Star Trek: Year Five #10 - IDW Publishing

STAR TREK: YEAR FIVE No. 10, January 2020

If Jim McCann’s aim for his narrative to Issue Ten of “Star Trek: Year Five” was to ‘overnight’ transform the popular character of Hikaru Kato Sulu into a petty-minded and utterly disagreeable shell of his former self, then the “American writer of comic books, theatre and television programs” undoubtedly achieved his goal in spades. For whilst the Nashville-born author’s script also focuses upon a clearly cataclysmic civil war between the sea-dwelling I’Qosa and the land-dwelling Lo’Kari, it is the U.S.S. Enterprise’s helmsman who arguably comes across as this twenty-one page periodical’s main villain of the piece.

To start with the Lieutenant simply won’t stop verbally abusing poor Ensign Chekov for pulling out a phaser, when Pavel was desperately trying to protect him from attack during a bar fight. The sheer venom artist Silvia Califano pencils across the Starfleet officer’s face as he illogically blames the Russian for starting “a war that will claim hundreds of thousands of Ayal’s people” is truly disconcerting, and makes Sulu appear as nothing more than an irrational bully; especially when he readily admits to realising that his shipmate only acted as he did because “you were trying to protect me.”

Disagreeably however, Hikaru is not content to simply leave this matter behind once he returns to his duties aboard the Constitution-class starship, and successfully gets Pavel reassigned to Security, simply because “I no longer feel comfortable seated on the bridge next to Ensign Chekov.” Of course, this change in personnel does provide an explanation as to Lieutenant Arex being one of the space-faring vessel's primary navigators during “Star Trek: The Animated Series”, but even so, it’s hard to see Sulu as anything other than a lovesick, selfishly spiteful individual following such behaviour.

Finally, the eventual Captain of the U.S.S. Excelsior is responsible for some seriously blatant insubordination towards Mister Spock, which is seemingly rewarded by the first officer rather than punished, or at least challenged. Having already separated Hikaru and Pavel and made it crystal clear that “Ensign Chekov’s phaser was not the catalyst” to the violence spreading across the planet I’Qos, the Vulcan later just accepts being verbally-abused by a vivid Sulu for being “a cold-hearted bastard” when the green-blooded scientist simply makes it clear that he feels Ayal’s people are equally responsible for the “mass destruction” being caused on the fish-people’s water-world.

Writer: Jim McCann, Artist: Silvia Califano, and Colorist: Sebastian Cheng