I happened to be reading Star Trek Vol. 4: Pleroma, which deals not a little with Benjamin Sisko’s past and future, at the same time as I watched Starfleet Academy’s "Series Acclimation Mil." As such, the question of why IDW’s Star Trek couldn’t go on longer perhaps answers itself; it is increasing not so much “What You Leave Behind” as it is “What You Leave Behind (Comes for All Licensed Star Trek Fiction Eventually).” Add to it that the early days of IDW’s Star Trek series is now coming back to haunt the crew of the USS Theseus in Pleroma, and indeed this feels like the beginning of the end that it is.

I felt myself constantly pulled in and out of this story. Writers Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing pen a tale that wonderfully blends concepts from across Trek media, and Pleroma is interesting and readable. At the same time, there’s not much to the central conflict aside from the bad guy being bad and the good guys being good. The efforts to line this series up with later developments in Next Generation and Picard can be distracting, especially now that we know that IDW’s Star Trek fails to be canon in a most specific way.