Out of options, Commander Riker turns to the last one he has: Ask the pursuing Sztazzan ship if they would extend their shields, and thus their warp bubble, around the saucer section to get them both to the second relay station, which will hopefully bring them back to where they started from. The Sztazzan are predictably boisterous and recalcitrant, but Will reminds them that its his people who have the coordinates to the station, and he’s likely to erase them should the Sztazzan try to invade the saucer.

Alexander is depressed and wants nothing except to be reunited with his father. Similarly Worf thinks only about getting his son back, to the point he puts it above his mission and the rest of his crewmates. It seems at first a perhaps shallow form of characterization, but it builds upon the turmoil both characters have been through over the past few stories. Alexander has already lost one parent and now faces the prospect of being completely orphaned, while Worf lost not only K’Heleyr as well, but almost lost his closest friend in Commander Riker in The Return of Okona. Mott comes to visit Alexander in his quarters and offers a suggestion. He’s come up with a tactical plan he thinks might help the crew, and asks if Alexander would like to come with him to tell Commander Riker about it, so long as he thinks it’s a good plan (Alexander of course being a superior tactician). Mott’s idea is to…Ask the pursuing Sztazzan ship if they would extend their shields, and thus their warp bubble, around the saucer section to get them both to the second relay station, which will hopefully bring them back to where they started from.

We cut to a scene on the Sztazzan ship, where we at last get to see a little more of their own cultures and beliefs. As Miles O’Brien guessed last month, the Sztazzan see humans as dangerous and untrustworthy with no set of morals or code of honour (a perhaps not unjustified assumption given what we’ve seen of how humans organise themselves in the 24th century at large). The Sztazzan are all ready to say no to the saucer crew, but one officer pleads the case that perhaps not all humans are as bad as all that, as he had personally witnessed the heroism of one human who went out of her way to rescue an injured Sztazzan when the two away teams had clashed on the planet’s surface earlier. Swayed by the story of Terry Oliver’s act of selflessness, the Sztazzan agree to Commander Riker’s plan, just before Alexander and Mott come to the bridge to tell him about it.

And it couldn’t have come at a better time too, as things aren’t looking so good for Captain Picard, Ro Laren and Deanna Troi back on the battle bridge. Outmanned and outgunned by the Sztazzan fleet and with multiple hull breaches to contend with, they’re about to be forced to abandon the saucer section to its fate and retreat with Geordi, Worf and Data.…

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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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