Welcome back to my blogging my way through DC's first attempt at a Star Trek series. Today let's have a look at the “New Frontiers” storyline that ran from Star Trek #9 through #16 (DEC 1984 through JUL 1985).
Boy have I had trouble getting this one going. Lately I seem to write three or four versions of whatever blog appears before scrapping it all and winging it from scratch. Which is what I opted to do here. I've reached one of those blogging points where I've got five or six things in draft mode and not enough time to finish them. I've three days off coming up, and I'd like to think I'll spend some of that time catching up, but one of those days is potential jury duty (ugh) and another is getting the second of my Wuhan Flu shots. Add in kids and chores and tasks to complete and who knows. It'll likely continue to be a sparse month as far as posts go.
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Here's the story in broad strokes:
(1) The mirror universe - last seen in TOS "Mirror, Mirror" unless there's a Trek tie-in book being obliquely referenced somehow; more on that below - attacks the Trekverse Prime, first blowing up a space station, then capturing the Excelsior and their counterparts (being ferried home from Vulcan to face trial for the vents of Star Trek III) aboard her. (2) Spock-2 is dispatched to Vulcan to wrest from Spock-1's mind the secrets of Genesis.
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| An inter-dimensional Vulcan Ritual of Chud ensues. Spock-1 wins. |
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| Spock-2, again, sees the logic in opposing the Empire and joins forces with Spock-1. |
(3) Kirk-1 and compatriots escape the brig and, while their counterparts fuss over the captured Excelsior, plot to take over the Enterprise. Kirk-1 makes his way to the Captain's quarters and meets once more (sound cue) Marlena.
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| Later, they get even more re-acquainted. |
She is still with Kirk-2 but has joined the underground. Kirk-2 et al. take control of the Enterprise and set most of it to self-destruct -Kirk's go-to move! - and escape in the saucer section. Scotty and Saavik interfaced the Tantalus Field from the former Captain's quarters with the ships' deflector shield and wreak havoc on the Excelsior. Everyone puts on spacesuits and blasts it out. Kirks grapple. Kirk-1 wins, of course.
Starfleet says invasion or no, you've got to come home; Kirk makes one of his "The word? Is no. I am therefore going anyway" decisions and races back to the mirror universe. (4) Meanwhile, Kirk-2 whips up support for a massive inter-dimensional invasion force and is given command of the Empire's new prototype, the, er, Excelsior. Kirk-1 tours the mirror earth and meets the leader of the resistance:
Kirk-1 patches together a coalition of various undergrounds: imprisoned scientists, downtrodden Terrans, and the star empires of the mirror-universe. (Here we learn that a brutal Romulan occupation of Earth created the resistance movement which eventually became the Terran Empire.) He uses the transtator - a gizmo that does the old push-a-button-and-turn-off-the-enemy-fleet trick - and gives the Empire's fleet to David and friends. Everyone returns to their respective homes to face the music.
As for the counterparts, they're put on a warp sled and - after a brief switcheroo with the Saaviks coinciding with the above battle - sent back into their own universe, as well. They're last seen - and apparently killed - by Captain Simons of the ISS Nosura. If that's a reference, I'm missing it. I hope it wasn't one from this very stretch of issues.
(5) The coda: they return in the ISS Excelsior and are arrested again by Captain Styles, who’s learned nothing from his earlier attitude(s). If anything he’s even worse. Now he’s commanding the USS Christopher Pike and basically acts like William Atherton. Which is certainly era-appropriate, as well as following the lead of Star Trek III. His and Admiral Garrett's plan to pin every and any disaster on Kirk's head is thwarted by Lyndra Dean, an investigative reporter on Earth with bellbottoms who – on a tip, we learn, from Kirk himself – popularizes Kirk et al's role in saving the universe.
Starfleet decides to promote everyone to get them out of the way. Kirk gets the captaincy of the Excelsior, and Spock is given command of the USS Surak.
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| The adventure continues. The End. |
Not a bad stretch of issues! I was simultaneously reading Mike W. Barr's Guide to DC's Sci-Fi Universe and kept expecting various alien species from Adam Strange's adventures to pop up. This is, by the by, the last of Barr's story arcs for DC's Trek, though not the last time we'll see him in these pages. But yes, starting next issue the writing and editorial team switches up. Robert Greenberger, former assistant editor, takes over all editing duties.
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| A word on continuity and what's canon. (Still a slippery topic.) |
This is the first of the DC Treks to appear after Star Trek III: TSFS, so it had to align the universe-building of the past eight issues with the events of the film. Which it accomplishes easily enough - the characters created (Konom, Bryce, Bearclaw, Maddox) continue on in supporting roles. (About as much as the secondary cast does, actually, which is too bad for Uhura, Sulu et al.)
There are a few "life on the Enterprise" scenes with Chekov and the others (Sulu's down in the botany lab again!), just not many. Scotty and Saavik develop a friendship as well. Which brings to mind the question: who's "playing" Saavik? Saavik as we all know was replaced by Robin Curtis for Star Trek III; did they alter her likeness here in any way?
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| Tough to tell, really. |
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| Okay, I guess it's Kirstie. |
In a response on the letter's page, Greenberger says the decision was to keep Kirstie and her “more exotic beauty.” I don’t use quotes to disparage the quote, although I know the word “exotic” is loaded in some contexts. Is it with Kirstie Alley and Robin Curtis? I don’t think so. And FWIW I think “exotic beauty” is a good way to describe Kirstie Alley’s Saavik. That’s not to take anything away from Robin Curtis. Hell, plenty of women’s beauty could be described in varying degrees of “exotic” from any norm you wish, sort of like Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method.
We interrupt this story to complain about Blogger; WTF, blogger? I just spent ten minutes trying to get those two Saavik pictures up there to sit side by side. I do this all the time. You put a caption on one pic, you make them both small, you cut one and paste it beside the other. It ABSOLUTELY will not let me do this, despite cutting and pasting every other picture, despite re-formatting this damn thing three times to clear any hanging-enters/whatever. No matter what happens, cutting that picture and then clicking DIRECTLY NEXT TO THE OTHER ONE and pasting it pastes it way up near the top of this post.
Do you know how long I've been trying to get this post finished? Do you know how often I've been interrupted JUST THIS MORNING trying to get this done before work? And then you throw this inexplicable shit at me? Blogger this is for you:
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| "I hope you can hear this because I am doing it as hard as I can." |
Don't want to end on a middle finger, but that's about all I have to say. Here are some leftover screencaps (which, of course,I numbered in order to upload in one particular order, thus making it so I don't have to cut and paste/ arrange anything, uploaded in their own random order below.)
See you next time... maybe!
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| They really emphasize McCoy's borderline psychoticness. |
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| Not every lady has to wear the midriff-exposing uniform, eh? Looking at Maddox on the conn. Thankfully they didn't make Chekov. |
I wanted to mention this in the post but Blogger was aggravating me too much: that "fifteen years" reference in the last panel is pretty wild, isn't it? I remember in the 80s (I was just talking about this a friend in a different context) the 60s sounded like some faraway dreamland, or some Golden Age long gone. The music was clunkier sounding (however cool it was) and the movies/TV were in B+w, etc. It seemed a hell of a lot further than 15 years. Which would be 2006, FFS - that hardly seems the same distance.
ReplyDeleteEither way, some of the TOS cast seemed so ancient by 1991. (Shatner still seems to be hiking and riding horses and hosting and touring and doing everything he ever did, slowed down, sure, but he seems to be an outlier in every field!) There are a lot of time-waring variables to take into account.
You will likely be unsurprised to hear that I think about stuff like this all the freaking time. I concur: from a vantage point of, say, 1985, the sixties really did seem like they'd taken place not only an unimaginable time ago, but almost literally in another world.
DeleteI also concur that to consider the fact that from today's vantage point, that same distance of time is the mid-'00s is a perplexing thought. Doesn't seem even vaguely as long ago as all that!
This is, I think, an instructive feeling. Instructive in several ways: first, that for kids growing up today, the mid-'00s probably *do* seem to be an unimaginably distant past; second, that in some ways it's beginning to seem like that even to me; and, third, that the disconnect is obviously only going to widen and deepen.
May we all use our time at least remotely as well as ol' Bill Shatner has!
I'm torn here. On one hand, from today's vantage point, the same distance to the mid-00s probably seems ancient. Although the mid-00s and 2021 look a lot more similar, fashion and technology and TV-wise, than the mid-60s looked to the 80s. And there seemed to be a lot of 60s nostalgia and songs and new versions of 60s things in the 80s. Whereas in 2021, as it did in the mid-00s, we're still remaking things from the 60s (and 80s).
DeleteIt's a big beautiful sweater to unravel, one thread at a time, isn't it!
I have to admit, the whole idea of the past seeming imaginary is...interesting from one perspective, and kinda dangerous from another (if that makes any sense).
DeleteOn the whole, I tend to argue such perspectives are really more like trick of the light than they are genuine facts. If history appears to have a fantastical quality to it, then I think it stems more from not having accepted it on some level. That, to my mind, can be a mistake. Then again, the past is always something I wind up having to play catch-up with. It's like something that's already happened before I arrived, so I guess for me that just means there's a lot more fascination going on.
Also, for the record, there is nothing "clunky" about Dylan or Hendrix. Just FYI.
ChrisC
Production-quality-wise, of course there's "clunky"ness about analog recordings, even the best ones, like the Beatles, compared to digital fidelity. It doesn't make one superior to the other.
Delete(1) I don't remember the story at all, but I had a copy of this issue back in the day and always loved the cover.
ReplyDelete(2) Not sure I like the implication that the Mirror Spock apparently reneged on the whole going-good thing. I completely understand the urge to ignore things like that so as to prevent it from slowing down a story in development, but at the same time, if you're not going to heed that sort of thing, what are you even doing?
(3) Mirror Kirk is kinda ripped, eh? He might even qualify as Thicc Kirk.
(4) "Here we learn that a brutal Romulan occupation of Earth created the resistance movement which eventually became the Terran Empire." -- Interesting idea, but I can't take it seriously. Unless the idea behind the Mirror Universe is that everyone is literally just born bad, I really just check out.
(5) I've got no idea what the "Nosura" would be referencing, but it's bound to be something.
(6) Big Poppa Bryant has thoughts about the Andorian reporter, boy.
(7) See also Mirror Saavik. Speaking of which, I get the "exotic beauty" thing. In the case of Kirstie Alley's Saavik, I think it's simply a testament to how effectively she inhabited the role. I mean, she was a gorgeous woman at that point in the eighties, but I myself would not say in an exotic manner ... until you put some Vulcan(/Romulan) ears on her and drain all the emotion out of her. Then, absolutely. And she did a terrific job in the role, so much that she really does seem alien in it.
(8) I kind of applaud everyone for deciding to chart their own course independent of the direction the movies were going. I find things like that to be fascinating. I'll take them to task for ignoring existing lore, but they can't be beholden to movies that haven't even been made yet! That's asking too much.
(9) I feel your pain regarding the Blogger issues. I experience them relatively rarely, but when they do occur they drive me insane(r).
(10) A Mooninite! From the incredibly-distant past of the early aughts! Saints preserve us.
(2) It's especially silly because all he does is reneg on it AGAIN after the ritual of Chud with Spock-1. (Who is in reality himself Spock-2, since he's post-Genesis-Spock.) But yeah: a more interesting story (for my money) is for Spock to be leader of the Resistance, or even killed/ imprisoned, in this story. But they wanted to set up David as the resistance leader, I guess. Also to tie into your pt. 4 - mirror universe stories just make no sense.
ReplyDelete(5) I looked through the issues again trying to see if I just missed it - and I must have, really. Or it's a Pocket Book reference. Or maybe Mike Barr's best friend in high school was named Nosura.
(7) Agreed on all points re: Saavik/ Kirstie.
(10) Aqua Teen has been undergoing a revival of sorts at the homestead. We haven't rewatched any, but quotes and references are on the uptake.
(2) There's an irony involved for me when the use of mirror universes in Trek. On the whole, I can't say I've found much dramatic potential in the concept. At the same time, there is Star Trek: Enterprise. It's a show I'm willing to go a lot easier on than other viewers out there. However, the re-visiting of the Mirror-verse in that show just came off as one big nothing to me.
ReplyDeleteI guess it's this experience, more than anything else, that allows me to look at this comic adaptation and say, well, at least it's slightly better than the last time I encountered this particular product. Like was said above, I think all that's needed is a few minor tweaks in order for this story to work. Have Mirror Spock be the resistance leader, with David as second in command, who then ascends to the title role after Alternate Spock goes out in a blaze of glory. The whole thing just has more promise than its official handling in a later Trek series, is my point.
Then again, there is a further irony involved when you consider that pretty much all the contemporary Trek takes place in an alternate universe of its own. That's a theory that may explain some things, pity it doesn't offer any kind of improvement.
(7) If I had to take a guess, then I'd say it's just a natural enough quality that all women have in varying degrees and shades. Perhaps the pre-"Cheers" era Kristie Alley was offered a role that allowed her to bring it out more in full. Nor am I at all certain that "alieness" is a necessary ingredient. I'm pretty sure that a woman can display these qualities all by herself. It is even possible to have an example to point to.
Jeri Ryan is able to accomplish this same feat without having to wear a single ounce of makeup or alien headgear when you stop and think of it. She's a looker, she knows it, she gets a kick out of it, and has always seemed quite content to enjoy that aspect of herself. The interesting thing is how she was able to use those same attributes to fight against a lot of the stereotypes that get lobbed at women with her looks. She seems to be one of the few women actresses who've discovered a way of combining a three-dimensional personality with an obvious enjoyment of sensuality in a way neither concept clashes, and instead are able to compliment each other.
That's got to be a tribute to a genuine talent of some kind, at least. Also, this till goes without saying, yet I still want a Saavik-centric Star Trek TV show now, damn it!
ChrisC
Saavik definitely could carry a show! It's weird they never brought her back, but Trek is weird with stuff like that. Can't use characters someone else created. If anything they'd bring her back as a Vulcan and rename her, like they did with Vorick in VOY (or Tom Paris in VOY for that matter).
Delete