Star Trek: Boldly Go #4 - IDW Publishing

STAR TREK: BOLDLY GO No. 4, January 2017

Whilst Chris Cerasi, “new(ish) editor here at IDW” and “life long Trek fan”, was quite right in his belief that Issue Four of “Star Trek: Boldly Go” brings both Spock and the planet Romulus’ fate “at the mechanized hands of the Borg… to a dramatic conclusion”, it does so in such a disagreeably lackadaisical manner, as to make the villainous Collective appear a rather superficial and impotent adversary. Certainly, it must have irked this franchise's fans that once again, when outclassed and outgunned, the Captain of a Federation starship simply transports “every photon torpedo we have” into the interior of their opponent’s superior vessel in order to ‘save the day’; a plot device which Marc Guggenheim used to great effect in “Star Trek: Captain’s Log: Harriman”.

Perhaps this twenty-page periodical’s biggest disappointment however, is not how easily James T. Kirk bests a Borg sphere, which up until that point had been holding off every spacecraft in the Romulan Star Empire single-handedly. But Mike Johnson’s bizarre assertion that because Mister Spock is half-Human and half-Vulcan, his neural pathways allow him to resist the Hive mind’s microscopic nanoprobes and simply rip out of his body all their cybernetic parts; “Assimilation… unsuccessful.” Considering that the Collective have assimilated both Humans and Vulcans before, it seems rather contrived that a simple “emotional stimulus” from a “combined Vulcan and Human DNA” hybrid would prove “more of an obstacle”, and definitely doesn’t account for how Chief Medical officer Groffus can seemingly readily restore all of the U.S.S. Concord’s heavily ‘Borgified’ former crew...

Almost as infuriatingly annoying is Captain Kirk’s uncharacteristic acceptance to leave his First Officer behind on Romulus in order for Valas ‘to inherit the crimes of her ‘traitorous’ parents’. The Starfleet officer has just saved the Star Empire from assimilation, and rescued “the Romulans captured by the Borg”. Why then would he acquiesce to “a citizen of the Federation” and “one member of my crew” being held in perpetual custody simply because her parents fled the xenophobic interstellar state years before? True, there was probably little that James could do whilst stood within the heart of the Romulan senate house, but surely “the first and only student at Starfleet Academy to defeat the Kobayashi Maru test” wouldn’t just warp back to Federation space without having tried some sort of rescue attempt first?

The regular cover art of "STAR TREK: BOLDLY GO" No. 4 by George Caltsoudas