Not that Star Trek Vol. 2: The Red Path lacks action nor consequence, but in comparison to Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing’s first volume, or Christopher Cantwell’s Star Trek: Defiant debut, Red Path (at four main issues) feels smaller overall.

I had wondered, finishing Star Trek Vol. 1: Godshock — with its very direct sense of what this Trek series' “mission” would be, at least for this “season” — whether Kelly and Lanzing would ever treat themselves and the crew of the USS Theseus to any traditional Trek stories: episodic, “distress signal from an alien planet”-type stories. Red Path is still not quite that, but in Captain Benjamin Sisko embedding himself in Cardassian culture, and in the story largely relitigating controversies from the latter episodes of Deep Space Nine, it feels like more of an hour of Trek than Godshock’s ongoing saga.

That’s fine and good, not even unexpected in the interstitial space between IDW Star Trek’s first volume and its upcoming multi-part crossover, Star Trek: Day of Blood,with Defiant, rather like any mainstream series might have a “down trade” before an event. Even if Red Path doesn’t super-forward the series' larger story, a resurrected Sisko among some familiar Cardassians is a story I’m always eager to read. I do think that who’s here and who’s not here, extending through to the including annual, is somewhat demonstrative of these Star Trek comic’s invisible storytelling barriers. That annual too has some bizarre developments that I wonder if the authors will follow up on or if it’s destined to simply have been a weird one-off annual.

[Review contains spoilers]

With Red Path, Kelly and Lanzing’s “return of Benjamin Sisko” story returns to Deep Space Nine, and as I noted in my review of Star Trek Vol. 1: Godshock, post-“What You Leave Behind” DS9 content is really what I’m here for. In that, Red Path is disappointing; there’s Kira, and Quark, and eventually Elim Garak, but that’s the extent of the mainstay DS9 cast in the story, not much more than what we saw when Sisko returned in Godshock. Miles O’Brien and Odo departed the station in the DS9 finale, we know, and Worf is accounted for, but Dr. Bashir should be bopping around somewhere, yeah?

Most surprising is that we haven’t seen Ezri Dax at all, both with Dax as a closer friend to Sisko than most everyone else on the station and for all that this series' overarching story has to do with Klingons, Curzon Dax’s memories were often go-to for Klingon issues. Maybe it’s a licensing thing whom the writers can and can’t use; maybe there’s a plan and they’re simply holding on to surprises for later on; or maybe I’m expecting too much, that Tom Paris would call up pal Harry Kim on the brink of interstellar war. But insasmuch as the character appearances are great — Shaxs, for gosh sake — some of the zigs and zags lead me to suspect unseen limits.

But no small amount of that is mitigated by, indeed, Sisko venturing to Cardassia in search of a missing Orb of the Prophets, and then being put on trial for Dominion War crimes by a relative of Corat Damar. Of course, let’s not be ridiculous, Garak would have to be Sisko’s lawyer, and the fact that both of them end up chained before a firing squad was nigh inevitable.

It reads like an episode of Trek, Sisko willing even to go to his death if it helps the Cardassians to heal, and then equally that it all turns out to be a plot by Barada Damar to eliminate his enemies. The story seems to want for an ending — Sisko is released, but then a Founder is freed, but then the Founder is killed — but in all I thought the writers did well delivering an all-in-one political Trek tale.

The high concept of the included Star Trek Annual 2023 is that a holodeck-type snafu teams the Theseus crew with Trek characters who wouldn’t otherwise be available in this time period — Star Trek: First Contact’s Zefram Cochrane, a la James Cromwell; Enterprise’s Hoshi Sato; Pike, La’an, and Ortegas from Strange New Worlds; Discovery’s Paul Stamets; and William Shatner’s original James Kirk. In practice, I thought it worked less well, to the point where I wondered if Kelly and Lanzing wrote the issue or if, as sometimes happens, there wasn’t a guest writer penning the annual.

The Thesesus, we’ve been told more than once, is an “experimental” ship, though what that means in practice hasn’t been totally clear to me. To wit, here the writers tell us via Scotty that the Theseus is “routing the computer core with holodeck technology,” that word “routing” doing a lot of work and explaining nothing at the same time.

We come to understand that the holograms within Theseus have procured the Voyager EMH’s “Photons Be Free” holonovel from Tom Paris' personal files and now endeavor indeed to “be free,” though a lot of that fall apart under scrutiny. The Doctor’s novel was published (inadvertently, as it were), so why do the holograms only know about it from Tom’s files? (Also that the Theseus gets actionable intel from snooping in Tom’s stuff.) In Voyager’s “Author, Author,” the desire for freedom is expressed by the Doctor, one individual “holo-character,” and by the individual EMH Mark I’s shown to be doing menial labor, but here oddly it appears that by hooking the Theseus up to a holomatrix, all the ships subroutines evolve into separate beings?

It leads to a cool scene crowd scene of holograms where it appears Michael Burnham is talking to Kirk, Saru encounters the post-accident Pike, and Crusher chats with T’Ana while Bones, M’Benga, and the EMH stand near by. But Scotty notes that ultimately, “nearly every sentient program in the computer matrix opted to leave,” which seems like a heck of a hit to the Theseus, far more serious than how quickly the story blows past it. Also all of this happens supposedly on route to the Theseus answering the Defiant’s distress signal for “Day of Blood,” shoehorning this story where it seems rather unlikely.

Again, maybe Star Trek Vol. 2: The Red Path’s annual will be followed up upon, so key to the story that what seems blithe now will be crucial later. I’m doubtful, though; instead sometimes a fun annual wins out over story sense. As with the previous volumes, this one too shows inexperience, panels with poorly placed word balloons and coloring that makes Barada Damar strangely blue and the off-model Jem’Hadar pink, not to mention the LCARS pages that really actively slow the momentum of scenes. But in the main Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing succeed in telling a Deep Space Nine-type story, and that’s a good foot to be on going in to the crossover.

[Includes original and variant covers]