IDW is at it, again.
They’re doing another round of their Deviations event – one-shots of various licensed properties being subjected to “What If?” scenarios. We’ve sampled a couple of these last year and this year… well, there was only one that piqued my interest and that was the Star Trek one. Took me a little longer to gather my thoughts on this one because… well, let’s be honest here. I’ve read three of these Deviations so far and we’re one for three at the moment.
Yeah, this isn’t very good, either… but this time, the blame falls on the premise, which seems to be all over the place.
The premise of this Deviation seems fascinating on paper; what if, instead of the Vulcans, it was the Romulans who were Earth’s first encounter with extraterrestrials. It’s an idea that has potential to be explored and possibly spin off an interesting alternate take on Star Trek lore before we get to the eventual “everyone dies” ending that a lot of these things fall back on because we’re uncreative hacks or something.
So what happens when the Romulans land on Earth before the Vulcans? They turn the planet into a Romulan colony and enslave the human race. Jump ahead to the 24th century and an eyepatched Will Riker leads a ragtag band of freedom fighters (who, coincidentally or conveniently, happen to be some of the old TNG crew in similar altered states or worse) to find a man who may or may not know the location of a Federation base… wait, what? A Federation base? How could there be a Federation base if the Romulans enslaved the human race shortly after Zefram Cochrane’s warp flight? If the humans never had a chance to develop space flight, how could there be a Federation? Hell, that Delta on the cover shouldn’t even be there if that were the case.
So IDW either lied about the deviation or nobody had a fucking clue. I’m leaning more towards the former because IDW has been doing Star Trek comics for years now and they’re usually on the ball with this stuff. I’d have to assume that, at some point, the Federation and the Romulans got into a war, the Romulans won, took control of Earth and enslaved the humans. That would make more sense and less questions would be brought up that we’d never get answers to. Approaching the story from THAT context rather than the premise it was sold on… eh, it’s not so bad.
For what it’s worth, it’s a fast-paced piece of business that doesn’t waste time on exposition since we don’t have time to waste in a one-shot book. The action bits are well-done and it was interesting to see the different takes on these familiar TNG characters. Would it have been nice to get more emphasis on the main players and how things have changed? Sure, but given what’s there… it was fine.
It’s just unfortunate that for all the good bits that this issue offered, I am left with more questions regarding anachronistic aspects of the story, including the final big reveal, which – had this been following the original premise of the series – should not exist in the first place. I don’t know… this feels like a sampler of a much larger story and if there’s more to come, I’d look forward to reading it.
As a one-shot, however, Star Trek: Deviations leaves much to be desired.
dtm666 