BW Media Spotlight

Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as a read-along book club.

Last time the epidemic hit. How it connects to IDIC is still a ways through the book.

Now we move to the Enterprise and our main characters. In the show the cold open would have started with the crew arriving just in time to witness the tragedy. This not just true of the original series and it’s animated spinoffs, but other shows in the franchise, though I’m not fully exposed to Kurtzman Trek. (What I’ve been exposed to is bad enough.) It is the usual pattern of the show. We join in on the crew, with a Captain’s Log (or one of the other characters) telling us what we need to know going in, and some episodes didn’t even need that, then we’re there with them when the inciting incident begins.

This isn’t always true in the movies. Some films started without the crew, following someone else as they get killed before the usual group arrives to reduce further death. Not completely stop because we have to raise the stakes by killing off some extra. So you could make the case that Lorrah was inspired by the movies, starting with the council on the science colony and not even a mention of the famous crew of the starship Enterprise. Then again, this isn’t a show or a movie. It’s a novel, and we’re getting to them rather quick. I just have this thought in my brain when it comes to adaptations that I want to feel like I’m reading an episode of the show, whether it’s a novel or a comic, or playing through one in a game. It’s one of the reasons I reject the adultified reimagines of my childhood Dynamite is putting out lately. It’s not completely new. Even the in 1980s there were comics that felt nothing like the show they were based and the DCAU tie-in comics often leaned more towards the regular DC comics universe than the shows they were based on.

This is an observation of myself more than the work at hand. Lorrah did what she needed to do for the book, to set up what the rest of the story is going to be about, a mystery plague attacking the colony. Putting the focus there without the crew allows the readers to already see the stakes are going to be desperate so that this chapter we’re seeing how the crew are going to feel about the news and how they’ll be drawn into the events. Not every observation is a critique or pointing out a negative. To understand story choices you need to understand the good, the bad, and the neutral. The neutral is unavoidable so you push for the good and avoid as much of the bad as possible. As we head into chapter two, the fun is finding out which is which.

Continue reading →