Star Trek: Year Five #6 - IDW Publishing

STAR TREK: YEAR FIVE No. 6, September 2019

Firmly focusing upon Nyota Uhura’s character throughout much of this twenty-page periodical’s plot, Jody Houser’s script for Issue Six of “Star Trek: Year Five” certainly gives the communications officer something infinitely meatier to do than the Lieutenant simply open hailing frequencies. But whilst watching the specialist “in linguistics, cryptography, and philology” arguably save the U.S.S. Enterprise’s crew from constantly being “at each other’s throats" by giving Kirk, Spock and McCoy an intriguing lesson in mind reading is entertaining enough. It also probably struck the vast majority of this comic’s disconcerted readers that the Constitution Class starship’s predicament involving the mysterious Truth Artefact had therefore been resolved with half the publication yet to read…

Debatably in order to pad out these remaining pages, the “critically-acclaimed” writer therefore manufacturers a freak confrontation between this book’s bridge crew and a small Kingon warship which presumably was meant to represent a mid-Twenty Second Century Bird-of-Prey; “We’re being hailed by a Klingon ship, Sir. We have no idea what kind of weapons… We’re going to die before we ever get back to Earth, aren’t we?” This ‘chance in a million’ encounter as Kirk warps back to Hesperides I badly jars with the rest of the story-telling, and in itself makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, considering that the evidently war-like Captain U’Jahl simply allows the “snivelling weaklings” to go about their business in peace despite clearly believing he has every right to rid “the presence of Federation scum” from the sector.

Equally as incongruous as this impotent clash between the Klingon Empire and Starfleet are some of Silvia Califano’s questionable design choices. The Italian artist’s decision to pencil U’Jahl commanding such an odd-looking vessel, as opposed to the infinitely more recognisable D-7 battle cruiser, must have perplexed many a perusing bibliophile who had momentarily lost themselves in the nostalgia of this publication’s narrative; especially when the spacecraft rather troubling appears somewhat Romulan in its aesthetic. However, that miscalculation is significantly less impactive than the illustrator’s depiction of the Bird-of-Prey’s crew as Klingons who have not succumbed to their races augment virus, and resultantly show no sign of the smooth foreheads which made their frequent appearances during the science fiction Television franchise’s original Sixties series so endearingly unique.

Writer: Jody Houser, Artist: Silvia Califano, and Colorist: Thomas Deer