Star Trek: Waypoint #1 - IDW Publishing

STAR TREK: WAYPOINT No. 1, September 2016

Announced by “IDW Publishing” as a “blockbuster bi-monthly anthology to celebrate fifty years of Star Trek” and supposedly “featuring short stories across all Treks by the top talent of today and yesterday”, Issue One of “Star Trek: Waypoint” must surely have come as something of a major disappointment to its 6,554 audience, on account of the comic’s inconsistent artwork and tediously dull writing. In fact, considering just how anaemically actionless the mini-series’ opening instalment is, it's hard to believe Group Editor Sarah Gaydos genuinely felt that these two tales were “a place to stop and reflect on what’s come before, and look ahead to the next fifty years of Trek.”

Set both after the television series, as well as the crew’s excursions upon the silver Screen, it is certainly difficult to imagine that the quality of Donny Cates’ narrative for the “The Next Generation” story “Puzzles” would safely assure the science fiction franchise’s future for another half-century. For her twenty-page tripe unconvincingly places Captain Geordi La Forge in command of an unnamed Federation starship whose bridge is exclusively populated by numerous holograms of Doctor Noonian Soong's Data; a somewhat surreal situation supposedly due to the androids’s physical form deteriorating over time, rather than being blown up at the conclusion of the 2002 film “Nemesis”. Such an unconvincing development, which largely follows events depicted within "Pocket Books" novels, undoubtedly must have irked those readers with a casual understanding of official canon. Yet probably not as much as the storyline's conclusion which depicts the Enterprise's former Chief Engineer being reprimanded by an uncharacteristically callous Admiral Jean-Luc Picard for simply taking a very human course of action and saving “two hundred time-displaced Starfleet” engineers. Little wonder the one-time blind helmsman questions his superior officer as to “what would you have done” in the same circumstances.

Equally as lack-lustre is Sandra Lanz’s ‘Original Series’ short “Daylily” involving Lieutenant Uhura becoming incomprehensibly separated from “the rest of the landing party” “on a strange planet” and subsequently encountering “a bizarre alien creature.” Admittedly the writer/artist’s colourful illustrations are infinitely better than the rough-looking scratchings Mack Chater pencilled for this title’s lead story. But even her ability to capture a wonderful likeness of actress Nichelle Nichols is not enough to save a script which tediously portrays the lonely communications officer teaching an amphibian-looking extra-terrestrial how to weave planet leaves before being simply beamed back up to her ship; "Wait right here! We'll come back for --"

The regular cover art of "STAR TREK: WAYPOINT" No. 1 by Marc Laming