Star Trek: Year Five #9 - IDW Publishing

STAR TREK: YEAR FIVE No. 9, December 2019

Considering that Issue Nine of “Star Trek: Year Five” was ‘penned’ by no less than three different writers, it’s narrative involving Hikaru Sulu’s physical relationship with the fish-faced extra-terrestrial Ayal and the lovers subsequent involvement in the civil war on I’Qos, probably surprised many of this comic’s readers with its well-paced flow. In fact, apart from this twenty-page periodical’s opening scene, which depicts a naked Helmsman enjoying a lengthy, intimate embrace inside his flora-infested quarters, it would be all too easy to imagine so emotional tale of (potentially doomed) love, diplomacy and political betrayal actually being ‘filmed’ as one the American science-fiction television series’ genuine escapades in the Sixties.

Foremost of this story’s successes has to be the subterfuge Mister Spock employs so as to stealthily infiltrate a hostile Lo’kari marketplace in order to protect the undercover I’Qosa speaker. Enveloped in the brackish shrouds of their water-logged hosts, and swift to employ the gracious greetings of the local inhabitants as a disguised Vulcan leads his small party into a popular drinking bar, it is hard not to recall the Bridge Crew’s desperate attempt to penetrate the people of planet Beta III during Boris Sobelman’s aired adventure “The Return Of The Archons” 

Just as in that 1967 transmitted story however, the subsequent eruption of violence which occurs once the off-worlders are discovered throws the well-meant peace-making plans of Starfleet’s finest into complete chaos, and the only real disappointment from the ensuing fracas comes when Ensign Patel Chekov is pencilled by Silvia Califano as a sobbing wreck following Sulu’s hypocritical tirade that it was the naïve Russian’s fault that the Lo’kari Chancellor gets shot with a Federation phaser; “The Lo’Kari were waiting for this, something just like this, and you gave it to them on a platter!”

Indeed, apart from the noticeable lack of ‘screen time’ for Doctor McCoy and a recuperating James T. Kirk, this publication’s only true frustration comes with the creative team’s characterisation of Mister Sulu. Once described by Spock as being “at heart a swashbuckler out of the Eighteenth century", it is hard to recognise the puppy-eyed, love-struck third officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise in this comic, especially when Hikaru conveniently forgets he was actually the one who blew their cover by theatrically spitting out his drink in the tavern before spitefully blaming his shipmate Chekov.

Story by: Jim McCann, and Script by: Jackson Lanzing & Collin Kelly