Chapter By Chapter features me reading one chapter of the selected book at the 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 read-along book club.

Part 3: Talin chapter 1

In our last installment we finished part two of this novel. Now we return to the story’s present day, so now we know the crew was blamed for what happened not just for political reasons but because of gross incompetence. Not the happy Federation we all know, is it kids? With so many red flags a bull would go insane (if they weren’t actually color blind) the now former Enterprise crew has to be the ones to check things out because Starfleet is too dumb to do their jobs.

One thing we didn’t get to see in part 1 was what happened to Spock, who suddenly decided to quit and thus leaving Uhura to face the rug-sweepers alone. Now everyone has quit over this so the Federation can put this aside rather than find out what actually happened, and for a crew this celebrated, and their first Vulcan (half-Vulcan but whatever) recruit, at least in this continuity, pushed aside they must think ignorance is even better than bliss, and I’m not sure I’m a fan of this interpretation. Surely the crew could have still investigated and been up against one official investigator of questionable competence (as much as I dislike that trope) rather than make the whole of Starfleet and the Federation look this pathetic. Sorry, I went a bit off topic because now we’re going to finally find out what happened to Spock.

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