One of the great pleasures of the first three issues of Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly’s Star Trek: Year Five is the comic series’ faithfulness to Gene Roddenberry’s original TV show. Artists and writers alike rendered characters with perfect fidelity to Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Sulu, Bones, and the rest. The stories could have been adapted to actual episodes of the original TV series due to a simplicity and clarity in line with what could be brought to the small screen in the late sixties.
That simplicity mostly continues with subsequent “episodes” of Star Trek: Year Five with one grand exception. “Episode Five: The Wine-Dark Deep” basically says “to hell with the sixties” and ends up as the richest, riskiest, and most enthralling installment of this comic series. Sulu explores and discovers his sexuality with a beautifully designed, gender-fluid alien from a planet rocked by civil war between progressive under-water dwellers and villainously conservative land-dwellers. Silvia Califano realizes that underwater world with phantasmagoric splendor that could never have been achieved with 1968 technology on a 1968 TV-budget. The tale’s sensitivity, adultness, and open-mindedness push the limits of even the relatively sensitive, adult, and open-minded original Star Trek series.
While the other two tales collected in IDW’s latest Year Five collection, Star Trek: Year Five: The Wine-Dark Deep, are not as transcendent as its title story, both develop on the comic’s first few issues nicely as Uhura continues to commune with an increasingly communicative renegade Tholian and Kirk contends with a far less agreeable Gary Seven and Isis, whom you may recall from the TV series’ season-two finale, “Assignment: Earth”. Art is fine, though the unexplained shifts among three different artists in “Episode Seven: The Mission Who Walks Like a Man” are odd, and the absence of Jody Houser, whose stylized art for “Episode Three” was the highlight of the Star Trek: Year Five: Odyssey’s End collection, is missed.
