“ The Last Starship “takes up two of the greatest missed opportunities for” Modern “Star Trek

When IDW announced its last Star Trek comic, The last vesselA large part of the accent was placed on the fact that the series would resuscitate, in one way or another, Captain James T. Kirk for a story taking place in the chronology of the 31st century introduced in Star Trek: Discovery. Now the series is there; The premise is much more than nostalgia for the original Hiking captain but rather a fascinating way of exploring not one but two different major intrigues have developed in contemporary Star TrekStreaming age – Make that Star Trek largely abandoned on television.

The first issue of The last vessel– Written by Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly, with the art of Adrian Bonilla and Heather Moore, and lettering by Clayton Cowles – takes place in the first of these two missed occasions: the immediate hatching of “The Burn” at the beginning of the 31st century. Cataclysmic destabilization, on the scale of the Galaxy of Dilithium (and with it, the almost instantaneous violation of each active chain core) formed a major background element through DiscoveryThe third season after the titular ship was killed in its distant future and in the middle of the 32nd century, in a galaxy which had already struck with the new status quo of a strongly reduced federation and a limited FTL interstellar trip.

But while DiscoveryThe third season has largely formed by solving the problem of the burn and its mysterious origin (and allowed the ship to cancel the FTL travel problems overall with its own alternative systems based on spores), setting The last vessel In the direct consequences of the burn itself gives the series a fascinating sense of drama. The first is the fact that, whatever happens, we know overall that the Starfleet crisis will not be resolved, because it is DiscoveryThe work of a century after all this takes place, without a dramatic or two time jump.

The other is that we have an incredible chance to see the Starfleet officers deprive themselves in real time with the loss of Star Trek The status quo which existed for millennia and what this loss can even do to its best and most brilliant. Last starship Do not give us a stagnant federation in the moments before it is deposited, but which was absolutely ascending: the problem opens with USS Sagan In the pursuit of a Great ship, but not for no regular problem, but because the crew of the ship has the possibility of convincing the Gorn to reach the Federation as the last Exceptional known species in the galaxy. Even if we know that everything is about to go to hell for Captain Delacourt Sato and his crew, for the shortest moments, Star TrekThe Federation is at the dawn of a complete utopian company, the ultimate achievement of the objectives that the franchise as a whole wants to defend for almost 60 years, an idea of Star Trek Without an external conflict, the series has rarely considered before.

Of course, things do not last: at the exact moment Sagan Reached this moment of diplomacy of the watersheds, the burn occurs. THE SaganAlongside the Starfleet’s main fleet and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of ships, Starfleet or otherwise, through the galaxy, explodes. Sato and three of his crew of bridges are among the few Starfleet staff still alive and become key personalities from the federation’s response to an almost complete broken from the galactic civilization in an instant. Contrary to DiscoveryThere is no flash forward at a modified status status but still largely similar. There is no one here who is used to it; There are not yet the flourishing pockets of society or isolationist worlds that we see through the series, pending hope of unity in the federation which will ultimately be provided by the Discovery Crew mission.

All in The last vessel is raw and in the moment, and enough to pose the most idealistic of the surviving members of Starfleet low. And not only can we sit with this horror, but but The last vesselThe first issue is almost luxurious, Bonilla and Moore’s art bent in thick and summary lines and highly inked shadows. Last starship It looks almost like a horror comic as much as Star Trek One, but fear is existential: horror is in the collapse of a society that has been given in almost all the works of Star Trek never done.

This is what people are suddenly ready to do in this kind of horrible situation that leads to Last starshipthe other twist and his other riff on a missed Star Trek opportunity. While the remains of the Starfleet command come together on Earth to navigate what comes then for the galaxy, they are interrupted by the arrival of a familiar emissary: ​​a masked and cybernetic figure, vrilles swirling around them, which ultimately reveals their name, their face and their identity … Star Trek: PicardIn Agnes Jurati, the ambassador of his own Borg cooperative, not seen for almost a thousand years, again ready to work with the federation as it had been at the beginning.

One of the largest and the strangest disappointments about the transition of PicardyThe second season in his third was how wasted the potential was in his sudden step Next generation Meeting (even if it was, finally, a fairly good meeting). Balsy’s imagination of a whole new faction of Borg not only willing to be at peace with the federation, but even potentially joining it was the kind of daring thought that Star Trek had not considered for years – not since Tng He himself had transformed the klingons of antagonists to the allies. But the show never did anything with: Jurati was just an original Picardy character among several who never appeared in season three, which brought together the Tng The crew to face the borg threat that we already knew and that we had seen many times before.

The role of Borg-Jurati in The last vessel is just as delicious as its brief appearance in the Picardy The final of season two was. While Starfleet had largely destroyed the Borg collective, the Agnes cooperative is a very different beast, offering to help the remains of Starfleet to build a new flagship product to try to bring hope to the galaxy, operating on Borg Transwarp technology rather than on FTL travel based on Dilithium. On the surface, it is friendly, pushing a desperate alliance federation to be up to the ideals it represents for thousands of years – it is not there to launch Starfleet while it is broken or finish the work. But it is immediately clear at the end of Last starship # 1 that the cooperative has its own objectives rather than simply launching Starfleet to put its Latinum where its mouth is: not entirely nasty or heroic, but playing a longer game through the new series.

It is only there that Captain Kirk of all this comes into play. After helping Starfleet almost literally tinkering a new flagship product – USS OmegaA disjointed hybrid of dozens of Starfleet Ship and Transwarp engineering from Jurati – Jurati reveals his negotiation reward is other than a Kirk blood sample stored on Waystrom for centuries. Using advanced borg nanites, the sample creates a fully real Jim Kirk. Not memories in a new body, or a clone, as she rejected it, but Kirk to her peak, a breathing, a thought and to remember Kirk as if his last moments in Star Trek: Generations were not at all definitive. The way Jurati recounts the resurrection, so to speak, is hope: she believes this moment in Star Trek Requires that someone like Kirk, a border diplomat who boldly explored and fought for the future of the federation, rather than being trapped in rest on the laurels of his past as are his contemporaries Starfleet struck with sorrow. But there is something, once again, presented as almost horrible by what she did: a borg playing God with one of the most revered figures of Star TrekEven if it is in an hour of a great need.

How The last vessel It remains from here from here. The first question ends with the taase of a very familiar conflict for this reborn kirk and the OmegaThe crew is confronted, in a faction of Klingons using chaos of the burn to try to bring their people back to their ancestral warrior roots and finish Starfleet once and for all. What will remain interesting is not how he manages to reshape the familiar Star Trekthe history of history, but how it is based on the vast potential that it started in mine Star TrekIt is more recent to create something new and exciting instead.

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