Star Trek, Year Five: Book 1, Odyssey’s End (IDW, 2020)

Star Trek: Year Five, Book 1: Odyssey’s End

by

Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly, Brandon Easton, Jody Houser, Stephen Thompson, Silvia Califano, J.J. Lendl

(collects issue 1-6)

My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars!

I was truly surprised by this series.

As I read this first story arc, I was pleasantly taken in and had a very enjoyable time. It was not the greatest start to an ongoing, however, it caught my interest by doing a few things well:

Honestly, I went into the first few issues more for amusement than anything else and because I hadn’t read a Star Trek comic in a bit and was feeling the need for some calm, Star Trek positive-ness while inundated on all sides by terrible news and a world seemingly going mad.

• It got the voices and characters of the main cast quite spot-on and I even enjoyed the banter between them, very reminiscent of the series,
• The basic pace and tone were very much like the old show, not overly amped up as many things/adaptations are, to fit into the more modern sensibility of story-telling,
• It felt like an adventure and not an action-packed extravanaganza and,
• It did all the above while still taking the time and care to tweak it all juuuust enough. (This last point I’ll address more in the review of the following issues!)

The first volume brings back the Tholians who were both a curious mystery in the show and one that never got the space it deserved, as well as laying down some tasty new mysteries that brings us a series that is both episodic and has an underlying plot that slowly reveals over the coming volumes/arcs.

In addition, we get the manic madness of the crew returning to a planet that some fans of the show will remember and the result is Kirk, Spock and McCoy finding themselves involved way more deeply than they’d like in the past, present and future of Iotia – the stakes for them as Starfleet officers has rarely been this high, morals conundrums and socio-political turbulence creates unforeseen threats and tensions that they must diffuse!

I appreciated the simple, clean, efficient first few issues as they were solidly in line with the source-material but were not, in my humble opinion, inaccessible to newer readers who hadn’t seen the original series.

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Click below for the reviews of the other volumes:

Star Trek: Year Five, Book 2: The Wine-Dark Deep

Star Trek: Year Five, Book 3: Weaker than Man

Star Trek: Year Five, Book 4: Experienced in Loss