Star Trek: Year Five #3 - IDW Publishing

STAR TREK: YEAR FIVE No. 3, June 2019

Supposedly scripted by a "writer's room" consisting of Brandon Easton, Jody Houser, Jim McCann, Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing, it must have amazed many of this title’s 8,749 readers that just a couple of instalments in to this new ongoing series’ narrative, one of its authors was already going to have to substantially pillage from an early televised episode for their ideas. True, the highly successful box office returns for producer Robert Sallin’s movie “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” showed just how popular a story could be when based upon a previous tale from Gene Roddenberry’s original "Wagon Train to the stars.” But this particular twenty-page periodical’s plot is a far cry from both the 1982 “Paramount Pictures” film, and “IDW Publishing” editor Chase W. Marotz’s extraordinary claim of it being an “incredible sequel to the TOS episode “A Piece Of The Action!”

For starters the contrived nature of the U.S.S. Enterprise even returning to the Sigma Iotia system is bewildering, with Brandon Easton arguably failing to convince anyone that the Constitution-class starship just happened to drop “out of warp to initiate diagnostics on the nacelles” one hundred light years “beyond the edge of Federation territory” and blind fate inadvertently picked the Chicago mob-inspired planet for it to orbit around..? To make matters worse though, the Eisner Comic Industry Award nominee would then have his audience believe that having spent months learning of “the events of Earth after 1929” from Doctor McCoy’s previously abandoned communicator, the Iotian civilisation would rapidly evolve into a thermonuclear reactor-powered space-faring society within a couple of years; “The structural design is comparable to early Twenty First Century Earth aeronautical technology mixed with Late Twenty Second Century propulsion elements.”

Disagreeably, the Baltimore-born writer even seemingly struggles to be able to pen a believable secondary plot on board the Enterprise, and resultantly portrays an angry Lieutenant Nyota Uhura having to stand toe-to-toe, phaser pointedly drawn, with the anti-alien Ensign Satie simply to try and encourage the 'red shirt' to follow her orders. Debatably such an ill-disciplined incident would never occur under “actin’ Captain" Montgomery Scott’s command without an antagonistic outside influence manipulating events, and yet Easton would have any perusing bibliophile believe an entire Starfleet security detail would mutinously arm themselves against their superior officer simply because one of them illogically believes the communications specialist is preposterously “harbouring a hostile enemy agent!”

Writer: Brandon Easton, Artist: Martin Coccolo, and Colorist: Fran Gamboa