Perusing a Previous Pike Prequel

Reflections on Marvel's "Star Trek: The Early Voyages"

I fell short of my arbitrarily self-imposed weekly publication schedule this week, as I was attending the American Academy of Religion — which produced reflections more suitable for my other blog. I actually considered bringing materials for today’s post with me on the trip, in case any downtime would allow me to share my urgently necessary assessment of Marvel’s Star Trek: Early Voyages (1997-1998). In the end, I decided that lugging a comic omnibus around with me on the off chance I’d have time to blog was… inappropriate. But anyway!

I regard Early Voyages as one of the very best sustained Star Trek comics runs of all time. Written by the duo of Ian Edginton and Dan Abnett (both of whom seem to have done a lot of tie-in work), it is fast-paced and action-packed, but also creative and thoughtful. If you simply flip through the IDW omnibus (widely available used), you will see that the art (split among Patrick Zircher, Michael Collins, Javier Pulido) is vivid and dynamic—it really does draw you in. Their prequel format—focusing on characters who, other than Spock, were only seen briefly on a single episode—required them to be a bit more serialized and consistent, and they did a good job of laying down a variety of simmering plot arcs that cash out over time. In many ways, it’s a better version of the Pike era than we actually got in Strange New Worlds. And in some other ways—let’s just say I found some uncanny similarities that appeared unmotivated by the prequel concept itself.

The first major difference is Pike himself. Unlike the loveable lug we’ve come to know and be ambivalent about on Strange New Worlds, this Pike is recognizably the guy we know from “The Cage”—broody, angry, even harsh. At the same time, though, the writers know that they have to “redeem” Pike from infamous sexist remarks, above all his claim that he’s not used to women on the bridge. They do this by starting Pike off with a male yeoman, a charming Irishman named Dermot Cusack, who is Pike’s best friend and confidant. Cusack is then tragically killed in the Rigel mission that haunts Pike in “The Cage,” and the plucky young Mia Colt is Cusack’s unexpected and unwanted replacement (hence the female presence he’s not used to is her in specific, since he previously had a male yeoman). An interesting twist here is that she herself doesn’t want the assignment, as it disrupts her career plans—making Pike’s harsh and dismissive behavior toward her even harder to take.

This backstory is prequel storytelling at its best, providing genuine depth and complexity to the characters and their relationships. When he’s considering quitting in “The Cage,” Pike is not just stewing about the death of random faceless crewmen, but trying to avoid explicitly mentioning the loss of his best friend, and Colt is not just a pretty face, but a young woman with ambitions of her own. This shift sets up what I consider to be one of the greatest tours de force of the tie-in literature, a complete retelling of “The Cage” from Mia Colt’s perspective.

So central does Colt become to The Early Voyages that she has the honor of being the crucial “missing piece” in a time travel narrative, who must be put back in her proper place for the future to unfold as it should. As in Strange New Worlds, this time travel narrative serves to reaffirm the necessity of Kirk—who in this timeline washed out as Pike’s yeoman after Colt’s disappearance (into the future) and wound up leaving Starfleet and becoming a shady trader à la Mudd—but by way of affirming the necessity of a character who is so transformed from “The Cage” that she almost counts as a series original.

In terms of other legacy characters, they are remarkably sparing with Spock, treating him as just one crew member among others (as he appeared to be in the pilot). His one major arc has him re-embracing Vulcan logic after an encounter with a splinter group of emotional Vulcans—presumably solving the problem of how his notorious smile and exclamation of “The women!” fits with his Stoic demeanor from later productions. Strange New Worlds of course covers similar territory, as I assume any attempt to address the Pike era would need to do. As for Number One, she also gets an obvious plot, as she struggles with whether to accept her own command (ultimately turning it down for reasons that are never revealed, as the series was abruptly cancelled mid-story-arc). Probably their biggest miss was the treatment of Dr. Boyce, who is revealed to be possessed by an entity that makes him act increasingly strangely. I guess they were riffing on the fact that all we know about him was his affability? In any case, it didn’t speak to me.

They also have a number of original characters, including a Native American chief engineer, a helmsman from a series-original alien species (the Lirin), and various less memorable humans. The Lirin helmsman gets probably the best plot arc for a series-original character, as he is the sole member of his telepathic species ever to live off-planet. It turns out that—in an echo of Odo’s fate from Deep Space Nine—sending him away was an experiment to learn more about the outside world, but—in an echo of Hugh’s fate—reintegrating him proves damaging to their world’s balance.

The political situation is dominated by conflict with the Klingons and the Tholians. The Klingons here are depicted in classic Original Series style, and one recurring arc features a Klingon captain who has been humiliated by Pike and must have revenge to restore his honor. The Tholians get more emphasis, though they are here represented by a subordinate species, the Chakun, who carry out military operations for them. (Perhaps they went this route because the Tholians had never been directly depicted on screen—they first appear in Enterprise’s Mirror arc in the early 2000s.) As it turns out, one of the series-original characters, Nurse Carlotti, is dealing with trauma from the destruction of her home colony by the Chakun, of which she and her two brothers were the only survivors. She ultimately has to face her trauma when she is stranded in another colony under attack by the Chakun, during the course of which she encounters a female Chakun who reveals that the Chakun are a naive, almost childlike race who fully buy into Tholian propaganda that humans are aggressors. In a sense, then, the Chakun are oppressed—but in any case, they are not fully the monsters she thought they were. This is reinforced when a rescue party comes for the female Chakun, who orders them to stand down rather than kill Carlotti. The most Star Trek lesson of all has been duly learned.

The attentive reader may not some… uncanny parallels with certain plot arcs from Strange New Worlds. The focus on the Tholians seems to parallel SNW’s focus on the Gorn—in both cases, we are dealing with one-off species from memorable Original Series episodes that get unexpected development. Carlotti’s arc is split between two characters, with La’an suffering from the trauma as the sole survivor (rescued by her brother) and Ortegas encountering the female alien who helps her overcome her hurtful stereotypes. As far as I can tell, none of these plot points is directly suggested, much less necessitated, by “The Cage,” so I can only assume the Strange New Worlds writers were drawing on material from the comics—a connection I have never seen explicitly acknowledged. (Perhaps Edginton and Abnett should get a drink with tie-in novelist David Mack so they can commiserate about the streaming era plundering their ideas.)

In the end, as with so many Star Trek productions—including arguably Strange New Worlds itself—New Voyages was cut unexpectedly short, without even allowing the writers one more issue to wrap up their concluding cliffhanger. Perhaps an ongoing series spun out from a single Star Trek episode known primarily by obsessives was a step too far at a time when franchise logic did not yet fully dominate the cultural scene. From our current perspective, though, the series stands an entertaining read in itself (which even holds up on rereading) and as proof that a richer and more thoughtful version of the Pike era than what Strange New Worlds delivered (or really even attempted) was indeed possible.

Alas, it will forever remain an alternate timeline… but perhaps some of you have voyaged there. What do you think of Early Voyages?