Chapter By Chapter> Star Trek: The Vulcan Academy Murders chapter 27

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.

Okay, we missed some time away from the book due to life but it’s time to see what happens next in our investigation. Then again every time I say that it becomes a character moment chapter, and when I finally just assume it will be character based because the last few have, we get the murder mystery plot. It’s been my only complaint thus far.

Last time we went through two oddly broken up chapters as Kirk goes to T’Pau for a bit of help and they actually get along. That was nice to see.

Look, I’m enjoying the story. I just think the title plot and the plot Lorrah wanted to do should have integrated better. Maybe it’s one of those things I’m noticing more in this format but I do like both plots. Following the events on Vulcan with the relationships would make for a decent Star Trek story on its own, as would the murder plot, and you can weave those together. I’m just not sure the two were integrated as well as they could have. Any other reason to bring the Enterprise here, even sticking with the medical drama (remember, the sequel is a medical drama and I enjoyed it enough to track this book down), would have been enough. We’re in the last quarter of pages so I want to see some more focus on that. Will that happen this chapter? Let’s read and find out.

I’ve talked before in this book’s review of the three episodes that focus on Vulcans in general and Spock specifically: “Amok Time”, “Journey To Babel”, and the animated episode “Yesteryear”, or at least those are the stories in official canon that get brought up. Even then it’s mostly the first two, since for the longest time “Yesteryear” was the only animated episode considered official canon for Spock’s childhood and the first appearance of the sehlat, an animal mentioned in “Journey To Babel”. The Next Generation would give us “Sarek”, which wasn’t out during the book’s first printing, some minor elements showed up in the movie, and then there’s whatever Star Trek: Discovery did with Michael Burnam, but the “Vulcan hello” was kind of a good-bye to me. I didn’t put Star Trek: Enterprise in that list since the show decided to put the Vulcans in as negative a light as possible, and even seemed to treat Archer’s bigotry of Vulcans as a good thing, even if unintentionally on both counts.

“Amok Time” and “Journey To Babel” are heavily referenced in this chapter as one of the other recurring elements expanded non-canon Trek writers love to get into shows up here. It’s the “burying the hatchet” moment between Spock and Sarek. One could make the case that “Journey To Babel” was enough of a reunion, and “Sarek” would take some time to go over Sarek’s regret of how distant he was from Spock for the decision he made to join Starfleet (again written as two words in this novel and you’d think an editor would have caught that). I do understand that this makes for great character drama, which is why writers would want to dive into it, but I’m not sure anyone asked for a further reconciliation between Spock and Sarek. The movies showed that any remaining animosity between them were long since past and I know I’m okay with that.

That said, it’s a well written moment between them, interrupted at one point by Daniel coming in to check on Amanda as the two most important men in her life came in to check on her. This at least moves the plots that aren’t about the character moments or Vulcan society moving, while still playing into both. Amanda’s coming out tomorrow and every precaution they can think of has been taken to keep her status chamber off the grid so the hacker can only mess with the lights. Whether or not that somehow comes back to haunt them we’ll have to see. Even then, Daniel is really here to go over his bonding with T’Mir to get the whole T’Pring discussion going on and discuss Sarek’s own bonding with Amanda, as Daniel isn’t used to mentally holding on to T’Mir and not broadcasting his emotions at his newlywed status. The two Vulcans assure him others understand (though I’m waiting to see how Sendet responds), but this is really only here to dive into Vulcan telepathy, which feels a bit exaggerated to me even though we’ve seen how strong it can be with V’Ger and that time the Vulcan-crewed starship got destroyed by the giant space amoeba. I don’t know if limits were ever established in official story guides. It’s one of those things the plot needs.

It’s a well written chapter, but by this point I really want to focus on the murder mystery the book promises. A quick look at the first page of the next chapter suggests that may come to pass, but I’ve been wrong…pretty much every time since I started noticing this. We’ll see what happens next time, which hopefully for those reading “live” will be when it’s supposed to be up.