Villordsutch reviews Star Trek: The Last Starship #2…
Star Trek: The Last Starship #1 was exactly what we needed. We Star Trek fans love Trek when it’s brilliant, and we hate Trek when somebody in a writers’ room seems determined to ruin it. It’s fair to say that a lot of modern Trek left a number of threads flapping wildly in the breeze, and The Last Starship from Colin Kelly (Star Trek: Year Five) and Jackson Lanzing (Batman: The Brave and the Bold) looked ready to grab those loose ends and finally pull them together.
With the USS Omega now serving as both the Federation’s and Starfleet’s last hope of survival after the catastrophic Burn wiped out trillions and pushed the remnants of galactic civilisation to the edge of ruin, Captain Sato has made a deal with the Starfleet devil. He’s allied with the Jurati-led Borg to retrofit the Omega with technology salvaged from this once-mighty foe. Transwarp engines are only the start; the Borg also bring a resurrected relic from Starfleet’s golden age: one James T. Kirk. But before the mission can even begin, old enemies crawl out of the woodwork, desperate to tear out the throat of an already limping Starfleet.
What is going on? What exactly is going on here!? Last month, I was waxing lyrical about how Star Trek: The Last Starship was gathering all the dangling threads leftover from NuTrek — including Picard and Discovery — and looked ready to tie them off with a smart, great-looking bow. However, having finished Issue #2, it feels like the “smarts” have completely left the room.
I don’t know if it’s the Trek nerd in my mind — who am I kidding, it’s absolutely the Trek nerd in my mind — but the lore twists in this comic are making my teeth itch. Whether it’s undoing Kirk’s evolution from Klingon-hating firebrand to one of the two captains who risked everything to secure peace between their peoples… only here to throw all that out, so he can go back to hating Klingons again. Or Captain Sato — the pious, lofty commander of the Omega — smugly telling Kirk he was brought back because he’s “a man of war,” lecturing him about the eleven thousand deaths on his hands, while he has, “None!”. Somehow forgetting the USS Sagan he lost during the Burn… along with the basics of universal causation. Sorry to drop existential dread on you, Sato, but once you were flying at warp, then A-to-B happened, and someone, somewhere, died because of it.
And speaking of the Burn (I know I’m on a roll here, but you can tell I’m irked) its consequences suddenly make no sense. Dilithium-powered warp travel is gone. Trillions are dead. The USS Omega literally cannot move without Borg technology. Yet an armada of old-school, violence-first Klingons manage to warp in and launch a full-blown assault on the Omega. Again I ask: what is going on?
If these were Romulan singularity-powered ships, I could maybe swallow it, but Starfleet is now relying on one of its greatest enemies just to get a single ship moving and meanwhile a horde of Klingons appear out of nowhere with fully functional warp drives? It’s a stretch worthy of Mr. Fantastic.
Nothing here is grabbing me. I’m once again not gelling with the crew. I feel zero affinity for them, and when two appear to bite the bullet, my reaction is basically, “…and you are?” Issue #2 has me genuinely worried for the rest of the series. The only saving grace is the art and colours from Adrián Bonilla and Heather Moore, delivering a gorgeous wash of shadow, mood, and encroaching despair.
Let’s hope issue #2 is simply an action-packed hiccup — a quick detour to introduce an early antagonist — before we move on to something more substantial. I want Star Trek: The Last Starship to be amazing. I don’t want my inner Star Trek nerd to start spotting giant holes in a comic that was meant to fill the holes left by the last batch of writers.
Rating: 6/10
@Villordsutch
