In today’s episode, a busted gadget brings the X-Men back to the 24th century, though you probably weren’t around for the first episode. Nevertheless, here they are, arriving just in time to render aid to a planet that’s starting to go through its own mutant growing pains. Which X-Person’s fault is it that they’re stranded here? Will it ever not be weird for Data to smile? And how much bridge conversation is pointless small talk? All this and more in Planet X, the book that’s selling the cure, but no one’s buying.

Planet X
Author: Michael Jan Friedman
Pages: 265
Published: May 1998
Timeline: Shortly after “You Are Cordially Invited” (DS9 6×07) (Worf’s recent marriage to Jadzia is mentioned)
Prerequisites: “Second Contact”, to which Planet X is technically a sequel, in which the Enterprise-E is rerouted to the 1990s by Kang the Conqueror immediately following the events of Star Trek: First Contact. The crew joins the X-Men in fighting whatever Kang’s evil plan is. I will politely decline to read it.
Not to be confused with: “Charlie X” (TOS 1×02)

It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to live in today’s world and enjoy popular works without having a mind that is poisoned to some extent by branding. Too often, we minimize art by calling it “content”. Many of us think of everything in terms of IP. Franchises are commodities, their characters assets. Some of the world’s most truly loathsome parasites that have the audacity to call themselves human have come to devalue art so much that they are literally incapable of seeing it as anything except a possible tax write-off. So today, in the year of our Lᴏʀᴅ 2024, a Star Trek/X-Men crossover seems like the kind of box a lot of people would take for granted as having already been checked. It would probably surprise very few that such a thing already exists. But nothing in this world is entirely devoid of context. So gather ’round and bend your ear this way, ’cause yer ole Uncle Jess has a yarn to spin ya.

Now, if you’re reading this and you happen to be of a younger age—in your mid-twenties or so—it’s possible you can’t remember a time when Marvel didn’t hold uncontested supremacy over all possible extensions of comic book media. But back in the 1990s, that was far from the case. For many people and companies, it was a decade of prosperity, but not so much for Marvel, who were dragged down by an agglomeration of unfortunate events into what remains to date the lowest valley in their long history. Speculation on comic books flooded the market with worthless variant covers and number-ones. Companies like Image and Valiant split off from Marvel and DC and took young phenoms like Jim Lee and Todd McFarlane with them. Marvel themselves spent tons of money buying up various card and toy companies to expand their offerings. When the bubbles popped, they popped hard, and Marvel wound up declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1996.

It would be a while before victory started to appear on the horizon for Marvel once more, so it’s not hard to figure they would try just about anything with anybody in the intervening low years. They were still over a decade away from their first real tastes of cinematic triumph,1Because they had to sell the film rights to icons like Spider-Man and the X-Men to stay afloat, Marvel saw very little of the profit from their pre-MCU movies. According to the afore-linked Collider article, they only saw $62 million of the original Spider-Man trilogy’s $3 billion, and just a measly $25,000 from 1998’s Blade. but Star Wars had recently established a precedent for multimedia success, and Marvel still knew their way around words and pictures. And so it was that in 1998, they attempted a crossover with Star Trek in a dual form: a comic called “Second Contact”, and a novel called Planet X, the latter of which begins immediately after the events of the former.

Before I get into the story proper, I think I should go ahead and disclose up front that most comic books and superhero media don’t really move my needle. I don’t hate them or hold any kind of Wattersonesque snobbery against them; they just typically don’t give me a lot of what I’m hoping for out of storytelling. That said, I can understand and even to an extent sympathize with a certain kind of Trekkie who would greet a fan-service crossover like this with a hearty harrumph. Star Trek is supposed to stand for something, after all! Isn’t mucking about with roided-out Atlases in spandex punching way below its intellectual weight? What one must not forget, however, is that regardless of whatever lofty and aspirational ideals we might project onto Star Trek, it is also, when it comes down to it, unequivocally and irremediably, a brand, owned and managed by corporate interests, and therefore not so immune to mercenary cash grabs as one might hope. So as long as I’m already neck-deep in this Deep Space Spines thing, I figured I ought to just lie back and think of England and hope not to overdose on cheese and corn.

So then! Seven of the X-Men (Storm, Wolverine, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Archangel, Shadowcat, and Banshee) find themselves aboard Starbase 88 after a temporal fluctuation, where they terrorize the local admins until the Enterprise-E comes and picks them up. While they try to figure out how they got sucked into the 24th century, people on the planet Xhaldia start experiencing transformations not unlike mutant evolution. The planet’s chancellor hears about this and decides the first and best course of action would be to put them all in a camp away from the rest of the population. Great look, my guy! I’m sure this won’t make them completely resent you and start indiscriminately killing civilians at all.

Naturally, the Xhaldian transformed resist and eventually escape their confines. Rahatan, who can telekinetically move the earth, emerges as a likely leader, but he has a short fuse and wants vengeance above all else. At first I thought the story was going to build a parallel Magneto/Xavier dynamic using Rahatan and Erid Sovar, whom the story concentrates on as early as the prologue. But ultimately it didn’t really do anything meaningful with either character, or indeed any of the transformed, and that’s because it’s way too overstuffed to give enough attention to any single story element.

Nearly every arc imaginable is completely undercooked. Friedman does manage some fun pair-offs, as well as some interesting Trek-rooted explanations for X-Men phenomena—e.g., Geordi discovers that Nightcrawler passes through subspace when he teleports, and also that he comes out dusted in verteron particles. But his utilitarian writing does the action no favors, making the story as plodding and witless as all of comics’ most aggressive opponents claim they are. Things especially start falling apart in the last ten percent, when clunkers like “‘Return fire!’ he snapped hopefully” start appearing raw and uncut. And although I’ll concede that this could be me retroactively projecting this onto it, the Marvel characters’ dialogue was quippy enough that it quickly reminded me of how tiresome MCU dialogue gradually became.

The heaviest load of dead weight, however, is the Draa’kon. Planet X was already developing a formidable enough antagonistic presence in Rahatan, but then the Draa’kon show up to come collecting on their diabolical long-game experiment—which is to say, the transformed are their creations. It’s revealed late in the story that the Draa’kon discovered how to mutate genes to unlock superpowers not unlike those of the Xhaldian transformed and the X-Men, but it wasn’t compatible with their genome, so they sought to seed a race that it would work with that they could exploit when the powers manifested, which just so happened to be the poor Xhaldians. Aside from that bit of lore, however, they’re incredibly one-dimensional, serving as little more than phaser and mutant-power fodder. Putting all their skill points into a tank build briefly makes them an overwhelming opponent, but not an especially satisfying one.

Worst of all, they suck all the oxygen out of the Xhaldian plot. There are people with personalities and dreams and aspirations and regrets on Xhaldia, and it would have been much more interesting if the Xhaldian transformation was a simple evolutionary leap forward like on Earth and the Enterprise crew had been able to facilitate the opportunity for the X-Men to help these people through their growing pains and make the transition smoother than it ever was for them. Instead, Rahatan is put asunder by Storm in one incredibly lopsided confrontation, and the resolution is pat and unconvincing.

I almost always go into a Star Trek novel hoping for the best, even when the premise has me skeptical about it being up to the task, but I admit I’ve been wary of this one ever since I learned it existed. It’s two great tastes that unfortunately don’t taste great together. Star Trek is rarely at its best when it has to rely on pure action to move a story forward, and superhero comics are propelled almost entirely by pure action, so one of them will inevitably suffer in the transaction. I suppose it’s good manners for the franchise to accommodate its guests in that way, but I can’t say that it made for a book I was terribly into.

Ten Forward Toast

Many redshirts go down in this book, but the most devastating death isn’t a Starfleet officer at all, but rather one of the transformed, Seevyn. She’s savvy enough to realize that going with Rahatan amounts to nothing more than trading Chancellor Amon’s form of tyranny for his, so Rahatan responds to that point by … burying her alive?!? Holy disproportionate retribution, Batman! Wait, wrong comic.

MVP & LVP

• My MVP for this one is Nightcrawler. It’s pretty handy to be able to teleport through shields, and I think he integrates the best out of the featured X-Men into the Star Trek setting. There is also something about his personality that makes it hard to render him as outsized as comic book characters can sometimes be, so it was nice to have a few of the more grounded ones like him and Storm onboard.
• LVP goes to Dr. Crusher. It’s okay if a character doesn’t have much to do, but sometimes you can tell that an author feels a need to force something to do on them, which is how Beverly ends up creating a mutant-gene reversal cure. I guess there’s probably someone out there who would take her up on something like that, but in this kind of story? It’s laughable that she even tries to offer it to the X-Men at all—them taking a hard pass on it is a foregone conclusion—but it’s even sort of hard to imagine the Xhaldian transformed going for it, and as far as we can see, none of them do. In the right story, it could be a compelling temptation, but it doesn’t really have any place here.

Stray Bits

• Cover Art Corner: Who is the green guy? Is that a Marvel person, or is it supposed to be a Draa’kon? Also, Riker, please start using conditioner. Your hair has zero volume, buddy.
• Yes, they make the Picard/Xavier comparison a couple of times. I imagine it would hit in a really satisfying way if you read this book at the time it was published and then two years later went to see X-Men, but it’s just kind of mildly “hee hee, ha ha” now.
• Picard and Storm have some romantic chemistry, and to be honest I was kind of into it. Sometimes the whole “captain’s responsibility” thing is really frustrating.
• It’s nice to see Rager make an appearance (since promoted from ensign to lieutenant), even though she doesn’t do anything noteworthy.
• A couple redshirts named Kirby and Ditko make an appearance. Cute homage.
• There’s also a Lt. Glavin in this book, whose name I failed to restrain myself from reading in a Professor Frink voice.
• The word “X-Man” appears several times in this book, and I don’t know how it manages to be ten thousand times more grating on the ear than “X-Men”, but damned if it doesn’t.
• As the Enterprise approaches Xhaldia, Riker simply says “Xhaldia” and Picard nods. Yep! It sure is! I laughed really hard at this. “Hey, check it out, Captain. Planet.” “Yep.” So goofy. (p. 136)
• “Data smiled” — Still weird! Shouldn’t be! It’s been canon for thirty years! But it is! I’ll never not get wigged out by it. (p. 156)

Final Assessment

Bad. Like the comics that it draws so generously from, Planet X is stuffed with characters and action—arguably too many and too much. There are too many villains; characters and friendships don’t have ample space to develop; plot arcs get resolved in the most rudimentary and unsatisfying ways; and the mirthless quipping does nothing to buoy the dialogue. This is fairly dire stuff. If Deep Space Spines wasn’t a completionist project, I probably never would have touched this. I never thought I’d be relieved to be moving on to the Shatnerverse, but here we are.

NEXT TIME: Haunted once more by the Spectre of the Shatnerverse