DC TNG Volume 2

Life goes on after loss.

Captain Picard says as much as he sets the stage:

“We have barely had a chance to mourn the deaths of our comrades before we find ourselves in the throes of another mission: This time, to aid in the evacuation of the Federation member-planet Lanatos, which is headed for a collision with a rogue comet. The Lanatosian, a water-breathing people, are of course space faring– but their capacity to remove their entire race in the time still left to them.”

It’s this middle section of The Star Lost, this issue and the next one, that I remember the least. The imagery of the first two issues is embedded within me so deeply I can’t separate myself from it, and I distinctly remember how this story ends from a recent re-read of it I did on my own personal time. But the events of this pair of issues are a bit of a fog for me…well, more so than the rest of The Star Lost at any rate. There was a planet of mer-people I think…but they were up to no good. And there was Deanna Troi leading an away team mission in a diving suit…and she shares some telepathic link with a culture of friendly sea serpents.

But that, as it turns out, is all concerns for next time. Although we do indeed get to see Deanna beaming down in Starfleet Scuba to poke around a bit, this issue is largely about setting that up. In the process of relocating the Lanatosians, Deanna expresses concern to Captain Picard that she thinks they’re hiding something important from them (especially as they seem oddly more concerned with moving a bunch of ancient statues than their own people). Jean-Luc has her go down to the planet and investigate, but requests she refrain from referring to herself as ship’s counselor. Instead, she should refer to herself as Lieutenant Commander Deann Troi, head of the away team overseeing the relocation process. As the Captain says, “Hardly a lie, though we don’t usually refer to you that way”. Before she goes, she gently reminds him that he needs to fill Worf and Commander Riker’s positions on the duty roster.

Lest you think they are gone and forgotten, the crew of the Albert Einstein are in an interesting predicament of their own at the other end of the galaxy. As the shuttle approaches the starship construct, it gets snared in a tractor beam and dragged towards the structure. But just as the crew is trying to deal with that, a second tractor beam shoots out from the other end of the construct and tries to pull it in the opposite direction. There’s a tug-of-war match between the two tractor beams for a bit before the second one ultimately wins out. This turns out to be a good thing, as the starship construct is soon revealed to be a colony of refugees from the alpha quadrant whose ships, like the Albert Einstein, were sucked into a time-space anomaly and deposited here and is firmly divided along pro- and anti-Federation lines.…

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Captain Picard stands at a podium in the middle of a large sunlit grassy meadow. He’s addressing a gathering of the crew, seated in fold-out lawn chairs. There are empty seats.

Jean-Luc is introducing the official eulogy for the missing crewmembers. His hand has been forced, as despite searching all hours for days, the Enterprise can find no trace of the vanished shuttlecraft Albert Einstein, and Starfleet can’t justify postponing its mission indefinitely to look for it. Such services are intended to serve as a formality to remember the departed and to help the survivors work through and accept their guilt. But the Enterprise crew doesn’t need that. Beverly Crusher, whom we might expect to be the most affected by this, puts it succinctly: “If he’s dead, he died helping others. Isn’t that the best way?”. And if it hadn’t been Wesley, than it would have been someone else, and Jean-Luc still would have had to deliver the awful news. And yet even so, she still sheds a tear. Deanna Troi, ever refined and composed, has a feeling the crew’s comrades are still alive, and she can sense that Jean-Luc does too. But she concurs that there’s no basis to continue a formal search, so she goes ahead with the preparations.

Condolences are broadcast across known space. Kyle Riker laments losing his son so soon after reconnecting with him. After her new captain breaks her the news, Doctor Katherine Pulaski returns to her patients, but says she’s going to need a lot of time to herself afterward. Selar’s parents cope in their own way. And on Betazed, Lwaxana Troi is absolutely devastated. Even though her own daughter was not on the shuttle, she feels the loss as strongly as if it were that of her own children. The Enterprise has left its mark on her.

Captain Picard, Deanna Troi and Geordi La Forge deliver the eulogies. Jean-Luc for Will Riker, Deanna for Worf and Geordi for Wesley Crusher. This is at once entirely unexpected for one more familiar with the TV series, or at least the received historical reading of the TV series, yet it also feels eminently natural and right. Deanna speaks of Worf’s pride in his ship and the his family aboard it, a pride that turned into a very powerful love. Geordi shares a memory of Wesley, and he retells it in the manner of one recalling an especially vivid dream. Jean-Luc Picard’s speech to his crew begins to reflect the conflicted feelings of his inner monologue he shares only with the audience, slowly becoming one. He wonders how much he really knew the people they have gathered to remember, especially Will, even though he sat next to him every day. He fears he was always too busy for them and that he never got the chance to tell them how proud he was of them and how much he liked them.

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I’m no comics scholar. I’ve said as much in the past, so those who are way more knowledgeable about the subject are free to correct me, but I personally don’t recall trade paperback reprints of current monthly comics to be that big of a thing in the Long 1980s. There were more traditional graphic novels and omnibuses that collected rare and out of print issues, but to my knowledge it wasn’t so common to see compilation editions for lines that were still in circulation. From my admittedly limited experience, that didn’t start to become a standard part of the industry until sometime around the dawn of the 2000s.

Having said that, in 1993, with three years of life still left in the line, DC’s Star Trek: The Next Generation started to release trade paperbacks. There were of course things like that Best Of… collection we’ve been talking at length about, but the real curiosity amongst these trades was one of the earliest: The Star Lost, collecting issues 20-24 of the monthly series, five books that comprised what amounted to Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s summer event miniseries for 1991. No other story arc had been collected and reprinted before The Star Lost; this was the one miniseries about which DC’s editors said “You know what? This three year old run of issues is good enough that it deserves to be seen again” and put it on bookstore shelves to stand right alongside more “proper” science fiction novels.

And it is, and it does. Believe me, it really does. 

The Star Lost is imprinted on me like any regular episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, probably more so, in fact. I owned this trade paperback, possibly one of the first Star Trek books I ever got, and if I stretch my perception back I can almost remember pouring over it over and over again with nervous trepidation in a dark corner of my bedroom, which is the only way to properly approach a story like this at that age. For years The Star Lost was a story that truly haunted me: I long, long ago lost my copy of the book to who knows where who knows when, and in the decades that followed my memory of this part of my history with Star Trek: The Next Generation faded away. Nobody archived or preserved the licensed comics, and none of the official literature ever addressed them. The Master Narrative of history all but effaced this story to me to the point I would almost feel like I had imagined it.

And yet The Star Lost was a story whose images refused to leave me no matter how much time would pass-An offhand recollection of some crewmembers stranded in a shuttlecraft somewhere in deep space, or of Captain Picard giving a solemn oration in a sunlit green meadow, or of Jerome K.…

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“The Lesson” is a story that could never have been made on the TV series. This is highly unusual to say, because, with the exception of a particularly lavish holodeck environment, the entire story takes place on the Enterprise and there’s not a single “effects shot” apart from the exterior view of the ship in the first panel. Normally, one would expect the comic book to tell stories that were too complex or expensive to film, but this is an extraordinarily intimate and low-stakes story the existence of which reveals some odd truths about how curiously inverted the roles of the two main series have become by now.

“The Lesson” is also perfect Star Trek: The Next Generation, standing shoulder to shoulder with “The Wounded” as something utterly and incomparably definitive.

It’s not so much a story as it is an interlocking series of vignettes all centred around the concept of learning and growth. Beverly confesses to Deanna that it’s her birthday today and she’s depressed not because anybody forgot, but because she thinks shes getting older and feels past her prime. Commander Riker is giving a guest lecture to the Enterprise school about the American Revolution and how it could have been prevented (a subject he did his master’s thesis on) and caution’s Wesley (who’s still aboard at this point in time and attending the school) that he won’t let personal feelings get in the way in an academic environment. Worf reads a letter from Jeremy Aster, who confides in him his uncertainty about pursuing his crush because there’s another boy who he thinks he doesn’t stand a chance against. Geordi and Miles O’Brien are sitting in ten forward talking about unique celebrities from around the galaxy who live outrageous lives they’d like to emulate, and they rope Data in to get a third perspective.

As a present to Beverly, Deanna prescribes her a “special” unorthodox treatment on the holodeck where they traverse a rugged and breathtakingly beautiful amalgam alien landscape as they hike through dense forests, cross waterfalls and scale mountains. Though she complains all the way, at the top Beverly is taken aback by the view and remembers that age is just a state of mind. Wesley catches Will in a factual slip-up and corrects him in front of the class, which embarrasses him, but Will thanks him afterwards saying that if he wasn’t going to give Wes any special treatment, he shouldn’t have expected any in return and confesses he should have prepared better. Meanwhile, as he observes Geordi and Miles’ conversation and, after he’s prompted for his opinion on which celebrity he’d most like to be, Data says he wouldn’t like to be anyone other than who he is and wouldn’t want to live anywhere apart from the Enterprise.

It is deeply, deeply ironic that this story exists here in May 1991, directly contemporaneous with garbage like “The Host” and “In Theory”. For all the writing staff may whine about wanting to do smaller, more intimate stories that just focus on the drama and the characters without having to worry about the allegedly extraneous and superficial science fiction elements, the show itself is *extremely* reticent about doing an episode that doesn’t have an action story as at least a B-plot.…

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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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One of the things Star Trek is often praised for going forward is how involved it would get its actors in the creative process. Now admittedly we haven’t seen a ton of that so far, especially where Marina Siritis, Denise Crosby and Gates McFadden have been concerned, but this is beginning to change. Shari Goodhartz recalls specifically consulting Brent Spiner during the production of “The Most Toys” to get his input on how Data should behave, there’s Patrick Stewart’s somewhat infamous alleged meddling in “Captain’s Holiday” and Jonathan Frakes is, of course, now one of the show’s regular top tier directors. Even Denise Crosby was invited to pitch the basic concept of “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, and she’ll be the guiding figure spearheading all her return appearances from now on. Yet Crosby’s is not the marquee name on any of her stories: One thing the cast member’s *haven’t* gotten to do yet is pen their own script themselves.

Until now.

“The Gift” is DC’s first Star Trek: The Next Generation Annual, a special extended length issue published once a year every year for the duration of the book’s run. I always looked forward to these Annual issues for a number of reasons: Firstly, they were always event stories, but not in the contemporary parlance of big, overblown, often incredibly lurid and brutal bits of crossover fanwank. No, for Star Trek: The Next Generation the Annual (and, subsequently the summer event miniseries) is the comic line’s chance to do its “Yesterday’s Enterprise” or “Transfigurations”: That one sublime story that everything sort of builds towards, standing out as the iconic moment of the year. The other reason I tended to look forward to the Annuals is because I never subscribed to any of these books; I bought my comics and magazines at the grocery store (yes kids, once upon a time you could do that) and since the racks were re-stocked just infrequently enough these tended to be the issues you’d see on the shelves most often.

“The Gift” is also none other than John de Lancie’s authorial debut on Star Trek, and naturally, it’s a landmark Q story. In fact, it’s the very best Q story since “Q Who”, if not “Encounter at Farpoint”. It’s a story of unprecedented depth and sophistication from the hand of someone who plainly knows his character better than the staff writers on the TV show do. This is the second story to be included in The Best of Star Trek: The Next Generation and it absolutely deserves it: “The Gift” is a potent mixture and anticipation of “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, “Family”, “Tapestry” and “All Good Things…” and comes damn close to outdoing each and every one of them. It’s a story that’s actually incredibly difficult to explain, so focused is it on dream imagery, hallucinations, memory and alternate timelines. It’s the story that singlehandedly catapults DC’s Star Trek: The Next Generation into the big leagues, conclusively demonstrating that not only is it more then capable of playing on its parent TV show’s level, it can pick up its slack and, if it’s not careful, actually outclass it.…

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Given Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s steadily climbing ratings and popularity, it was only natural that DC would bring the series back to the world of comics for a second volume and greenlight a monthly tie-in comic to go along with its television counterpart. In much the same way then that “Encounter at Farpoint” was the pilot for the series prior, it could be said that DC’s 1987 miniseries was a pilot for this book line. And indeed, DC’s Star Trek: The Next Generation would go on to be so successful it actually outlasted the show it was based on, running well into 1996. It probably could’ve run indefinitely had Paramount not pulled DC’s license in lieu of its ill-advised mid-90s “Paramount Comics” partnership with Marvel.

And furthermore, this series comprises an absolutely *massive* chunk of my personal history with Star Trek: The Next Generation, so there’s simply no way I couldn’t cover it, or indeed no way I could not have it be the dominant form of spin-off media this project explores.

This being comics, one thing that differentiates four-colour Star Trek: The Next Generation from fuzzy VHS Star Trek: The Next Generation, even at this stage, is an overt focus on serialization. While the stories tend to have the same scope of an average TV episode (though there are exceptions), they also tend to be spaced much further apart, sometimes running for months at a time. The two stories we’re looking at today, “Serafin’s Survivors” and its conclusion “Shadows in the Garden”, actually comprise issues 5 and 6 of the monthly series: The line proper began back in the second season and did a few stories set in that period that began to lay the groundwork for what it would become later on, but I chose to start with the third season material because, much as is the case on TV, this era sees the show in a time of transition, slowly evolving into the form it will be most remembered for.

One of the biggest transitions this series makes from the first volume is the addition of Michael Jan Friedman as head writer, who goes on to not unimpressively pen pretty much every single Star Trek: The Next Generation thing DC puts out. He comes in with volume 2 so this isn’t his debut, but it’s his positionality and approach to conceptualizing these characters and this setting that will define a lot of what we’re going to say about this book. We’ll get into that, but first I want to open by saying “Serafin’s Survivors”/“Shadows in the Garden” isn’t actually a personal favourite of mine from Friedman’s run: It’s got a few nice bits here and there, but it isn’t anything amazingly special, is more than a little rocky in some places and not batting at the level I know this series is capable of when it’s going at full tilt.…

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