Star Trek: Boldly Go #9 - IDW Publishing

STAR TREK: BOLDLY GO No. 9, June 2017

If Mike Johnson and Ryan Parrott’s goal with their one-shot storyline for Issue Nine of “Star Trek: Boldly Go” was to turn the Vulcan race into a dislikeably arrogant people, who are as judgemental and condescendingly conceited as they are frustratingly logical, then this twenty-page periodical’s narrative definitely works on every level. For whilst the character of Sarek, marvellously rendered by “series-regular artist” Tony Shasteen to replicate the facial features of actor Ben Cross, comes across as a well-meaning, pleasantly-mannered member of the relocated race, the likes of Uhura’s fellow Vulcan teacher and Spock’s drill rig companion smack of inter-galactic hubris and personal unpleasantness which would rival that of the Klingon House of Duras.

Indeed, for some reason, the collaborative writing partnership seem to actually go out of their way to make the stoically cultured aliens appear disconcertingly disagreeable, and even pen one not only nastily suggesting that Nyota is not an “adequate mate” for the Ambassador’s son because she is a worthless ‘incompetent’ human with “volatile emotions”. But then venomously implying that it is simply not logical “for any Vulcan to choose a mate who is not Vulcan” because such senseless selfishness would threaten the survival of their species.

Just how the Starfleet Lieutenant stops herself from punching the poisonous educationalist, or her partner’s egotistical colleague, is doubtless a testament to Uhura’s patient Federation training. Yet surely, even that wouldn’t prevent the Communications Officer from having a sharp word to say in retaliation towards the pointy-eared extra-terrestrials; especially when they derogatively refer to her as Spock’s “human friend” and suggest she “is in need of medical attention” when she is literally stood right beside them saving their new planet… 

Sadly, all this obnoxiousness doesn’t help the publication’s scandalously poor storyline either, which seems far too nonsensically contrived to even be read worthy. Presumptuous and lackadaisical, the tale never even attempts to explain just why the “geothermal anomaly” at “the Voroth Massif near the Southern Pole” was not detected by the Vulcan’s “initial planetary scans prior to colonization”, nor how the new radioactive isotope’s ability will help make them “self-sufficient.” And let’s not even mention the ludicrously lazy conclusion when New Vulcan is apparently spared a cataclysmic fate by the ghosts of its centaur-like “native inhabitants”; “Spock’s best hypothesis is that they are psychic echoes of the last survivors.”

The regular cover art of "STAR TREK: BOLDLY GO" No. 9 by George Caltsoudas