Star Trek: Year Five #20 - IDW Publishing

STAR TREK: YEAR FIVE No. 20, February 2021

For those readers able to struggle through this comic’s horribly contrived opening and settle down to an intriguing nine hundred year-old trip back into the dark past of Vulcan, Brandon Easton’s narrative for Issue Twenty of “Star Trek: Year Five” must surely have pleasantly reminded them of such classic televised tales such as “The City on the Edge of Forever” and “All Our Yesterdays”. For whilst on this occasion it is only the U.S.S. Enterprise’s Science Officer who is suddenly hurled back in time to “a pivotal moment” in his home planet’s history, the twenty-page periodical’s plot is still predominantly focussed upon the inherent dangers of altering a world’s past events, no matter how noble a time-traveller’s intentions may be.

To begin with however, the book debatably gets off to an extremely shaky start as the Baltimore-born writer pens the Tholian Bright Eyes somehow being able to hear “a repeating signal from the surface of Vulcan” which cannot be detected by any Federation sensors. To make matters even more unbelievable though, the crystalline entity is then able to pinpoint the precise location from which the sound is emanating to a mysterious beacon situated just outside the planet’s capital, and subsequently inadvertently activate the unknown device without being sucked back in time himself.

Happily however, once Spock meets his philosophical hero Surak, and deduces that the legendary logician is most definitely not the great man of peace the writings contained within the Kir’shara would suggest, this publication’s ‘pull’ dramatically increases. Indeed, the suggestion that “the father of the modern Vulcan civilization” is perfectly willing to mercilessly mow down his opponents and incarcerate the survivors in violent re-education camps provides both the shocked Starfleet officer and this comic’s audience with an enthralling conundrum; “In this moment, I argued with myself that it is only logical to preserve life. But logic cannot undo the ramifications of my actions. A deep sense of regret fills my consciousness as I realise I may have obliterated the future.”

Likewise, Easton is not shy of adding some space-battle action to the proceedings by having artist Silvia Califano pencil a seriously outnumbered U.S.S. Enterprise facing a large armada of Vulcan/Romulan hybrid starships. Just how Bright Eyes is able to partially protect Captain Kirk and his crew from the ravages of an altered time-line using tachyon particles is probably something best forgotten, but it does lead to an exhilarating chase sequence involving plenty of phaser blasts and the Constitution-class vessel’s colourfully-costumed bridge personnel being thrown all over the place.

Writer: Brandon Eastman, Artist: Silvia Califano, and Colourist: DC Alonso