Villordsutch reviews Star Trek: Waypoint #4…
First, an ENTERPRISE story by Vivek Tiwary and Artist TK. Captain Archer’s pet beagle Porthos takes center stage in a Temporal Cold War tale that sees the beloved pooch traveling back in time in order to save a young Jonathan’s life. Then, a NEXT GENERATION story by Scott Bryan Wilson involving double trouble – quite literally – for an away team when they explore a strange new planet!
SEE ALSO: Check out the preview of Star Trek: Waypoint #4 here
Star Trek: Waypoint is a fantastic idea! Get together several writers from different ilks, pluck out of the Trek timeline different commanding officers and top this off with the work of numerous artists and colourists from across the board. What’s not to love!?
The series started off rather splendid with Daylily from Sandra Linz and then we had the excellent The Menace of the Mechanitrons from Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore along with art from Gordon Purcell and Jason Lewis; each of these two opening comics also held other rather corking stories within its covers too. Then we came to the issue #3 effort with Star Trek: Voyager – “The Wildman Maneuver” – starring Naomi Wildman – and it nosed dived, and now here in Issue#4 it’s not getting up quick enough from that rather brutal blow.
Our first tale takes us back to the Enterprise days with The Fragile Beauty of Loyalty, though to be honest a few decades before that as Vivek J. Tiwary has dropped us into the year 2020 and Jonathan Archer is a mere boy (Archer was actually born in 2112 mind you) and is wandering through the snowy hills of New York State, off to explore Nacacijin Gorge. However his jaunt is disturbed by a member of Suliban Cartel who appears – out of nowhere – and unceremoniously boots him under a frozen lake, leaving him to drown in a frozen tomb.
Our second tale it was is unfairly teased at us with the title of, “Mirror, Mirror, Mirror, Mirror“. Here we find Dr. Crusher and Worf inspecting a planet only to discover a strange mirror like object that instantly replicates – down to the atom – whatever is in the object’s field of view. Written by Scott Bryan Wilson this story reads as it sounds, a rather poor Season 7 “Sub Rosa” effort. It takes mere minutes to finish this tale and at the conclusion you feel disappointed.
The only real saving grace in this comic is Zachary Baldus cover, which in truth has nothing at all to do with the contents of the comic, this and Fran Gamboa’s art for The Fragile Beauty of Loyalty. The rest of the comic isn’t good at all. This is disappointing as now we’ve had two Waypoint comics which are below par, so we really need this title to pick itself up and dust itself off before it really gets counted out!
Rating: 5/10
@Villordsutch
Originally published March 8, 2017. Updated November 14, 2019.
