Starting with Wesley Crusher and never-ending from there, Star Trek series have inevitably had their “kid” characters, veritably the young Robin to the rest of the show’s Batmen (or something). They have often been annoying, but as with many things, in retrospect become beloved. Allow me to rattle off: Wesley and Alexander Rozhenko, Jake and Nog, Naomi Wildman and Icheb, … oh, maybe not Enterprise, Adira, … huh, this crackpot theory is falling apart faster than I thought. Suffice it to say, if Picard and Strange New Worlds don’t have any kids in them, that’s balanced by not one but two “all kids” Treks, both Prodigy and Starfleet Academy.

Which is to say, a Sons of Star Trek miniseries branching off from IDW’s Star Trek and Defiant series is inspired. Surely someone in some medium has done a “Trek-kid” team-up story before, but I haven’t read it, so I’m happy to credit the IDW and Sons writer Morgan Hampton with the idea.

[Review contains spoilers]

In execution, Sons is less than I wanted in some respects and more than I wanted in others. The story stars Jake, Nog, Alexander, and “QJ,” the son of Q as seen on Voyager. For a book that is rife with other cameos, however, who does not appear are any of the other “sons” I’ve mentioned, including Traveler Wesley, who’d slot into this plot fairly easily. Again, that’s just my expectations, but in this way Sons is a disappointment, not living up to the unique corner of Trekdom that it could conceivably spotlight.

Hampton mitigates this significantly with his crew of the alt-universe USS Avery that the “sons” are transported to: Skrain Dukat, Tuvix, Jadzia, and Liam Shaw, all “dead” characters, except they’re also joined by Beckett Mariner, drawn as Tawny Newsome (also Nurse Ogawa and bridge officer Morn).

Of all the eclectic alt-history Trek crews that have ever been assembled, this is surely up there as one of my favorites, well-depicted by Angel Hernandez, and kudos too to Hampton that they’re not just there for cameo value, but have arcs — Dukat, weighing the advice of extra-dimensional travelers; Mariner, taking command of the Avery after Dukat’s death; a Jadzia who never merged with Dax and is able then to relate to the sons' sense of placelessness.

In the many times that the sons' plots continue across predictable paths, Hampton’s non-son characters are the ones who keep Sons interesting. Indeed Hampton has a job and he does it, though in the main not any way that deviates from the standard. Four issues, four sons, and more or less each son gets their own issue in which to travel their arc.

There’s a weird, labored conversation in the first chapter where Jake seeks to set aside novel-writing to help people as a journalist and Ben Sisko tries to talk him out of it. The point, as Hampton inevitably comes to in the end, is that Jake should consider his own needs and not always everyone else’s, but it’s an odd reversal of the expected, that Sisko should steer his son away from service. It also feels vaguely privileged in a way the narrative doesn’t seem to grasp, that a starship caption has the luxury of telling his son to be a novelist instead of getting a job, even in Trek’s post-money future.

In that same early conversation, Hampton also has Nog rethinking his decision to join Starfleet, citing that “people don’t respect me.” This may be my biases coming from the Deep Space Nine relaunch novels, but this surprised me, both that Nog should be so lacking in confidence (when in the novels it was much the opposite) and also that in three story years since Sisko’s disappearance, Nog seems not to have changed much. His knocking on his prosthetic leg, a gesture in the art but that the dialogue doesn’t reflect, seemed especially as if someone in the queue didn’t realize time and experience would have passed since Nog was injured.

Here at the beginning and again at the end, Hampton has the characters wear their hearts on their sleeves. QJ veritably speaks every character’s arc aloud at the end: “Jake learned to cope by putting his wants and needs first … Nog learned that underneath the pressures of your culture is a sense of pride … Alexander learned that your mistakes don’t have to define you,” etc. As they beam away, Nog tells the group, “We grew while we were here … Into better versions of ourselves,” and Sisko is asking the characters outright, “How do you feel after this whole ordeal?” Hampton does exactly what he’s supposed to — a story, and it has characters, and those characters change over the course of the story — but that narrative intent in Sons is far too explicit.

My guess is that we won’t hear another word about Sons of Star Trek in IDW’s Star Trek books, at least in part because Worf’s presence at the end seems fairly contrary to Star Trek: Defiant’s general continuity. But there’s an interesting moment at the end that suggests maybe Jake received QJ’s powers somehow, and maybe, who knows, that might factor into the god-focused storylines from Star Trek proper. Equally, that could just be sloppiness — QJ’s “clap” set against Jake’s smiling face just to give QJ one more mention at the end, but the effect is confusion rather than clarity. Sons is perfectly fine, especially if you like these particular characters, though boilerplate in most regards.

[Includes original and variant covers, script page, character sketches]