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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