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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