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.
Only a few chapters remain. Last time, Kirk had himself a serious battle in the desert, but in his shape, he’s still going to need help.
So have I been calling our killer this whole time? I don’t know. I haven’t read the chapter yet, at least not since I originally bought the book. That’s the trouble with mystery stories. Once you’ve read it, you already know whodunit, and that is lost. What a good mystery story has to do is give you a reason to come back if you didn’t forget the killer. That’s harder with something that gets famous, like the classic Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple series. People talk about those books, but notice how few spoilers there are from Sherlock Holmes stories unless you see the adaptations. Admittedly this may not be the case in actual mystery fan circles, but unless Professor Moriarty shows up, and in adaptations you’d think Moriarty ALWAYS shows up even when he didn’t in the novels, I couldn’t tell you any of the criminals. Moriarty overshadows and becomes the cultural meme and awareness.
So what brings you back is seeing the character interactions, how they go about solving the case, and maybe spotting clues you didn’t your first readthrough. This story has been heavy on the character interactions, but at the expense of the murder mystery. When it does remember the mystery, it’s all procedural. You learn the clues along with Kirk but because you have the same time away from the case as Kirk you don’t really get to try to solve anything. I only spotted a few clues because I went back to check on information for the review of a later chapter. Decide for yourself if that hurts the story, but it’s time to dive back into it.
Okay, Eleyna–I think all of us reading along or following the spoilers are sure of it by now, and she’s the one who took Kirk into the desert–really screwed up on a minor detail. That’s always the way in these stories, whether your solving along with the heroes or already know what’s going on (think Columbo), or somewhere in-between, that being on the omniscient side of the fourth wall gives you info the characters don’t. There has to be some slip-up by the villain that exposes them. For Eleyna it’s leaving behind the frond she uses to sweep away the evidence that they walked into the desert from Sarek’s house. McCoy has been part of these investigations in the past, and he has a few instincts of his own along with the others. So when he sees the discarded frond he goes to check into it, a hunch he doesn’t understand but he can tell something isn’t right.
That’s when he sees the sweep marks, which on a windless desert planet is rather strange. He follows them until he finds evidence of footprints, and then realizes that Kirk might have gone out there on his date. McCoy learned that this was a dangerous time for a moonlight picnic, but doesn’t put together that Eleyna, who has lived on this planet long enough and works around many Vulcans beyond her own “boss”, should be aware of that. It’s important later.
Taking the car he finds Kirk unconscious and the engorged plant. Naturally, he doesn’t know the man-eating plant found something besides a man to eat. His first thought is getting his friend to the hospital. There he treats him with help from M’Benga, who knows about how Vulcan animal poison affects humans, and Corrigan is late because he was at the Verification. McCoy even offers to recommend M’Benga for work on the Enterprise, which would put this story before the original series episode “A Private Little War”, when he first appeared in canon. Fun fact from Memory Alpha on the character.
This character was actually created by Darlene Hartman, in her purchased (but never produced) TOS script entitled “Shol“. The notes for that script give Dr. M’Benga’s first name as “Joseph” (confirmed in canon only in [the Strange New World episode]”The Elysian Kingdom“), and stated that he was originally a native of Uganda. His brother, Commander Simon M’Benga, was the first officer of USS Hope, a Federation hospital ship, in the planned-but-never-developed Star Trek spinoff Hopeship.
I haven’t watched Strange New World, but I wonder if that makes his appearance there canonically questionable just for the diversity quota? Lorrah herself would give him the first name Geoffrey in the sequel book that led me to this one, The IDIC Epidemic, and other authors had their own idea, but Joseph comes from the unproduced script, is what the producers of Strange New World found in the records, and that’s now officially his first name. I need to update the tag. I wonder if his brother is canon, because that actually sounds like an interesting spinoff show. Not under Secret Hideout and Alex Kurtzman, but the plot of a Federation hospital ship has promises. That’s what I love about sci-fi; it can even replicate your typical medical drama.
Kirk awakens screaming about the attack, but due to what he says before passing out again, McCoy and Corrigan assume the real killer got her as well, thinking the plant ate her or her body. This is a surprisingly short paragraph but I had to add something to the one above and that meant putting this in its own section. Sorry, writer nitpick and all.
I can understand why he hasn’t figured out Eleyna is the killer. He has less evidence than Kirk, and Kirk doesn’t know she’s been looking into Amanda’s condition or the strange program Sarek found that he didn’t even figure out. Of course he doesn’t know that Eleyna left him to die, and we can guess she tried to cover her tracks, thinking either the plant or the Le-Matya would finish him off after she got him hurt. When it comes to Kirk, she’s really not prepared. Kirk investigating the murders was a factor she didn’t plan on, as well as the other two people part of Sorel and Corrigan’s experimental treatment. She’s been improvising, but taking out Kirk required more than simply hacking a computer to shut off life support or start a fire. It’s the frond that she used to hide the footprints that was her final mistake, probably assuming it would be passed off as falling on its own without Amanda to tend the garden, so she also didn’t plan on McCoy being as observant and curious as Kirk.
Will our heroes put the clues together in time to stop her from taking her final victim? I mean, we can assume because there’s two chapters left and Amanda shows up in the movies so we know she dies of old age long before the events of The Next Generation when Sarek returns to the franchise with his new wife, so the real question is how will they figure things out and stop her? That’s still interesting enough to come back for, right?
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