Forest of Illusions

We open with the passage that gives this issue (and thus the series in general considering I’ve jacked the phrase for rhetorical purposes) its title as Admiral Rosenstrum confides in Captain Picard in the ready room.

“I owe you an apology, Jean-Luc. As it turns out, you knew exactly what you were doing. If you’d listened to me, the Beta Tarsus colony would have been obliterated – Just like the Nairobi and the Merrimac before it.”

“I appreciate the praise admiral, but you didn’t call me in here just to congratulate me, correct?”

“Not entirely, no. As your superior officer, Jean-Luc, it’s my duty to quote Starfleet policy at this juncture.”

“Policy, admiral?”

“That’s right. And policy dictates that as long as we have any options at all, we avoid destroying that other ship.”

“I trust you’re familiar with Nietzsche?”

“The philosopher? Yes, I am.”

“It was he who said ‘Whoever fights monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster.’”

“’And when you look long into any abyss, the abyss also looks into you.’ I know the quote. What’s your point?”

“I don’t need any policy to keep me from destroying that other vessel. Not that its crew deserves any mercy – Not by any stretch of the imagination. But if it is in my power to extend it, they will certainly receive it. What nettles me is that you would think me capable of doing otherwise.”

Admiral Jan Rosenstrum of Starfleet Command believes authoritarian power structures are necessary to keep people from acting on their instinctual evil natures. Captain Picard doesn’t need rules to tell him to be good and virtuous because he is inherently a good and virtuous person. What elevates this above generic Hobbesian social contract thought is what it reveals about the lingering self-doubt lying at the heart of Starfleet and its officers: After all, why would they feel the need to self-consciously quote rules, regulations and procedure at one another if they didn’t, at least at some level, distrust themselves? In spite of its utopian rhetoric, when you get right down to it Starfleet simply does not have enough faith and confidence in its own people and its own ideals to trust them to do the right thing. So, when confronted with people like Captain Picard and the Enterprise crew, people who truly are trying to better themselves and live up to their own standards, they react with a mix of trepidation and fear. Projecting their own insecurities onto those they’ve written the very mark of their ideals onto (by virtue of serving on the flagship), they’re quick to judge, dismiss and condemn an effigy of themselves rather than own up and come to terms with the unsustainable corruption and xenophobic power fantasies that makes up the foundation of their philosophy.

Echoes of this reverberate throughout the rest of the story. Back on the bridge, the Bogus Enterprise is starting to catch onto Commander Riker’s tactical style, just as it was able to predict Captain Picard’s before.…

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Well, obviously it had to be, right?

The question was never really whether or not there was someone going around besmirching the good name of the Enterprise, but who exactly was doing the impersonating and why. We still don’t know that yet, there’s one more issue yet to go. But we do get to meet our adversary, and it’s a bit unsettling how dead-on their recreation truly is. Before any of that though, the story opens on a genuinely disturbing scene of yet more brutal carnage. Our foe has beat us to Alpha Sarpeidon and murdered another starship, this time the USS Merrimac. And no punches are pulled this time, with the whole gruesome aftermath laid out for us in a lurid full-page spread right when you open the book, complete with lifeless bodies floating in space.

The crew, accompanied by Admiral Rosenstrum, retreat to the observation lounge to discuss their options and come up with a way to track down the killer before it strikes again. This is going to prove difficult, as there’s been no obvious pattern in its behaviour to date and Geordi can’t pick up a traceable ion trail. Data eventually posits a theory that, if true, will allow the Enterprise to hunt down its evil doppelganger. He suggests that the ship is following the Enterprise‘s exact flight path from a specific mission several years ago (which also explains why it was in Ferengi space: When the Enterprise initially visited that sector of space, it was under Federation jurisdiction, but the boundary between Federation- and Ferengi-occupied territory has shifted since then). Should this pattern hold, the Bogus Enterprise (and yes, this is actually what they call it for the remainder of the story. Prophets, I love the 1980s) should next be headed for a defenseless colony on Beta Tarsus IV. Captain Picard immediately orders Wesley to proceed there at maximum warp to intercept.

We might expect that once we reach part three of a story of this magnitude, the plot would start to tread water a bit. We had a first issue laying some subtle hints about what’s to come, a second issue of rising tension and we know the big climax is coming next month. By all accounts, this should be a filler issue as we kill time before the big showdown, and perhaps a lesser creative team would have done that. But not Michael Jan Friedman and Pablo Marcos: The majority of the plot-related stuff is taken care of at the very beginning and very end of the story (and there’s even a brief but requisite shootout with the Bogus Enterprise in the issue’s final third to keep us hooked), leaving the bulk of the story to be taken up with character moments. One thing that Michael Jan Friedman is quickly proving himself to be a master hand at is vignettes where people just sit around and talk to each other.…

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In the past, I’ve expressed my disdain for courtroom dramas (in fact, the last time Star Trek: The Next Generation did a major story of this type, no less). I think they’re a cheap way to artificially introduce drama while at the same time potentially dangerously misleading people when it comes to actual legal jurisprudence. Media has power because so much of what we perceive about how the world works is gleaned from it, and it is thus media’s responsibility to be accurate should to choose to be realistic (whether it should choose to or not in the first place is another discussion entirely). Deliberately faulty and inaccurate legal information for the sake of conflict is but one way media can do harm and add to the world’s darkness-A comparatively small one in the grand scheme of things, but a no less noteworthy one.

So thankfully, even though “The Noise of Justice” is split almost entirely between a hearing room and a holding cell, this isn’t actually the kind of story it is. Captain Picard and the rest of the Enterprise crew are obviously innocent, and, more to the point, we know they’re going to be cleared pretty quickly: There’s two more issues in this story arc and it would be absolutely tortuous for Michael Jan Friedman and Pablo Marcos to drag a courtroom plot out that long in a comic book. The central hook of this issue comes firstly from speculating about what might be going on and if someone is out to destroy the careers and reputations of the Enterprise crew for some reason as we move away from the diversionary plot last month to the main meat of the miniseries, although we figure that’s all going to get cleared up in the coming issues as well. Secondly however, it comes from watching the crew do battle with Starfleet Command over the allegations levelled against them. And it’s altogether fitting that the chief prosecutor is our old nemesis Phillipa Louvois as “The Noise of Justice” is a compelling rebuttal of “The Measure of a Man”.

As is standard for Friedman by now, each character (save the Cushers: While Wesley is thankfully absent, we can assume Beverly is still recuperating from her ordeal last time) is afforded a spotlight scene, and he’s once more nailed their voices. In this story, these spotlights manifest by giving each character time on the witness stand to face down Louvois’ relentless assault of legalese and leading questions. Were this a television episode, we’d call it a bottle show as it largely takes place on one set, which is a praiseworthy dedication to good storytelling sense as we might expect the comic book to be flashier, more colourful and feature far more explosions and fisticuffs. Instead, the bigger “effects budget” goes into things like the look of Starbase 104, which is pleasingly futuristic and abstract-looking, and flashback sequences for Captain Picard that reveal bits of his history as he examines his life choices as he faces the risk of losing everything he’s lived for.…

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One of the big appeals of the comic line back in the day was that because it was a monthly series that ran year ’round, this meant you could get a regular stream of new Star Trek stories even when the show was on summer hiatus. And I’d be willing to be that in Summer, 1990, in the gap between “The Best of Both Worlds” and “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II”, the comic line filled a very desperate demand indeed.

Perhaps that’s the reason why the Summer Event miniseries came about. It’s odd to talk about such a thing at first, considering pretty much every story in this line belongs to some kind of multipart serial: That’s the entire nature of the medium we’re dealing with, after all. During the summer months, however, DC would go all-out with a particularly extensive serial that sometimes lasted well into the fall, oftentimes far more heavily hyped than any of their usual fare. These miniseries tended to have big, imposing-sounding titles and could even be collected in trade paperbacks after the fact, while few of the books that came out during the other seasons were. Even though Star Trek: The Next Generation was a licensed book, whenever summer rolled around it felt as if DC was treating it like a top tier title that not only deserved to stand alongside its TV namesake, but the rest of DC’s stable as well. So while there’s good stuff in the other months to be sure, including some excellent standalone tales, given the gravity they exert over the line we’re going to be talking primarily about the Annuals and the Summer Event miniseries here.

Given that, the serial that ran during the crucial summer of 1990 is a peculiar one. It didn’t have the hype of some of the later miniseries, and doesn’t even have its own unique title (I’ve chosen to call it Whoever Fights Monsters after the final issue in the story because it quite frankly sounds cooler than the titles of any of the other issues). Even so, it’s definitely a milestone for the book because even though it doesn’t upsell itself to the extent some of its successors will, it marks the moment where Michael Jan Friedman and Pablo Marcos’ take on Star Trek: The Next Generation finally and definitively arrives in full. They weren’t around for the first volume, of course (well, at least Friedman wasn’t) and while the second volume has had some nice bits here and there, it hasn’t yet quite had its first real knockout story that can be called a bona fide classic from its actual creative team: The big highlight so far in my view, if you’ll recall, is John de Lancie’s “The Gift” that ran in the 1990 Annual.

But even now, this arc is shaping up to be the one that does it for Friedman and Marcos. “The Pay Off!” pulls no punches out of the gate delivering blow after blow: Captain Picard receives an eyes-only from a furious Admiral Rosenstrum (who amusingly looks a bit like a raging Gene Roddenberry), demanding to know if he’s planning on starting a war with the Ferengi.…

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