(courtesy IDW Publishing)
SNAPSHOT
Explore the far future of Star Trek in these adventures set after the U.S.S. Discovery’s jump forward in time at the end of Season Two! Uncover new stories of four fan-favorite characters! First up, Grudge—who is very much a queen and NOT a cat—works tirelessly to keep her interplanetary courier/working human, Cleveland Booker, safe. Next, witness the heart-wrenching history that brought Adira Tal to Discovery and how they were paired with one of the last remaining Trill symbionts. Then, while on a mysterious mission to a frozen world, Lieutenant Commander Detmerencounters the last person she expects to find: herself! And, in the finale, Saurian Lieutenant Linus has never truly fit in with his Starfleet colleagues, but an encounter with an undiscovered species will put all their fates, and the ship’s, in his hands! Longtime Star Trek comics creators Mike Johnson and Angel Hernandez, the team behind Star Trek: Discovery—Succession, Star Trek: Discovery—The Light of Kahless, and Star Trek: Discovery—Aftermath, reunite with Star Trek: Picard co-creator Kirsten Beyer in their fourth comics tie-in to the hit streaming series. (courtesy IDW Publishing)
Giving every character in an ensemble show their moment in the narrative sun can be an almost impossibly task.
It’s tough, especially when you have only have 10 episodes per season to play with, to make sure that not only your main characters get some attention, but that the supporting characters, many of whom are integral to various plots progress, to be, in a certain sci-fi franchise at least, more than “Man on the Bridge” or “Woman sometimes on an Away Team”.
Star Trek: Discovery, which has screened four wonderfully divergent seasons, each anchored by a prevailing narrative that allows them to tell one-off stories against a wider arc, and has a fifth and final one in the offing, handles this challenge better than most but even so, at this late stage, there are still some characters for whom there is more mystery than not.
Or, a the very least, gaping holes in their backstory, that go some way to explaining who they are now and why they act the way they do in certain situations.
And with just ten episodes left to go – goodness knows why this is other than some bean counting that decided Star Trek series can no longer do the traditional seven seasons – it’s highly unlikely we’re going to get a Supporting Characters’ Backstory Deep Dive gobbling any of those precious and highly-limited instalments.
(courtesy IDW Publishing)
Thank goodness that other media are available to accomplish such a task.
In this case, and yet the review has finally reached the subject matter at hand, Star Trek – Discovery – Adventures in the 32nd Century by Mike Johnson, Angel Fernandez and JD Mettler which shines a succinct but beautifully well-told light on four characters who have gained some currency on the show but for whom more needs to be known.
The four characters in question are, in order of their placing in the four-issue series:
Booker’s cat Grudge the cat whose size is attributed to a thyroid condition.
Grudge is all personality and attitude an in issue#1, she proves herself to be a “queen” who saves the day and allows Booker and Michael Burnham to “live long and prospurr!”
Adira Tal (Blu del Barrio), a non-binary (the first in the franchise) human who hosts a trill symbiont. In issue #2 we find out how that happened, why her relationship with her transgender boyfriend Gray (Ian Alexander) matters so much to her and her excitement at being a member of Starfleet.
Keyla Detmer (Emily Coutts) a helm officer on the Bridge crew who sports some arrestingly catchy cranial and occular implants and who in issue #3 movingly gets in touch with her inner child as a way of surviving a current traumatic incident.
Linus (David Benjamin Tomlinson) is a member of Discovery’s crew, a Saurian whose people evolved from dinosaur-analogue creatures on his home planet when a certain asteroid missed them and headed for a certain blue planet we know well. All Saurians have four hearts and it’s this feature that proves instrumental when Linus is the only one left standing after a strange incident fells everyone else.
(courtesy IDW Publishing)
These stories, all fulsomely and richly illustrated in a way that feel televisual, make you feel as if you have been given the gift of four extra episodes so beautifully realised are they.
All of the characters are captured just so – well, the humans anyway; I’m sure Grudge would deem her portrayal not befitting a queen but then she’s a gorgeously lovable prima donna – and with people like Michael Burnham, Dr Culber (Wilson Cruz) and saru (Doug Jones) roped in as supporting characters, it’s one of the best sets of episodes, told outside of the show it’s drawn from, that this reviewer has seen.
While it’s always welcome to have further adventures with characters you love, you don’t always get the sense that the writers or artists really get the people at the heart of their stories or the overall narrative sensibility of the show.
But Johnson and Fernandez nail it in Star Trek – Discovery – Adventures in the 32nd Century, pitch-perfectly summoning up the characters, fitting them seamlessly into plots that could have totally been lifted from the show, and concluding their tales much as you’d expect from a Star Trek episode.
It’s inspired stuff and a joy to read because not only do you get to spend time in the world of Discovery, which is always a good thing, but you do in a way that honours the show and which feel like an organic part of its trailing arc of storytelling while filling in some gaps that only serve to make you love the characters more and to make you glad there are people as talented as Johnson and Fernandez to make it happen.
(courtesy IDW Publishing)