Star Trek: Year Five, Book 2: The Wine-Dark Deep
by
Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly, Jim McCann, Stephen Thompson (Illustrator), Ángel Hernández (Illustrator)
(collects issues 7-12)
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’M GIVING HER ALL I’VE GOT CAPTAIN!
That’s what I was feeling when I was reading this second story arc by Jackson Lanzing and team. The intensity and story-telling really amps up and the art team seems to have found a hell of a groove and it all shows.
We follow the crew as they face a few new standalone challenges and in the meantime we have the running plot of the Tholian child they rescued in the first arc, but there is no magic-translator and Scotty and Uhura have their work cut out for them as they try to (respectively) keep the alien they know next to nothing about, alive, and try and find a way to communicate with it.
We also get a fascinating new species and world in the process as our crew rescues a hitherto unknown alien from a stranded ship and takes them home; in a rare change, it’s Mr. Sulu who is the anchor-point for this particular arc-within-the-arc and the way he is portrayed and the new facet of him that’s explored is one I quite enjoyed. It’s another example of how this series (and comics+animation in general in my view) have an edge over live-action, because the creators are able to build a world and explore it in the biggest and the smallest detail simply due to the lack of budget required – it’s illustration and doesn’t need stunt-people, costumes, make-up, etc, etc and so we see the crew able to do things and go places they never would have before.
In the meantime, the underlying story of this season continues to unfold as the pieces start showing – the infamous Gary Seven and his cat-person Isis cross paths with the Enterprise crew again (and neither side is remotely happy about it!) and the Tholian Assembly starts to make their presence felt and tensions begin to rise and flare.
Will our heroes survive the dangers as they head toward the end of their legendary five-year journey? Or will tragedies strike? Who or what is working behind the scenes against the Federation and what is their end-game? I can tell you all but it’s too good and in case you plan to take my word that this is a great series, I don’t want to spoil anything for you!
Acting as Showrunners (an apt title in fairness), Lanzing alongside Collin Kelly, do a very admirable job building on the 3 seasons that came before while charting new paths – in many ways these first two story arcs have drawn me into Star Trek again in a way that pretty much none of the recent live-action reboots have been able to do.
And that concludes the review for the second volume – the next two will be posted shortly (I’m already writing out the reviews!) so please feel free to swing back and check out how this exciting adventure of the intrepid Starship Enterprise continues!
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Click below for the reviews of the other volumes:
Star Trek: Year Five, Book 1: Odyssey’s End
One Happy Monk 
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