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“Second Chances” is perfect Star Trek: The Next Generation.

…Oh no, not the goofy episode from next season where the transporter retroactively cloned Commander Riker on his previous post that fucks up Will’s relationship with Deanna Troi and Mae Jemison is the best part of it. That’s ridiculous. I’m talking about this comic book that’s the fourth part of Separation Anxiety.

You know it’s going to be a good story, or at least noteworthy, when it opens with a “chief medical officer’s log”. And this one doesn’t disappoint, with a lengthy portion of its runtime dedicated to just letting us watch Beverly Crusher be awesome leading an away team mission. Any Beverly Crusher, Science Officer fan will be spoiled by scene after scene in this book of her being unflappably competent, whip-smart and quippy. And continuing a thread introduced in The Return of Okona, Bev is also portrayed as having a manifestly different style of leadership than Commander Riker, though still compelling in its own right: She’s far more involved in the nitty-gritty of the technical research, not issuing orders to her team but managing, delegating and actively working with them to help gather as much information as they can. Seeing how effortlessly and perfectly she slides into this role here only makes you wish all the harder that this had been her role on the TV show much, much more often than it really was.

But we barely have time to appreciate that before we’re treated to a scene so defining it could have come from “The Wounded”. Which, incidentally, is what it’s positioned as a sequel to. Miles O’Brien and Terry Oliver are investigating a computer room the away team discovered on the planet they beamed down to last issue. Doctor Crusher has learned there aren’t any sentient life-forms still around who could help, but figures the computer banks are probably still intact and could yield some clues. Terry expresses concern that time is of the essence as the Sztazzan no doubt know of their whereabouts and will probably send a team of their own down. What follows is an exchange between her and Chief O’Brien so priceless and air-pumping I had to repeat it in its entirety here.

“After all, it won’t take long for those Sztazzan filth to find our coordinates and beam down after us!” 

“’Filth’, eh?” 

“You’d call them that too, if they’d murdered your friends the way they murdered mine!” 

“I see. Funny…You sound the way I did not so long ago. Except it wasn’t the Sztazzan I had a hate for – It was the Cardassians! I’d witnessed the kind of slaughter they’re inclined towards – First hand!” 

“Then you know how I feel!” 

“Sure – But that doesn’t mean I approve of it! Not so long ago, we had some Cardassians on the Enterprise – Making some wild charges about my old captain.

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Picking up where we left off last month, this issue opens with Captain Picard and Ro Laren trying to figure out where the hell the saucer section went. It obviously wasn’t destroyed, but somehow it’s been picked up and moved somewhere without any indication of how it was moved or where it ended up. One thing they can be reasonably certain of is that it likely *wasn’t* the Sztazzan, as one of their ships has apparently gone missing too. Thankfully the battle bridge crew soon receives word from Geordi, Worf and Data, and it turns out they may have found a clue as to what happened.

They figure the artificial moon is actually some kind of large-scale relay transporter device meant to move entire ships across huge distances instantaneously. Reasoning it must have been triggered by the energy discharge from the Sztazzan’s weaponry, they think they might be able to tease out how to make it work on command and bring the saucer section and the other Sztazzan ship back if they had some time. Unfortunately time is not something our heroes have in abundance, as the Sztazzan are a bit rattled and trigger happy about what happened, and, to make matters worse, there is naturally an energy buildup inside the moon that will cause the whole thing to go up in flames if Geordi and Data can’t shut it off. Meanwhile, at the other end of the galaxy, the saucer section crew has come to the same conclusion and have problems of their own. They too are dogged by a Sztazzan ship with an equally itchy trigger finger, and don’t have the benefit of a nearby relay station to work with. What they do have is a seemingly uninhabited planet, presumably one the builders of the moon intended to send people to, so Commander Riker sends an away team down to see if there are any clues still to be found on its surface.

One thing that’s immediately somewhat of a concern with the way this serial is shaping up is that it’s already bearing a worrying number of similarities with The Star Lost. Once again, we have a huge portion of the crew flung across the galaxy by unknown forces, giving us two discrete teams each with their own unique dynamics. It’s not that Separation Anxiety is doing this poorly or is coming across as a pale imitation of The Star Lost so much as we’ve seen a lot of this before already and it simply can’t be as effective the second time around. However it must be said this serial gives a significantly different weight to certain thematic aspects such that it still feels relatively fresh: In The Star Lost, for example, the Enterprise was eventually forced to give up on the Albert Einstein and leave its crew for dead. The story thus became one about loss, grieving and moving on. Here though there’s never any indication this situation is anything other than temporary-The whole crux of the motivation for everyone involved is reunification.…

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With the Sztazzan demanding they leave the area based on territorial claims that are questionable at best and Geordi, Worf and Data stranded on the artificial moon due to its alloys blocking communication signals (and the distinct possibility it is in fact no moon at all, but a superweapon), the Enterprise is faced with a difficult set of options. Captain Picard eventually decides to separate the saucer, with Commander Riker taking the saucer section to safety while he stays behind with a skeleton crew on the battle bridge to deal with whatever the Sztazzan decide to throw at them. Joining him in playing the waiting game are Ro Laren, Deanna Troi and relief officers Solis, Burke and Thorne. Commander Riker will take Doctor Crusher, Jenna D’Sora, conn officer Dooley and Terry Oliver with him along with the civilians to Beta Cangelosi.

It’s nice to see the battle bridge again. It’s also nice to see Deanna Troi on it instead of twiddling her thumbs off screen in the saucer section with the civilians and “non-essential personnel”. Not that I should be surprised by this of course, as Michael Jan Friedman is the single best author ever to write for Deanna Troi, and her expertise with extraterrestrial cultures would obviously be needed during what amounts to a diplomatic incident (also, I should hasten to add, it’s not like Friedman would be so incompetent as to completely ignore the action on the saucer section, especially as he has one of his narrative prime movers aboard it). I dig Pablo Marcos’ rendition of the battle bridge: It strikes me as a cross between the set we saw in “Encounter at Farpoint” (and that we haven’t seen since as it’s been scrapped and repurposed so many times it’s by this point in various states of disrepair) and the main bridge redress from “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, which I find to be appropriate.

(I also quite like Captain Picard’s little aside observation in his internal monologue that “it’s been a long time” since they last separated the saucer because it’s an intricate and complicated maneouvre that requires an annoying amount of preparation; a nice meta nod to how laughably impractical saucer separation has always been from both a narrative and material TV production reality perspective.)

Story-wise this issue is a bit of a holding-pattern one, serving mostly to present the key saucer separation scene itself and recap the miniseries’ major story arcs. It’s handled fairly elegantly, though, with Worf and Geordi bringing their respective subplots up with each other as conversation to pass the time. By interesting contrast, Laren exposits not to a friend, but directly to us through an internal monologue. This is noteworthy because while Captain Picard isn’t the only character in the series to have the internal monologue as his explicit signature, he is the one who uses it the most frequently, typically as an extension of his captain’s log entries. As a result, on rare occasions you could slip into the mistaken assumption that he might be Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s narrator.…

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Saucer separation. It’s always been kind of a weird concept, if you think about it. Presumably the Enterprise is a capable enough craft on its own such that it could defend itself without the cumbersome process of politely asking the bad guys if they would be so kind as to hold their fire for a minute whilst the ship does the splits, yes? Andy Probert didn’t even design the Galaxy-class to separate: He had to chop the ship up after the fact when word got to him late that Gene Roddenberry wanted the saucer to come off, because that was apparently something he always wanted the ship to do in the Original Series. And of course, it was prohibitively expensive for the VFX team to shoot a saucer separation scene every week, so that particular plot thread got promptly dropped (probably in hindsight wisely) after the first season.

But what if you did a story overtly about a saucer separation? One that uses the technobabble gimmick of the show not as a plot device, but as an actual level of textual metaphor? A story where the Enterprise is quite literally divided in half, with families and communities kept apart from each other by a vast expanse, with a symbolic reunification at the end?

This is essentially the backdrop for the event miniseries I call Separation Anxiety, spanning issues 39-44 of DC’s version of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Between the Enterprise returning Captain Okona to his ship and now, we’ve had a few smaller serials one-off adventures, none of them especially noteworthy. Q came back in a rather embarrassing trilogy about turning the crew into Klingons, and the comic book line has tried to redeem a few more one-shot characters from the TV series-Sonya Gomez and Ardra, namely. While those were more or less functional tales that once again demonstrate the spin-off series’ better mastery of its source material than the actual source material, and generally cleaning up the various messes it occasionally makes of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s world, they’re above par for this line’s truest pinnacles and I can’t really recommend them to a casual fan (though the Adra miniseries boasts what has got to be the most terrific title in the entire book line: “Shore Leave in Shanzibar!”).

As for Separation Anxiety itself, it’s actually not a typical summer event miniseries mainly because it starts in October 1992, which means we’re well into the TV show’s sixth season speaking strictly chronologically. However, I read it as a far more fitting coda to the stories and themes of the fifth season, and the summer event series for 1993 is likewise a perfect fit for where the show will have just recently left off. So there’s really no better time to look at this story than here, and in Star Trek’s two-year 25th Anniversary year, such temporal chicanery seems more than appropriate. The separation itself doesn’t happen in this opening issue, but it is effectively and ominously foreshadowed.…

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This run of issues is an interesting one, as to my knowledge it’s the only example of a story arc being interrupted midway through. While issue 28 “The Remembered One” picks up the Return of Okona storyline from issues 25-7, the next issue “Honor Bound!”, has absolutely nothing to do with it. It also sucks and introduces a raft of difficult-to-ignore-even-for-me continuity errors, so we’re not talking about it (perhaps not coincidentally, it’s also not written by Michael Jan Friedman). Issues 30 and 31, however (“The Rift!” and “Kingdom of the Damned”, respectively), do continue this story arc and bring it to a fitting conclusion.

“The Remembered One” continues the subplot about Worf dealing with being a widower and absentee father introduced in the first half of this series. It’s the anniversary of K’Heleyr’s death and Worf isn’t handling it especially well. Discussing the matter in ten forward with Guinan, Worf reveals that the source of his anxiety is the fact that he misses K’Heleyr and feels guilty about doing so, because she died a warrior’s death, and thus an honourable one, and he should be happy for her instead. Of course, I’m not entirely certain how true that is since in “Reunion” K’Heleyr was actually murdered by Duras and I don’t think Klingons consider murder honourable as it’s not fair and equitable one-on-one combat. But I’m going to let that slide as anything that retcons even a little bit of “Reunion” out of existence is more than OK in my book. In this timeline of events, we’ll say K’Heleyr died a warrior’s death in honourable combat with Duras.

(In fact, with everything this story arc has been doing over the past few months, it may have just come up with a version of the Worf/K’Heleyr/Alexander story that actually *works*.)

What Guinan was going to remind Worf of, before she was interrupted by a pulsar exploding and freezing the crew’s life energies in a state of suspended animation, was that he was still raised human and thus could still react to things with human emotions. So when an energy being feeds on the life force of the Enterprise crew to assume the visage of K’Heyler to learn about love and loss from Worf (individual members of her species, which live in the pulsar, are born, grow and die in only one day, but their experiences live on through a race memory), he’s able to react to her in true Enterprise fashion by calling upon both the human and Klingon sides of his positionality. In particular, he’s able to show the new K’Heleyr how her predecessor valued loyalty and sacrifice to others and would have been appalled at what she’s doing now, consigning the Enterprise to burn up in the pulsar because the crew are rendered incapable of making the necessary course corrections.

This issue is also noteworthy for marking the comic book debut of Ro Laren: She’s not much more than an extra here, but it’s not her story after all and everyone else who’s not Worf sits out two-thirds of this issue too.…

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It’s perhaps inevitable that at some point spin-off media will begin to revisit one-shot characters and plotlines from their parent series. I don’t personally consider this to be necessarily bad or fanwanky: A lot of times it makes good storytelling sense to return to those concepts, so long as it’s not done simply because it can. You could argue that this is in fact the point of media like this, to go back to things the parent series abandoned and examine it in more detail, and while I think there are a lot of other reasons spin-off media is good, that’s certainly one of them.

The title of this story arc is a bit misleading, as while it does indeed mark the return of Captain Thaddeus Okona it’s actually about a great deal more than that. The Return of Okona immediately follows on from The Star Lost, and expands greatly on its predecessor’s approach to character building: This miniseries marks the first time Michael Jan Friedman begins to seriously double down on the number and intricacy of parallel subplots for DC’s Star Trek: The Next Generation-From here on out each issue or set of issues is going to explore at least one important story for every one of the main characters and several reoccurring characters to boot. It gives the comic line a very novelesque sense of pacing and scale and makes the world of Star Trek: The Next Generation feel far more vast and expansive as a result.

In fact, it’s so lengthy, gets so intricate and I’ve got enough to say about it (and I’ve got a whole other summer event miniseries, plus assorted one-shots and two and three parters I want to look at for this summer hiatus) that I’m breaking protocol a bit for the comics: Instead of doing a post for each issue, I’m covering the first three stories, “Wayward Son”, “Strangers in Strange Lands!” and “City Life”, in one extended essay and calling it “The Return of Okona Volume 1”. I’ll do the back three (“The Remembered One”, “The Rift!” and “Kingdom of the Damned”) a post from now, with the expected entry in-between. I’m not technically sure all six issues are considered part of the same story arc as the major plot is different between the two sets of books, but Captain Okona features prominently in both of them so I’m considering them all part of the same story for category purposes. If I didn’t, I’d basically end up reviewing the entire comic line issue by issue and quite frankly nobody wants to see that.

Right now the important thing is that The Return of Okona is every bit as elegant and meticulously crafted as anything else Michael Jan Friedman has done. You wouldn’t think so given how Captain Okona is a bit of a broad-strokes character, not the sort you’d expect to divine a lot of nuance out of, but Friedman manages it: His care and attention to not just narrative structures, but the symbolic context, meaning and associations of said structures, enables him to craft a compelling and provocative story about the kind of character Okona is and the role he plays in the world of Star Trek: The Next Generation.…

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How well do we really know Commander William Riker?

Conventional fan wisdom certainly seems to think it knows him pretty well. He’s the dashing rogue, the adventurous away team leader, the Casanova space age sex tourist. He’s Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s version of Captain Kirk, and he does all the things we loved seeing Captain Kirk do in the Original Series. Though if this is the reading afforded to him by conventional fandom it must be a relatively recent one: Round about the time Enterprise and the final Next Generation movies were being made, Riker was seen as one half of a double act with Deanna Troi and calling them anything other than lovers fated by destiny to be together forever was unthinkable. And when I was growing up with Star Trek, Riker was joked about and dismissed as the pointless guy who skulks around the bridge barking “Shields up, Red Alert!” once an episode.

None of these, I would submit, manage to adequately convey who Will Riker really is. Obviously Will isn’t useless, so I’m not even going to address that one. The Kirk stuff…Just isn’t true. Not even remotely. yeah, there was probably a little bit of that very early on in the show when the lineage to Will Decker and Star Trek Phase II was the clearest (maybe in episodes like “Justice” and “Angel One”), but any trace of that was gone by mid-season. The only episode I can clearly think of where this is explicitly a theme is “Up the Long Ladder”. Maybe some hints of it in later stories like “The Vengeance Factor” and “First Contact” if you want to argue them that way, but “First Contact” at least strikes me as pretty clearly a subversion of the Captain McGoldenPants trope. As for his relationship with Deanna…I’ll actually come back to that a little later on.

“Thin Ice”, DC’s Star Trek: The Next Generation Annual for 1991 (not to mention the final reprint in 1994’s The Best of Star Trek: The Next Generation), is a very Riker centric story. It is, actually, precisely the sort of thing that we would call a “Riker Story” were this a TV show episode and what we might imagine Michael Piller’s team would be highly supportive of. But the TV creative team has had a very tough time getting a grasp on precisely who its characters are and it’s just now starting to figure this out: On a good day, we might get something like “Sins of the Father” and “Redemption” for Worf or “Data’s Day” for Data, but we’re just as likely to get “The Loss” or absolutely anything involving Geordi La Forge on an off day. Also, the TV team thinks “Remember Me” and “Night Terrors” are rubbish and praises “Final Mission” to high heaven, so that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Michael Jan Friedman, by contrast, has always had a far more reliably comfortable grasp on his characters.…

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It’s not an epic conclusion to The Star Lost, nor is it an unexpected one. The ship works. Wesley figures out how to pilot it. Worf and Darios bring everyone home, even the “hostiles”. There’s a heartfelt reunion, and the family is “once again whole”. There is, you could argue, a teeny bit of playing for time and space as the ship travels so fast the crew ends up in Klingon territory, unable to communicate their intent and with their engines about to overload. Of course, the Enterprise happens to be the nearest Federation starship and is called in to investigate at the request of the Klingon High Command. But this is a serial, and serials end up getting stretched. It’s fine. It works.

But as we’ve been learning over the past few months, it’s not the plot itself, epic or otherwise, that’s what’s important here. In fact, The Star Lost seems to tacitly play against our assumption that it is-“Homecoming” opens up with the destruction of Lanatos by comet impact. Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher console the Lanatosian governor, who’s still sore about their decision to bring along the Skriiti instead of the Lanatosian monuments. Beverly says that “Planets are balls of mud – things. They can be replaced. When a person is gone, he’s gone forever”. And it’s here I might start to disagree a little bit with the story’s broad-strokes ethics. I get the sentiment Friedman is trying to go for, but from an animist perspective that’s simply an indefensible argument. Land, and “land” can come in many different forms, has life energy and we are all bound to it in some way. You could argue the book tries to hedge against this with the governor’s rebuttal, but he’s a racist and not at all sympathetic.

It’s not a huge issue and I’m surely nitpicking, but it’s not something my perspective allows me to let slide.

That aside, what’s interesting to me is that in any given TV episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, that scene on the bridge with Jean-Luc, Beverly and the Lanatosian governor would have been the *conclusion* to the story; the denouement. Here though, it’s just the lead-in and the meat of “Homecoming” is still to come (of course it is, as the Lanatosian stuff is and always has been a secondary story thread). That says something about not just the scope of the story we’ve been watching unfold for the past few months, but also where its heart is. One thing I really love about this issue from this point is where it places its little cliffhanger beats: As soon as the Lanatosian mess is resolved, Deanna Troi politely reminds Captain Picard to promote Data and Burke, the relief tactical officer who has been covering for Worf since the disappearance of the Albert Einstein. He’s interrupted when he tries to do this by the reveal of the plot twist with the Klingons and this is addressed at several points during the story.…

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This section of The Star Lost really does feel like it’s from another story. In fact, when I first rediscovered this miniseries, it thought it was another story: Stumbling upon the cover for this issue while browsing through the archives of DC’s Star Trek: The Next Generation immediately caught my interest and I picked it up out of curiosity, only to find it was actually Part 4 of The Star Lost.

In any other context, “Deanna Troi uncovers the mystery of a culture of mer-people and its thinly veiled institutionalized power structures of oppression and discrimination” would be grounds enough for a science fiction story unto itself-Indeed, even the Animated Series did an episode that was broad-strokes similar. But while that episode took its central sci-fi conceit (ocean planet inhabited by civilization of mer-people) and went no further than that, here it’s a subset of the far larger and grander tale we’ve been seeing unfold for the past few months. What this does is touch on a central divide in attitudes about how science fiction ought to be approached and once again shows how Star Trek: The Next Generation, particularly this Star Trek: The Next Generation, is transmuting the genre into something more holistic and universal.

The mere fact that one of this very series’ own predecessors took a similar conceit and expected it to carry an entire story is a revealing demonstration of just how much science fiction has changed in only the past 10-15 years or so. “The Ambergris Element” figured all it had to do was present a neat sci-fi concept (“Hey look! Ocean planet with mer-people!”) and its job was basically done. Now, the fact “The Ambergris Element” was also a spectacularly incoherent piece of shit penned by the single worst writer ever to job for Star Trek is actually beside the point here: What I want to focus in on here is the assumption that the most important thing was the central speculative idea and that everything else was just window dressing and irrelevant details. This is a very traditional (read Hard SF) way of going about doing science fiction, and that simply isn’t going to fly anymore for a lot of very good reasons. You can’t get away with this these days, and quite frankly, you shouldn’t be able to.

That’s not to say we have to abandon the speculative and the fantastic; this is still science fiction after all and there’s no point in doing science fiction if you’re not going to engage with that on some level. But what we’re learning now is that the speculative has to be treated as a manifestation of the themes, energies and emotions of the larger work, not the be-all and end-all unto itself. We’re getting right back to what was so terrific about “The Lesson” (or indeed Dirty Pair, or any other hallmark of Long 1980s storytelling), where abstract images and concepts are used to highlight new dimensions of stories instead of obfuscating them.…

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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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