This week, a jaunt to the Gamma Quadrant leads to love for Pike!Enterprise’s goofiest-looking crewman, but the premature closure of the gate that brought them there forces them to leave before she can engage his hyperdrive. Several years later, when the Enterprise returns for a hopefully rosier second outing, she dares to quit before her people can fire her, to which they respond by holding the Federation’s contact team hostage. Will Kirk figure out how to extract his people before the gap closes for another three decades? Will Jose Tyler finally get the sweet, sweet Gamma Quadrant strange he was denied all those years ago? Is it shorter to list the things that don’t offend a Tellarite? All this and more in The Rift, a romance 33.4 years in the making.
Tag: first contact Page 1 of 2
This week, the Enterprise is making first contact with a world where three distinct species evolved from a common ancestor and peaceably coexist, and Starfleet is keen to get all of them on board for Federation admission. Kirk gives McCoy the conn for laffs, but when he disappears shortly after going planetside, it’s not so funny all of a sudden. Before he knows it, Bones has Starfleet and the Klingons, among other threats, breathing down his neck. What’s the most alien-sounding Earth language? Is Dr. McCoy a closet capitalist? When Naraht’s not on-screen, should everyone be asking, “Where’s Naraht?” It’s the book that reminds us that the universal translator wasn’t built in a day.
(This is really late, I know. Christmas and all. Sorry to anyone who was invested in it!)
Picking up immediately where the previous mission left off, it’s clear right off the bat we’re not in Kansas anymore. Geometric shapes stand out against a dense star field, and a giant three-eyed head of lettuce presides over the group. This is it: the final test.
Remember First Contact? Of course you do, it’s great. (At least, I recall that being the case. Not gonna lie, I’ll be kind of shook if it’s not when I revisit it.) Well, this week’s event novel is more like the supermarket tabloid version of that well-known tale. A tell-all book has just been released positing that the series of events generally 555accepted as Earth’s first exposure to Vulcan were in fact not as such, and that the real first contact happened twenty years prior. Meanwhile, Kirk and Spock have dreams, each independently of the other, that they were involved in the whole crazy shebang somehow. Were they? or is the book just that gripping?
For the first time in recent memory, we’ve got an introduction. I think they fell by the wayside because authors realized we’re interested in our favorite crew and not their silly self-indulgent life stories, but mercifully it’s a short one. Still, even in only six short paragraphs, I found enough to give me pause (emphasis = my own):
“Over the years, it’s gotten ever harder to resist the temptation to watch the reruns, particularly when they’re showing gems like the Gary Seven episode, ‘Assignment: Earth,’ and ‘The Menagerie.'”
“Assignment: Earth” a gem? Really? “Assignment: Earth” is in my bottom five episodes. Should this seismic divergence of opinion worry me about the story ahead? Only one way to find out…