Coincidences abound in both the third volumes of IDW’s Star Trek and Star Trek: Defiant series.

In some respects Star Trek lives on coincidences — the Enterprise is flying through space when it encounters an anomaly, and off we go. But while Star Trek: Defiant Vol. 3: Hell Is Only a Word is a satisfactory attempt at space horror, gritty and grimy in the way that differentiates Defiant from its sister series, the larger story gets lost in this coincidental diversion in a way that feels inartful.

Writer Christopher Cantwell forwards some of the character plots, but not the story overall; a smoother approach would have tackled both, so the story doesn’t feel paused while the characters develop or vice versa. There’s a lot of action here, and if more comes of it, great, but I suspect it’s done-in-one, and that makes me concerned whether Cantwell has enough material for all of Defiant’s pages.

[Review contains spoilers]

After a series of undercover bounty hunting missions, the crew of the Defiant is disillusioned with Starfleet and each other, ready to disband. They have to stop at the decrepit Starbase 99 to drop off one of their quarry, the former Borg Hugh, and wouldn’t you know, it’s infested by the parasites from the Next Generation episode “Conspiracy.”

The five issues are almost entirely taken up with the Defiant crew trying to escape the space station. In that way, while the adventure (and the sacrifice of crew member Nymira) does reignite camaraderie among the group, the story is something of a bottle episode, and makes no great change to the status of the Defiant and what its purpose is. On the other side, in Star Trek Vol. 3: Glass and Bone, when a crew member coincidentally encounters their own family, at least the Theseus is on a mission from Starfleet; since the Day of Blood crossover, the Defiant has spent four issues undercover, deciding to break up, and now five issues simply going home to enact that one way or the other.

“Conspiracy” has a controversial place in TNG lore, loved and demeaned, considered at times too graphic for television in TNG’s first season when the show was still figuring itself out. Defiant Vol. 3’s opening LCARS page spoils that the story is about the parasites, if you didn’t already know, with Dr. Crusher recounting the events. She writes that there being “very little left of Lieutenant Commander Remmick to investigate” after “the dual-beam phaser fire that killed him destroyed his entire cranial structure in an explosive rupture,” calling it “disappointing, as I very much would have liked to have had a look at his brain.”

Beginning there, I thought the story might function as a critique of “Conspiracy,” with Cantwell’s Crusher suggesting the violence was un-Starfleet-like, as opposed to some opportunity for study or learning. But ultimately Hell Is Only a Word proceeds along mostly familiar ground, with indeed another two-phaser head explosion scene and the boilerplate Xenomorph theatrics. We do learn more about the parasites, but nothing surprising or to differentiate them much from the Borg, the early Species 8472, or Strange New Worlds' Gorn.

I did think Cantwell had a clever solution to a parasite infecting B’Elanna Torres, which was to have Hugh inject her with Borg nanoprobes, the latter collective overriding the former. In line with what Cantwell has established about Hugh, dovetailing with Picard’s first season, it’s interesting to see Borg technology used here for healing instead of hurting. At the same time, given the outward sign of B’Elanna’s assimilation is a familiar ring around her eye, I’m surprised the whole thing brooked no mention of her time with Seven of Nine.

After the main Star Trek series hosted a variety of artists of various prowess, one selling point for Star Trek: Defiant Vol. 1 was Angel Unzueta’s depictions all the way through, photorealistic without being distracting and with enough edge for this “darker” Trek book. But in this third volume, perhaps overcompensating for the subject matter, I didn’t find Unzueta quite so effective; there’s a lot of scenes of the characters standing around with their mouths half open, a lot of times where characters who should be looking at one another instead seem to be staring down at the floor. Once or twice it felt as though there was an extra panel — a character is pushed and then keeps falling — that made me question just how well script and art were working together.

Again, maybe we’ll come to find that the parasites are the big villains of this Defiant series, and that if Worf encountering the parasites again on Starbase 99 is coincidental, at least it helps shape the IDW Trek run. But I’m skeptical; my better guess is that after Star Trek: Defiant Vol. 3: Hell Is Only a Word, the crew leaves the parasites behind, as much as flash in the pan as they were in Next Generation (an abandoned first attempt at the Borg). Christopher Cantwell has two Defiant volumes left; I’m eager to see him make something of them.

[Includes original and variant covers]