Chapter By Chapter> Star Trek: The IDIC Epidemic chapter 10

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.

We saw the beginnings of a new romance subplot, but let’s get back to the situation on Nisus.

Romantic subplots are fine in Star Trek. Many good episodes involved one of the crew with some kind of love interest, though these were usually one-shot characters who showed up again. TNG had a large enough cast and backstory to have dating among the main characters, namely whatever Troi, Riker, and Worf were doing. Personally Troi and Worf seems oddly mismatched so I’m kind of glad that didn’t hold.

Until the Kelvin Timeline movies you didn’t see dating between the crew, but there were only three women and Nurse Chapel even took a break once from pining for Spock, which transferred over into the animated series in Harry Mudd’s solo toon appearance.  (Catch it on MeTV Toons if you can. Pluto TV still doesn’t have it up with the other Star Trek shows. Still the kid left in the corner.) Kirk’s track record may have been exaggerated over the years, at least in canon shows and movies, but he’s usually the one you most think about having a girl in every proverbial port, though McCoy, Chekov, and Scotty have had their relationships. Sulu had to wait for a fan series to have a daughter.

I wouldn’t want to see romance as the main plot, but a bit of romance now and then can only benefit the characters. It won’t help Korsal, but now we’re just segueing back to what he’s been doing back on Nisus.

We pick up where we left Korsal before. He’s arrived at the dam, being the first engineer the dam operator, and no I’m not doing that joke, Emily Torrence, was able to get a hold of. Ice has damaged one of the water turbines, so the two work to free the damaged water wheel before it wrecks the other two. Not every action sequence has to be a fight scene. This was two people using cranes to grab a broken turbine wheel and it’s a good scene.

Then the operator’s husband, Charlie, shows up, and sees Korsal without a shirt and his wife seemingly naked (she’s fully clothed but wrapped in a towel because it’s very wet in the turbine room when there isn’t a broken water wheel thrashing around like a rabid dolphin trying to escape a net. He jumps to the wrong conclusion but his wife eventually gets him to calm down and, being a fellow engineer, help get things started. The ice is a chunk that didn’t melt from the mountain, and the safety sluices along the way haven’t been checked because one pilot is dead and the other critical. Korsal volunteers himself and his son since they have the Nisus equivalent of a pilot’s license, to check it out. Maybe they can have the Enterprise melt a few more bits of ice. Will Scotty be staying behind as well to help with the dam?

The scene with Charlie shows that it’s not just the plague causing rage. There’s a lot of stress going on with so many people down, and then this happens with the worst timing. He ran here because he heard about his wife making emergency engineer calls all over the colony. We also get a Klingon’s POV of how you describe a black woman and adrenaline, but unfamiliar to Klingons unless you check the make-up trailer at Paramount Studios. (Black actors need less make-up for the movie and beyond Klingon design, which was a benefit to Michael Dorn as Worf, and even the original TV designs had darkened skin pigments. Apparently Kurtzman Klingons need to be a near albino smurf. Hopefully that doesn’t continue past his disaster of a timeline.)

Next time it’s back to the ship, and apparently I should have saved that talk of romance subplots for the next chapter. Oh well, not risking it getting lost.