Star Trek: Voyager – Seven’s Reckoning [IDW, 2020]

Star Trek: Voyager – Seven’s Reckoning

by

Dave Baker (writer), Ángel Hernández (Illustrator) and Ronda Pattison (colours)

A chance encounter with a reptilian alien race draws Seven of Nine and the rest of the U.S.S. Voyager crew into an ancient class conflict that’s on the brink of exploding into all-out war! Set during Star Trek: Voyager‘s amazing fourth season, Seven finds her newfound humanity in conflict with her commitment to the Prime Directive. When she finally makes her choice, will it have the desired result? And will there still be a place for her aboard the Voyager once the dust clears?

The first issue kicks off with an excellent start to this mini-series, good fun read and very nice capture of the characters and vibe from the show. The interactions between them, the dialogue and the pacing was spot on in my view and set up an interesting premise to kick off the story. The Voyager crew encounter a drifting but ailing alien ship and inadvertantly awaken the slumbering (cryo/stasis) inhabitants, a reptilian race called the Ohrdi’nadar. Thereafter an accord is reached wherein Seven will remain on board to help the species repair and in exchange, Voyager will get some supplies to help their own journey homeward.

Extra special mention to the art.

It was excellent! Clean, crisp and whether they used references or tracing or what, I don’t know, but the faces in particular were very good and the expressions and body language in many panels/pages really felt like I was looking at stills from the show itself. Every environment felt tangible without things being photo-real, the vibe of both ships could be felt, the body language of people, the colour palettes and the layouts were all very good and really enhanced the experience of reading the story. There were some weak panels here and there but over 4 issues, I can honestly say I loved the vast majority of it; not an easy feat when the whole story is predominantly people talking and walking and working at engineering repairs and on occassion having moments alone and the like. Truly solid work.

As we enter chapter two, we get to focus squarely on the time that 7-of-9 is spending with her new work crew. Seven has always been a fan-favourite character and that is in no small part to her complicated character as a drone seperated from the Borg collective and trying to re-integrate into life as an individual.

Now she is seperated from the Voyager crew and is spending time with the lower-caste of the Ohrdi’nadar who do the grunt work to keep the ship alive and functioning and she is appalled at the social differences between the classes. Forced to question things including her own world view as a former Borg, Seven is approaching a crossroads in her thinking and in the situation in which she finds herself.

The tensions between the highborn Kz’ar and lowly Vesh move from simmering to boiling point as we enter the 3rd and 4th chapters and Sevens’ state of mind is far from at ease. She has a choice to make and the consequences could be catastrophic if she chooses wrong – for both ships and their crews. Will she disobey the principles of her own Starfleet crew and support her new Vesh friends? And what will be the aftermath of her choices?

Soon, Sevens’ journey comes to a close and she must face the consequences of her actions. Through her time spent with the Vesh, she has had to face what it means to be an individual as well as part of a collective and what it all really means. She has struggled with her past and her present as well and what it means to her to be human.

Personally I think this would have been a great character centric episode to have had for the show itself but I am glad it got a space here because it is a fantastic story and the culture of this new alien race that treats everything in life as a narrative and a story is both an interesting premise/approach and is deftly handled by Baker and as a reader, it is interesting to overlay some of that on stories in general – not just this one.

A great entry into the Star Trek story library and one I would 100% recommend to anyone who is a fan of Star Trek and of Voyager.