At the beginning of each episode of Star Trek, Captain Kirk informed us that the crew of the starship Enterprise was on a five-year mission to
explore strange new worlds and so on. Unfortunately, he and the rest of the
gang never got to finish their mission on TV because hostile aliens from the
planet NBC aborted it after just three years.
In light of season-three’s high ratio of stinker episodes
like “Spock’s Brain” and “Turnabout Intruder”, Star Trek’s early cancellation may have actually been merciful, though
there were more tales worth telling in that universe, hence the franchise’s
healthy life beyond 1969.
One of the most recent continuations of the Star Trek story returns us to its
origins to complete the Enterprise’s
original mission. Star Trek: Year Five
is a comic series from IDW that began last April, and the groovy thing about
this series is how faithful it is to the original series at its best. Like that
original, Year Five is the work of
multiple writers and multiple directors—or in this case, artists—yet all are
dedicated to recreating the Star Trek
we know and love in terms of storytelling, characterizations, themes, and
visuals. While the art style varies from issue to issue, it never becomes so
stylized that we cannot recognize the faces of Shatner, Nimoy, Nichols, and the
rest. As soon as Bones orders Kirk to drink brandy on the job in “episode” one
(these are episodes, not issues), we are transported right back to the sixties.
Fortunately, that period flavor does not extend to its treatment of Uhura, who
gets a much bigger role throughout these comics than she did in the original
series (Sulu, however, tends to get sidelined).
The tone, storylines, and character voices and faces are so
solid that it does not disrupt the feel at all when Star Trek: Year Five strays from the franchise’s sixties-TV
origins. In fact, the decisions to make these comics both episodic and
serialized—think Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The X-Files—and pull in Carol and David Marcus from The Wrath of Khan or depict the Klingons in
their more alien form from the eighties are welcome. Only the coldly digitized
coloring really breaks the retro-spell.
Episode one, “Odyssey’s End”, by writers/“show runners”
Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly and artist Stephen Thompson gets the balance
best with writing that perfectly captures each character’s unique voice and
likeness and art that looks like it was stenciled right off the TV screen. “Odyssey’s
End” sets up the ongoing story effectively as the crew of the Enterprise
contend with the hostile aliens first seen in the season-three episode “The
Tholian Web” only to take a young Tholian aboard the Enterprise in an attempt
to communicate with it.
Episode two, “Communication Breakdown”, returns Kirk and
Spock to the gangster planet from season two’s “A Piece of the Action” where
the pathologically imitative people of Sigma Iotia II have now developed a
twisted form of democracy in which presidents only hold office for a meager six
weeks (actually, that might be nice to have here on Earth right now). Things
get a bit more complicated when Spock decides to run for president. While
Brandon Easton’s writing continues to nail the character voices and the
original series’ dry humor amidst wacky situations, Martin Coccolo’s art has a
bit of an off-putting, uncanny valley quality with characters never quite
looking each other directly in the eye or sometimes having slightly distorted
facial features.
By far, my favorite artist in this series so far is Jody
Houser, who captures the original actors’ features perfectly in a more
stylized, cartoony fashion for episode three, “The Truth Artifact”. She’s the
one artist who seems to actually have some fun with the medium and not simply
try to convince readers they’re watching a TV show on the printed page. Writer
Silvia Califano does not capture the character’s personalities and voices as thoroughly
as the other writers do, though her story—artifacts pulled from a planet that
seems to have suffered a mass extinction cause the Enterprise crew to start
punching each other in the faces— is the one that most feels like a typical Star Trek episode, particularly because
so much of the action is limited to the Enterprise rather than exotic planets.
Where this will all lead remains to be seen, though there is
an ominous hint at the beginning of episode one. I am very pleased with the Star Trek: Year Five episodes I’ve read
so far though. Those first three episodes are now being collected in a nifty
single paperback package by IDW so you can catch up before the Enterprise’s
five year mission reaches its apparently harrowing conclusion.
