In today’s episode, the Faal family comes down with a nasty case of silver eye, and Zero breaks out of galactic confinement as Q’s PowerPoint finally reaches its last slide. But it will take a blast of minty fresh breath to counter Zero’s hot air. Why is Picard so slow on the uptake? What kind of damage can writing too much Q do to your prose? And has my teaching career coincidentally prepared me for this moment? All this and more in Q-Strike, the book that’s on its way to get some head.

Q-Strike
Author: Greg Cox
Series: Q Continuum 3 of 3
Published: September 19981There’s one more August ’98 publication, but I wanted to keep the trilogy together.
Pages: 272
Timeline: Immediately following Q-Zone
Prerequisites: See previous entries
Borrowable on Archive.org? Yes, which means you can read the beginning and end of the trilogy on the Internet Archive, but not the middle. Sucks!

Picking up directly from where Q-Zone left off, there’s still a bit of the business in the past to wrap up. Zero and his pals face banishment for their wanton destruction of the Tkon Empire, but Zero isn’t having it. They try to run and hide, but are quickly found. An interstellar war that directly causes many cataclysmic events in the franchise (and also Earth’s ice age) breaks out, lasting several millennia, but in the end Zero is imprisoned in the galactic barrier, his friends banished to various black holes and other impenetrable parts of the galaxy, and Q gets off the hook for making the decisive turn against him in the war.

In the present, now that Lem Faal and his son Milo both have the Gary Mitchell eyes, he carries out his experiment without any mortal able to stop him, and even though the wormhole only stays open for one second, it’s enough for Zero to get out and start wreaking havoc on Q and the Enterprise. Of course, with the increase in phenomenal cosmic power comes the lapse in sanity, as Lem Faal and Zero each occasionally lose their grip on their own identities. Curiously, however, only Lem falls victim to that. I guess children don’t have enough selfish desires for the barrier to impact them that way? Anyhow, as Faal turns sickbay into his own twisted research lab and studies the infant Q with brutal clinicality, Zero pursues grownup Q all over the Enterprise, hoping to draw out the chase and scare the wits out of Q before dealing the final blow.

Completing the trilogy confirmed my suspicion that it would probably have been better served as one 400ish-page event novel rather than three separate books. Individually, the installments are fun enough, though Q-Strike, outside of a badass climax, is easily the weakest. Part of the reason for that weakness is that it brings a lot of things that nipped at the edges of my awareness into sharp relief. For example, it seems like Picard was unusually slow on the uptake. Should it really have taken him so long to understand that Q was showing him all this as a way of telling him that the galactic barrier is not for keeping stalwart explorers in, but rather for keeping threats like Zero out? Dramatic irony, I suppose, though not the most cleanly executed example I can recall.

Picard may be a spectator for most of the trilogy, but he’s only the most prominent example of one. Another issue is that anyone without powers ends up mostly a bystander, either waylaid by someone with preternatural abilities or unable to do anything about them. Only Riker, who takes some decisive action when reason spends too long not working, and Data, who works tirelessly with Barclay and others to create a translation matrix for communicating with the Calamarain and wisely makes no attempt to solve the problem of multiple trickster gods running amok on the ship, feel like they’re actively part of something resembling progress toward a solution. It’s simply the product of the antagonists and deuteragonists operating outside and beyond their reality, but it is a little unfortunate.

Another danger of writing for Q and other demigods with grossly inflated egos for eight hundred pages is that one can’t help their own prose turning at least light purple. That’s the shade for most of the duration, and although I could name more than a few five-dollar words that deepen it temporarily, it reaches its darkest complexion near the end when Cox refers to Zero as a tatterdemalion. Is it technically correct? Yes. Is it a word that I am itching to slip into my next party conversation? Not exactly. I consider Greg Cox a great Trek writer, but it seems like writing this story got the best of his restraint at times.

And speaking of restraint, there’s no one with less of it than Zero. My wife is extremely not into Q episodes, which I accept even as I disagree with her. But Zero’s tortured syntax made me appreciate that position a bit more. I think it’s harder to take because you know from the pacing of the rest of the trilogy that he’s going to go down swift and hard—in a matter of pages, if not paragraphs—and more bluster doesn’t necessarily make that defeat more satisfying. Q-Strike has one of those unfortunate lines that ends up accidentally describing the book on a meta level, which is that Picard, awaiting the end of his trip to the past with Q, is “eager for this odyssey to reach some conclusion” (77). At no time did I feel that more acutely than when Zero opened his mouth.

Only in the final moments does Q-Strike build up to an exciting level of intensity, when Q takes the chase into the holodeck and runs The Tempest, then (spoiler) joins forces with the Calamarain to take down Zero, a moment so awesome it makes me wonder if the entire impetus for the trilogy spawned from the question “What if Q and the Calamarain put aside their mutual animus to join forces against a greater threat?” and was reverse-engineered from there. Otherwise, the wrap-up of Q’s context takes up too much of the book for the rest of it to get moving at a satisfying pace, and most of the crew seems oddly impotent in the face of the threat. Cox writes Q very well, but just because Q-Strike‘s one climactic nitro boost happened to carry it across the finish line doesn’t mean it ran the whole race well, particularly in this final installment.

There’s a lot to love in the Q Continuum trilogy. If you crave the Odd Couple-esque interplay between Q and Picard, you’ll more than get your fill of it here. Picard gets in enough passive-aggressive digs to singlehandedly fill his own Ferengi Rules of Acquisition–sized chapbook. Cox also proves his Trek bona fides several times over with callbacks that elicit appreciation without being forced or intrusive. (He even manages a nod to Slug-o-Cola!) But eight hundred pages is a fairly major ask, considering 90 percent of the action comprises either watching an emotionally stunted omnipotent being unpack the baggage of his youth or seeing the rest of the senior crew figure out how to talk to a cloud. It’s not a bad trilogy, but I definitely wish I liked it more than I did.

Ten Forward Toast

This time, we’re pouring one out for the unfortunate Ensign Clarze, the Deltan helmsman who makes what I’ll call the Three O’Clock High Mistake: he touched the villain.2CW for homophobic language at the beginning of the clip. I watched this movie for the first time this past summer at the behest of a friend who’d been asking me to for years. As 80s high school movies go, it’s got a more surreal vibe than most, and it’s nice that the students actually seem to like each other in general rather than the various cliques hating each other for no reason, as too often happens in these sorts of films, but the movie doesn’t seem to realize its alleged “bully” is too sympathetic for it to work on the terms it asks the viewer to accept. Buddy Revell is a rich and fascinating character that doesn’t get talked about enough in discussions of 80s teen cinema, but overall I wish I liked it more than I do. And then Zero desecrates his corpse by reanimating it and sending it right back to navigating like nothing happened. Sickening!

There’s one other person who would get a TFT as well, if she hadn’t made probably the single strongest contribution to ensuring victory…

MVP & LVP

• Well, how about that: Baeta Leyoro earns my MVP for a noble sacrifice that, had she not made it, would have severely reduced the chances of the Calamarain entering the fray, if not eliminated them altogether. I didn’t like the cut of her jib for the first two books, but she really came through in this one. I think that’s the first LVP-to-MVP turn we’ve ever had in a miniseries?
• Most of the humanoid crew members are reduced to standing idly by while the characters not bound by mortal flesh run the show, but perhaps no character suffers from this more than Dr. Crusher. I honestly can’t remember a single thing she did in this book that moved the needle one way or the other.

Stray Bits

• The infant Q is often posited by both Lem Faal and Zero as the next stage of evolution, but similarly to how the baby is considered the future of the Continuum in “The Q and the Grey”, this is ultimately never addressed.
• I feel like I should have realized this earlier, but it’s fully spelled out in the banishment sequence that The One is “God” from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. In the war between the Q Continuum and Zero et al., he’s reduced to just his head and locked away at the center of the galaxy. Zero locks the Enterprise into a course to go pick him up, but they never make it.
• Beaning into the holodeck, Q hides from Zero in The Tempest. That struck a real-life chord, since we read that for our final unit of the year in my sophomore English classes. [Appreciative nod.]
• Though Zero’s alliteration is truly enervating, I was genuinely impressed with a single sentence containing thirteen Q words and actually making sense: Q is for quitter, whose questionable quibbles and querulous qualms quashed my quintessential quest and quickened my quiddity to queer and quiescent quarantine. Some of that enjoyment, however, may be due to the fact that he kept that thought in his head instead of saying it out loud. (117–18)
• Although Q’s life flashes before his eyes chronologically, he remembers Guinan before Farpoint Station. What happened? Not revealed! It’s as much as a mystery as the reason they put hands up at each other when they reunite in “Q Who?”. Cox, you tease! (238)

Final Assessment

Average. Q-Strike took too long to wrap up what was already hundreds of pages of backstory and wound up dispatching its major threats too quickly, resulting in the trilogy kind of coasting to a close (with the exception of one isolated bang). Cox is a formidable writer, but I suspect that prolonged exposure to Q and similar deities would have a deleterious effect on any writer’s prose and pacing. Zero is far more annoying as a villain than threatening, yet somehow that doesn’t make his downfall more satisfying. If you like the Q/Picard dynamic, this trilogy will give you plenty of that, but not much else.

Rating for the Q Continuum trilogy as a whole (not an average): Average

NEXT TIME: All Pathways eventually lead to Voyager