In today’s episode, when Voyager stumbles upon the Fury homeworld, they also discover the galaxy’s largest gas-siphoning operation. But there isn’t much time to crack the Furies’ endgame, and Voyager’s only source of intel is nuttier than a squirrel turd. How are Tuvok’s students getting along? Is it even possible to make a dent in the Furies’ operation? And since when is Neelix the paragon of calm, cool, and collected? All this and more in The Final Fury, the book that really socks it to those pesky combadges.

The Final Fury
Author: Dafydd ab Hugh
Pages: 308
Published: August 1996
Timeline: At least after “Learning Curve” (S1E15); roughly concurrent with Time’s Enemy (DS9 #16, Invasion! #3)
Prerequisites: All of the Invasion! novels to some extent, but especially The Soldiers of Fear (TNG #41, Invasion! #2)

At the back of The Final Fury, there’s a collection of short afterwords by each of the miniseries’s authors and editors. In his, Dafydd ab Hugh offers up a quote from the English poet Robert Browning, which says this: “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp.” A very noble sentiment, to be sure, albeit one prone to producing works of wildly varying quality. It turns out to be extremely apt, both in the case of the Invasion! saga as a whole and this book in particular, which had a handful of ideas and let practically all of them slip away from it.

With the inertial dampers crapped out and everyone except somehow Harry feeling the resulting gastrointestinal strain, Voyager picks up a distress signal from, of all things, a Starfleet shuttle—the Lewis, attached to the Enterprise. Not long after losing that scent, they find a caged sun being tapped for energy, an artificial moon, and a nearby planet. When hailed, Janeway lets Neelix pretend to be the captain. The hailer says they took care of the wayward ship, everything’s copacetic, just move on—unless, that is, you’re interested in learning about the “true faith”. Janeway is intrigued enough to check out a few pamphlets, and beams down with Tuvok and Neelix.

As we’re by this point well aware happens in the presence of Furies, Janeway and even Tuvok are scared out of their wits by Navdaq, the alien who hailed them and now greets them planetside. Neelix, however, is strangely unaffected, a phenomenon that, like many of the more eyebrow-raising aspects of this book, is not explored at any meaningful length. Their facade falls apart in short order and they get imprisoned, but they bust out and track down the pilot of the lost shuttlecraft, the identity of whom you might have already surmised is Lt. Sam Redbay, whose heroic sacrifice singlehandedly saved the Alpha Quadrant’s bacon back in The Soldiers of Fear. While they make a break for it, Chakotay eludes a halfhearted pursuit by Fury ships, and Paris and Kim explore the artificial moon in a sequence where the total absence of Fury security is both unnerving and baffling in equal measure.

Eventually, the crew deduces what the big setup is for: the Furies plan to make their own sun go supernova, which will generate enough energy to create one final wormhole to the Alpha Quadrant that will only stay open for a few seconds. But they aren’t going to use that precious window to send as many ships through as they can. They’re going to shove their entire planet through it—ditch the whole scheming-from-afar bullcrap, post up in the A.Q. without warning, scare the bejeezus out of everybody the way they do best, and reassert their claim to Heaven once and for all. Obviously, they have to be stopped, but nothing anyone tries seems to be able to make more than the faintest dent. Can Sam Redbay swallow the unimaginable horrors he endured in captivity and pull it together long enough to save the galaxy one more time?

Of the four Invasion! books, The Final Fury is easily the hottest mess of the bunch. That isn’t to say it’s the worst. I would accept arguments for that, but I genuinely don’t think it is, mostly because it didn’t bore me—not on the whole, at least, the way The Soldiers of Fear did, although it certainly did have multiple boring stretches. It’s hard to imagine how a prison break could be much less exciting than Janeway’s, and the interminable explorations of the artificial moon are equally unthrilling, and the Old Reliable callback to metaphasic shielding doesn’t inject any life into the Furies’ one perfunctory attempt at pursuing Voyager. These segments are all limp and toothless, but they’re not the biggest problem plaguing this book.

The biggest problem is that The Final Fury wants to try to steer the annihilation of the Furies back to being a moral dilemma when the two books preceding it made it very clear that they did not care about that at all whatsoever and took the inevitability of the conclusion of the Furies’ ultimate destruction for granted. First Strike tried valiantly to lay a high-minded foundation for the miniseries, but that ship sailed alarmingly quickly. Never at any point was there any unified sense between any two given authors of what the Furies were about or what the end goal of encountering them was. The only thing all Fury portrayals retrospectively have in common is an astounding deficit of tactical know-how and base-covering, because they are ancient demons who thought they would always be able to rely on their innate spookiness and thus never bothered to cultivate critical thinking skills.

I won’t say the age-old Trek concept of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few being writ large on a galactic scale isn’t at least a little fascinating. In this case, the “few” equals 27 billion, i.e., the number of beings on the Fury planet. That against the entire rest of the galaxy is pretty staggering to think about. (And you thought deciding what to do with one Tuvix was a conundrum!) And there’s no way 27 billion of any people can be completely united on any front. Maybe they could have found that one who envisioned a different way, as Star Trek crews seem to have such good luck doing, and turned it around with that one’s help. But that was never on the table here. The Invasion! saga already had a conclusion it was on a crash course with, and The Final Fury‘s only job was to keep its foot on the gas. Whatever else you can say about it, that it did dutifully. I don’t envy what ab Hugh had to work with here at all.

MVP & LVP

• My MVP for this story is Torres. There’s a light but inconsequential thread about her lack of self-confidence, but she and Redbay get it together and solve the issue of how to sabotage the wormhole just in time. Of course, he eats the dust, and she, being a top-billed cast member, lives to see another day. The natural order remains in balance.
• My pick for LVP is Kes. Sometimes Janeway will do that thing where she keeps trying to play Model U.N. in the Delta Quadrant against all good sense and she sticks to her guns long enough and hard enough until finally she ends up saying something fabulously stupid. Well, this time Kes saved her the trouble. While the debate over the morality of killing 27 billion Furies rages on in the conference room, she offers up this gem:

“Have you considered,” she said in a small voice, “that many billions of the dead will be innocent children who have nothing whatseover to do with the feud?”

Wow. Wow. That is gold. I didn’t know 2-year-olds could ride horses that high. We’re talking about nightmare demons who can psychically project complete abject terror directly into the minds of their enemies and who plan to enslave literally the entire galaxy. But wait! Hold up! Some of them might be babies! Look, obviously no race (especially of that size of population) is a monolith, but there’s been no indication across four entire books that kid Furies figure into this at all. They want to park their whole planet in someone else’s spot, and your best rebuttal is “Think of the children”? I literally laughed out loud. Kes, you are lucky they let you and Neelix talk at these things, much less attend them at all. If you want to keep that lucky streak going, I suggest bringing better material to the table than that.

Stray Bits

• Adding to the overall sloppiness of the book is the fact that the Furies literally never appear again after Janeway et al. make it back to Voyager with Redbay. That is just barely halfway through the book. If they’re going to fade that hard into the background and become that abstract, then what on earth is all the pearl-clutching for? There are some real headscratchers in this one, I tell ya.
• The crew members Tuvok whips into shape in “Learning Curve” make multiple appearances. They seem to be doing all right. Good for them.
• ab Hugh goes 0-for-3 on Korean food spellings on page 52, where he manages to mangle kimchi (“kimchee”), japchae (“chap che”), and bibimbap (“bibimba”) in just two short paragraphs. Perhaps the ethnic awareness simply wasn’t there in 1996. Though this got me realizing: I’ve been thinking this whole time that Harry was of Chinese descent? Apparently it’s at least somewhat up in the air. According to Memory Alpha, Garrett Wang himself has said on The Delta Flyers that he believed Kim to be Korean-American, but also recalled a conversation in which Brannon Braga suggested Harry was Chinese-American. I guess it could go either way, but I’m inclined toward Wang’s interpretation, being as, you know, he played the character and all.
• On a more positive note, ab Hugh does score some vicious salvos with a brutal takedown of combadge illogic. Villains always confiscate them—so why don’t landing parties carry spares? Why aren’t officers issued multiple ones? Why aren’t they surgically implanted, so that getting them stolen never even comes up to begin with? There are probably good answers to these questions, but it was an amusing passage. Also, I wish it wasn’t Neelix landing these body blows, but hey, when you’re right, you’re right. (pp. 90, 91)
• Paris, when Chakotay asks him if he’s familiar with the starburst maneuver: “‘I have a nodding acquaintance.’ Paris winked, but Chakotay did not understand the reference.” — I did, though! I’m always a sucker for a good meta-acknowledgment of the Paris/Locarno duality. (p. 110)
• Chakotay to Janeway, in a conversation about self-defense styles: “We should spar sometime. I would like to see what it feels like to have my own power turned against me.” — I don’t ship Janeway and Chakotay, per se, though I do think they have a fairly undeniable chemistry, at least up to the point I’m at in my series watch, anyway (end of season two). Still, when you tee it up all fat and juicy like this, the fanfics all but write themselves. (p. 180)
• On Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch: “That both their middle names are the first names of Star Trek characters is strictly coincidental.” — I’m slightly embarrassed I didn’t notice this on my own. (p. 293)

Final Assessment

Bad. The Final Fury is a train wreck of a conclusion, some of which is ab Hugh’s fault, most of which isn’t. It lays bare the ugly truth of how disorganized and divided the Invasion! series was from the outset. It never really had one solid, ironclad conception of what it wanted the Furies to be. Each book had wildly differing opinions of whether they could be reasoned with, needed to be annihilated, or weren’t hardly worth the time of day in the first place. A couple of them stood on their own just fine, but the ones that relied more heavily on tying into the larger picture suffered—and this was definitely one of those.

Invasion! books, best to worst: Time’s Enemy; First Strike; The Final Fury; The Soldiers of Fear

NEXT TIME: Time for a payday from The Joy Machine