Star Trek: Year Five #4 - IDW Publishing

STAR TREK: YEAR FIVE No. 4, July 2019

Apparently motivated, at least according to co-showrunner Jackson Lanzing, by “a beautiful Mondo poster for the second season episode A Piece of the Action” that was hanging in the “super-secret Star Trek archives”, it is extremely doubtful that many of this particular twenty-page periodical's readers would agree with “IDW Publishing” that Brandon Easton’s script for it managed to “sequelize” the January 1968 televised adventure “in a smart way.” In fact, it’s highly improbable that the comic’s audience would even acknowledge that the “Transformers scribe” succeeded in penning a “humanistic backstory” to the estranged relationship between James Kirk, Carol Marcus, and their infant son David, considering that the starship captain’s supposedly “deep and personal” difficulties aren’t even mentioned in this actual publication..?

Instead, the Baltimore-born educator outwardly provides a horrifically over-wordy depiction of Spock “running for the presidency [of Sigma Iotia II] under the banner of Jojo Krako’s Astro-Liberation Party” and demonstrates an uncanny ability to basically bludgeon any unsuspecting bibliophiles into mute submission with some of the most dialogue-packed word bubbles debatably yet seen within a comic book; “As elected leaders squabble over an endless array of foolhardy proposals, countless resources earmarked for planetary development are squandered while southern continent citizens go without basic necessities…”

True, once the niceties of President Jamek’s fledgling democratic civilisation are contrivingly cast aside so as to allow Kirk, Spock and McCoy to assault a heavily-armed government installation theatrically named Omega Base, Easton’s narrative finally contains a remarkable amount of pulse-pounding action. But this blatant disregard for the Prime Directive, which has Martin Coccolo poorly pencilling the U.S.S. Enterprise’s senior officers pummelling the rocket installation’s security guards, makes little actual sense when it becomes clear that the Constitution-class vessel’s captain won’t actually agree to the projectile mowing down the Iotian Air Force threatening it post-launch. 

The Disney-ABC Writing Program recipient’s sub-plot concerning Ensign Satie and his attempted revenge upon the Tholians for the disappearance of his sister “aboard the Defiant” similarly suffers from such nonsensical narration, with Scotty discovering that the red-shirted conspirators had supposedly caused an unstable dilithium chamber by altering their “phaser’s power settings to emit a low-level pulse…” This gibberish tactic would apparently “rattle” the starship’s crystals “when refracted off another crystal structure”, both causing the engines to explode and triggering the Chief Engineer to supposedly kill his Tholian ward in cold blood.

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