERGENCES: Not a divergence per se, but I AM surprised that on this 33rd book, the Dominion War was still going on barely a year ago and that Gomez has essentially only be XO for a year.
SCREENSHOT OF THE WEEK - A Keldon-class glows red-hot when filled with plasma
REVIEW: An interesting way to do a two-book story, with the same threat being encountered in the past and then the present. The series is still reeling from the loss of Duffy, evidently, and it's mostly his point of view that's used to tell the Dominion War tale. A few more breaks for Sonya's reactions might have made the story more poignant there, though I suppose we're mostly supposed to care about Salek and his Spock-like sacrifice. But do we? We've seen him before, but his fate is a foregone conclusion, and I wouldn't be surprised, given the mysterious reappearance of the Dancing Star, that HE TOO returns in Book Two, somehow. Of all the characters, I think Fabian actually comes off as the most interesting thanks to his gallows humor. Captain Gold is on the opposite end, either missing from briefings and letting Salek call all the shots. The engineering problem is an intriguing one and, for once, the mystery aliens seem to have been goodies like the Federation. But that all takes a back seat to the War and some really cool action as the da Vinci's David fights a Keldon-class Goliath, with a little help from the totally unarmed Dancing Star. Some really neat combat tricks we've never seen before.
Comments