One of the stream-of-consciousness notes I jotted down while reading Star Trek Vol. 3: Glass and Bone was that “Voyager was terrible except when it was great.”

Believe me, I write that with much affection. I think it’s a net win that TV shows have whittled down to 10-ish episodes in the streaming era, but one thing about 22-episode runs was that even if every episode wasn’t great (something surely not just limited to Voyager), one still spent such a considerable amount of time with the characters that they grew on you even if their stories didn’t always. It’s why even if the holographic Doctor pining over Seven of Nine was cringeworthy, we still cheer to see the Doctor whole and hearty in the 32nd century.

Glass and Bone is a lot of things, pulling in a lot of different directions — continuing Deep Space Nine-ish plots, an unsubtle lead-in to Next Generation’s final theatrical outing, a kind of classic Trek story that even Starfleet Academy riffed on recently — but the headline, featured on the back of the book (don’t spoil it for yourself!), is Voyager’s. Arguably writers Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing verge on fan fiction, a kind of wish fulfillment tale that rights a supposed wrong done to a character rather than grows naturally from the character’s lore. But I was a fan, too; if perhaps the writers present the Voyager they wanted instead of the Voyager they got, well, some 30 years from “Caretaker,” there are probably worse things.

[Review contains spoilers]

One knock against Glass and Bone is its coincidences, not that it doesn’t come by that honestly. Hailed as heroes after the Day of Blood crossover, Benjamin Sisko’s USS Theseus is sent by Starfleet to investigate a buildup of Tzenkethi forces — the Tzenkethi not only being a semi-untold chapter of Sisko’s history, the Tzenkethi not only having killed ancestors of the Theseus' communications officer, but also Starfleet just so happens to have a secret operative on Tzenketh: Voyager’s Harry Kim, with Tom Paris' infant daughter Miral in tow. (The book makes a point of how Tom doesn’t usually go down to the planet on away missions, but they just so happen to bring him on this one.)

There’s a lot going into that to make this story work. If the Cerritos had been sent to Tzenketh instead, it’d be a less resonant story, letting alone the high unbelievability of Harry bringing a baby with him to a fierce dinosaur planet, assisted by an EMH or not. But one might be willing to leave all that aside simply to hear Tom and Harry bantering again (“B’Elanna can never know.” “Oh, obviously”) or their fantastic two-page heart-to-heart.

If Voyager was sometimes silly (being “turned into a weird proto-salamander” gets a mention), Kelly and Lanzing parlay that into a hotshot pilot who’s lost his taste for adventure and a perpetual ensign who finds himself addicted to the adrenaline rush. I feel like super-spy Harry Kim is wishful thinking, but I’ll be darned if the writers don’t make it cool. Sisko casting a distrustful eye at Harry Kim, of all people, on his bridge is also a great moment. Homecoming and The Farther Shore were an inauspicious start to the Voyager relaunch novels, but I thought the dynamics between Starfleet officers who’d been lost on Voyager and those who fought in the Dominion War was an effective bit, echoed somewhat here.

As I must have demonstrated by now, I’m a bit picky about my Star Trek comics, and that includes that anything significantly outside what the shows and movies might do effects-wise (I grant some would say that’s the value of Trek comics). So the talking dinosaur Tzenkethi were not my favorite (“Terrarium” notwithstanding) and in that way I’d sooner Sisko on trial on Cardassia in Star Trek Vol. 2: The Red Path than I would a pitched dinosaur battle that’s supposed to then be taken as very traumatic for the characters.

That said, coincidentally around the same time I watched Academy’s “Vox in Excelso,” Glass and Bone hits that tried and true Trek trope that the greater act of heroism is not victory but understanding. If predictable — planet secretly on the verge of destruction, et al. — this is still the place Star Trek shines. And I particularly liked the closing beat with the new Cardassian ruler Barada Damar, pleased with the peaceful outcome but considering how to use it to his benefit. This Damar feels like a true complicated Deep Space Nine frenemy in the style of Michael Eddington or Kai Winn, and it’s only a shame this is more of a starship comic than a space station comic.

Artist Marcus To, familiar to me from his DC work, draws all of Star Trek Vol. 3: Glass and Bone, which is nice after parallel title Star Trek: Defiant Vol. 2 struggled with multiple artists. To’s smooth, curvy lines, just this side of animated, are a good choice for this book, rendering the characters not too photorealistic and not too abstract. I don’t see that To is continuing at least with Trek’s next volume, but having one solid artist was a boon to the book.

I’m interested to see if Harry will stick around on the Theseus. Also the commemorative plate on Jake Bartok’s Tom Paris cover is an exceptionally clever touch.

[Includes original and variant covers]