In today’s episode, Picard won’t call off an experiment at the galactic barrier just because Q says he should. But when Q yoinks Picard off the Enterprise to show him some home movies, the rest of the crew has to figure out how to make the clouds stop raining on their parade. Why are most tactical officers so trigger-happy? What guises has Q hung out on Earth in? And what did Guinan do to make Q’s wife big-mad? All this and more in Q-Space, the book that’s made possible in part by Viewers Like You. Thank you.

Q-Space
Author: Greg Cox
Series: Q Continuum 1 of 3
Published: August 1998
Pages: 271
Timeline: After “Message in a Bottle” (VOY 4×14)
Prerequisites: Almost all Q episodes up to this point in the chronology are referenced at least once. Q♀ was introduced in and recurs from “The Q and the Grey” (VOY 3×11). The Calamarain recur from “Deja Q” (TNG 3×13). The galactic barrier was one of the very first concepts ever introduced in Star Trek, first in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (TOS 1×01) and encountered intermittently since, mostly in TOS. Lem Faal’s barrier experiment builds off of work pioneered by Dr. Lenara Kahn in “Rejoined” (DS9 4×06). Iverson’s Disease, the condition from which he suffers, was seen in “Too Short a Season” (TNG 1×16). There are a few others, but they constitute too much of a spoiler to include here.
Borrowable on Archive.org? Yes

The Enterprise-E is hosting a Betazoid scientist named Lem Faal, who hopes to apply some previous research on artificial wormholes to the galactic barrier, which would expand the possibilities of humanoid space exploration beyond all imagining. However, an ulterior motive is almost certainly motivating Faal, who is in poor health and has to take a hypospray hit every so often to keep from keeling over, and often makes cryptic remarks about immortality and/or evolution that honestly should probably have the Enterprise crew throwing up more red flags than they do. Unfortunately, like too many people with an acute interest in the galactic barrier, this motive has warped and poisoned a lot of his attitudes; he nearly hauls off and wallops Barclay when Barclay almost breaks a vital piece of equipment for the experiment, and he couldn’t give a quark about his son Milo and daughter Kinya, the former of whom, quite understandably, resents him quite bitterly.

Just as they’re about to get the show on the road, Q shows up (with wife and baby in tow) and warns Picard to forget about messing with the galactic barrier, turn around, and go home. In characteristically cagey and high-handed Q fashion, he doesn’t tell Picard why, just that he should, and of course that’s not good enough for Picard, who has a whole mandate about pushing the boundaries of space exploration to live up to and whatnot. During an engagement with the Calamarain (the cloud aliens that came after Q seeking revenge when he lost his powers), Q decides Picard needs to be shown rather than told and absconds with him to parts unknown, leaving Riker and the rest to deal with the gaseous threat. But are the Calamarain trying to attack the Enterprise, or warn it?

While Riker tries to say hi to the cloud before it tears them apart, Q takes Picard through some of the pivotal events of what one could consider his youth, showing him (among other things) how messing with matter at the subatomic level led to his first brush with the strict orthodoxy of the Q Continuum, a date with Q♀ on a then much livelier Tagus III that doesn’t go so hot, and, most crucially, an encounter with another powerful cosmic entity whose bum leg (a physical representation of a limitation in his powers that Picard can wrap his mind around) belies a barely-concealed lust for the power he recognizes Q as being able and willing to give him access to. Some of the interludes peppered throughout the story feature an unidentified character who is clearly imprisoned in some kind of cosmic solitary confinement, but it’s not clear who it is until we meet this guy, whose name is Zero,1It’s written in the text as 0, but I don’t want it getting confused with the letter O, so I’ll just write out the word when I refer to him. which sets the stage for the primary antagonist of the next two parts.

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There was one line in this book that hit me like a ton of bricks, and which I believe is the key to the whole thing. It’s at the end of chapter 14, on page 216. Q’s date with Q♀ on Tagus III has gone poorly, much to his chagrin. Unaware that his “future” self and Picard are listening in on him from a distance, he asks himself:

“Just once, why can’t I meet someone who understands me?”

Part of why it landed so hard for me is that that’s exactly what I always wanted from a partner, and through immeasurable fortune found early in life. But it also had a significant impact because it developed Q’s humanity by illuminating an irony I never noticed before: namely, that although he appears before humanity in the guise of seeking to understand them (as a means to judge whether they are worthy to persist in the cosmos), his true desire is for humanity to understand him.

Although Q is presumably millions or even billions of years old by mortal reckoning, none of the 90s Treks ever examined his past. There are plenty of probable reasons, all the ones I can think of being able to be framed as a lack of some sort—lack of time, interest, imagination, budget, etc. The simplest and best, however, is that we never needed to know. Human beings have longed to know the lore of unexamined characters since Milton wrote Paradise Lost, but Q is all about moving humanity forward through his various tests, tricks, and trials. He does have a keen interest in humanity and humanoid cultures, but the wrinkle that makes him a truly fascinating character is the occasional implication that among the entities that make up the Q Continuum, he is largely alone in this interest.

The character of Q♀ has always felt like a tough sell to me, and reading Q-Space, I realize why I never fully bought it: because Q’s soulmate is, always has been, and always will be Jean-Luc Picard. I don’t mean this in the slashy Kirk/Spock or Garak/Bashir way, but rather a kind of warped kin to the agape love described in the New Testament. Although the segments in the past do drag a little, they’re not the rank indulgence they might initially come across as. They’re Q realizing that for the message to be understood, the speaker must be understood first, and he is showing these events to the one specimen in all of humanity he thinks is likely to meet him where he’s at and understand him on his terms. Does it need to take three books? Debatable. But I hope we get to see more of this vulnerability in the next two installments of the trilogy. Certainly I imagine I’ll have more complete thoughts about the Q/Picard relationship by the end.

Elsewhere, the book entertains capably. It’s nice not only to see the Calamarain return, but for more of an effort to be made at communicating with them this time. There are also some characters who play a bigger and more welcome part in the ensemble than generally expected—in this case, Troi and (to a lesser extent) Barclay. Troi is our POV character for the opening chapters of the book, and she has more to deal with concerning Lem Faal than the other characters, since he can invade not just her personal space but her thoughts—and you know he’s only going to become more cantankerous and greedy for whatever it is he thinks the galactic barrier is going to give him as the saga wears on. I also liked how she teamed up with Data to figure out rudimentary communication with the Calamarain; their talents worked surprisingly pleasantly together.

Of course, the true measure of how well this book did what it set out to do will become apparent once the entire trilogy is behind me. But as an amuse-bouche to the main course, it did what I want that sort of thing to do for me. I like Q stories, I like hanging out with the character, and I like his dynamic with Picard. There are a lot of other characters to pay attention to and galactic barrier business at hand, but I hope there’s time to explore at least a little bit of the infinite potential in Q’s adventures across the universe in the pages to come.

MVP & LVP

• I’m giving MVP to Riker on this one. He handles things very well in Picard’s absence, managing a tough balance between shooting and asking questions, giving Data and Troi the space they need to come up with a more diplomatic solution to extracting themselves from the Calamarain while understanding that occasional forceful measures need to be taken to keep them all alive long enough to find that diplomatic solution. It’s an unenviable situation, and he handles it with a remarkable amount of calm and skill.
• My LVP pick goes to Baeta Leyoro, the ersatz Worf standing in at tactical. Is it a Starfleet requirement that all tactical officers have to constantly ask when they can shoot at the thing? ZZZZZ

Stray Bits

• “Mr. DeCandido in Transporter Room Five” is a quick nod to a name we’ll be seeing on a lot of covers in the future. (18)
• It’s implied that Q is a Monty Python appreciator. He asks Picard “What is your quest?”, then, when Picard characteristically refuses to roll with the bit, laments that “some people have no respect for the classics.” (37)
• “Picard handed the enchilada back to Q and wiped his greasy fingers on his trousers.” One of those sentences I didn’t know I needed in my life until the exact instant I read it. What a blast it must have been to not only get to write a sentence like that, but see it printed on actual paper by a publishing company and sold in a bookstore. (38)
• Q♀ has a dislike of Guinan equal to, if not greater than her husband’s, though it isn’t made clear why. Maybe we find out in one of the other two books? (69)
• While inhabiting the form of a three-headed Aldebaran serpent, Picard briefly wonders if “Q” has any connection to Quetzalcoatl. Interesting to imagine Q posing as a god on Earth for a time, as some aliens seem to have done at various times. (154)
• Sesame Street appears to be living, thriving, and surviving in the 24th century, if a reference to something called the “Federated Children’s Workshop” is any indication. (236)

Final Assessment

Good. It’s always tough to rate the first installment of a miniseries on its own, but I’m cautiously optimistic about where we’re headed. Q shows a vulnerability in some parts of the story that make this book more than just crassly mining a character for the kind of lore modern fandom craves. Naturally, a lot of what happens here is mere setup and prelude, but I’m sufficiently excited for what’s to come.

NEXT TIME: The reminiscing and retaliating continue in Q-Zone