Star Trek: Captain's Log: Pike #1 - IDW Publishing

STAR TREK: CAPTAIN'S LOG: PIKE No. 1, September 2010

Pitched after the events on Talos IV, “which were detailed in the classic television two-parter, The Menagerie”, Stuart Moore’s script for “Star Trek: Captain’s Log: Pike” probably proved something of a disappointment to its 6,038 readers in September 2010. For whilst the twenty-two page periodical contains plenty of action-packed excitement, both aboard the Constitution-class starship as well as in outer space, and certainly features plenty of ‘screen time’ for the comic’s titular character, it seems a pity the prose novelist elected to create a new antagonistic extra-terrestrial species for this story rather than continue his narrative’s nostalgic feel by utilising one of the many races previously encountered on the Sixties Television series.

Admittedly, in many respects the Halogians do a stellar job of providing the U.S.S Enterprise and her crew with some formidably powerful opposition. Their “suspicious” spacecraft design, which initially “matches no know configuration” within Mister Spock’s records, definitely gives the Federation vessel a run for its money in the firepower stakes, and some “twelve years later” causes almost catastrophic damage to Captain Colt’s Class J Ship due to its “radiation beam... generating intense heat.” Likewise, the tendril-covered crustacean-looking beings are clearly capable of posing a considerable threat when encountered at close quarters as their phaser-fight with Pike, Yeoman Colt, and Ensign Stevens, which is dynamically-pencilled by J.K. Woodward, attests; “Wonderful. Two more deaths… For no reason whatsoever. Maybe someday…”

But surely of all the Rim Worlds “not currently Federation-affiliated” the American freelance editor could have selected one that was a little less arguably clichéd and much more familiar to his audience, such as the Tholians, the Gorn, the Andorians, the Klingons, the Romulans, or even a ship of political refugees from the planet Chero? Perhaps then, Moore wouldn’t have had to invent such a contrived case of jeopardy in this publication’s second act, where the Halogians have somehow managed to penetrate Earth’s Solar System undetected and are about to ignite Jupiter’s core, having discovered the “giant ball of gas” is actually a failed sun twinned to our own “G-type main-sequence star.”

Somewhat less perplexing, though similarly frustrating, is this comic’s lack of Number One and Spock. Both bridge officers prominently appear in the tale’s opening moments, yet are then conspicuous by their absence throughout the remaining tome as Captain Pike suddenly selects to take J. Mia Colt with him on a boarding party instead of the half-Vulcan, and the entire book’s script unexpectedly shifts to arguably focus more upon the “pert and shapely” Yeoman from Operations Division, and her sky-rocketing career to becoming a Starfleet Captain…

‘First published on the "Dawn of Comics" website.'

Writer: Stuart Moore, Art and Colours: J.K. Woodward, and Letters: Robbie Robbins