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.

And in their own way I think Kelly and Lanzing are also wrestling with “What You Leave Behind” in Pleroma. The frustration they express through the characters is only a reminder of the frustration the audience feels, and I don’t think that necessarily benefits the story here.

[Review contains spoilers]

There’s a long Star Trek tradition of ships running afoul of godlike beings. Here, when a time-spanning crisis threatens, the gods come together — not just Apollo and Trelane and Charlie X, but also the Guardian of Forever in its “Carl” guise from Discovery and the adult Rukiya M’Benga from Strange New Worlds, plus cameos by Picard’s Kore Soong and Enterprise and etc.’s Daniels. It’s a wonderful party, if held back a bit by the art; Megan Levens gets the main cast right, but Charlie Evans is unrecognizable up through his death and I’m really unsure which Daniels that is supposed to be. It makes for more looking up of the who’s and what’s online than I necessarily wanted.

We find ultimately that the crisis the Theseus has arrived to the Pleroma to prevent (a crisis they were fated to cause, naturally) is an incursion by Lore, carrying a universe-erasing bomb. This results in a particularly confusing chapter where Lore arrives and demands that Sisko’s mother, the Prophet Sarah, turn Lore into the Emissary lest Lore destroy Bajor. There’s much discussion — only for that to turn out to be a ruse just 12 pages later, and that Lore intends to destroy the universe irrespective.

That Lore wants to be the Emissary is on its face confusing; not that Sisko gained nothing from being the Emissary, but it was often just a title, not a set of mystic powers, so Lore’s covetousness is meaningless. To that end, we’re still caught in the fact that Deep Space Nine itself never really explained this; when Sisko asks his mother to make Lore the Emissary and she replies, “I cannot do what I never did,” it’s a reminder of the DS9 mythology’s own ever-changing ruleset.

I would imagine that, before this series' end, Kelly and Lanzing will offer their own explanation for Sisko’s trials; it seems silly to resurrect him and not to, though I’m not sure the Trek novels ever quite got there either. But it feels here the authors chafe, or let the characters chafe, at what DS9 left unresolved; regarding Sisko possibly relinquishing the Emissary title, Lore taunts, “You capitulate a little power no one even understands.”

Sisko too turns on his mother (whom the writers even have Lore call his “mother-slash-kidnapper”), berating her for being “inscrutable.” Insofar as "Series Acclimation Mil" is a love letter to Sisko and DS9, it too wrestles with DS9’s legacy of having left things unresolved, even irrespective if that can sometimes be a valid narrative choice. Pleroma railing against DS9’s open questions is made all the more poignant since we know now, in canon, that those questions were never resolved.

Pleroma includes the Star Trek Annual 2024, a step back to explain how Data became Lore’s prisoner. It’s a fun bit in that it initially seems to team Data with Miles O’Brien, pulled from academia like the start of an Indiana Jones movie, and then later includes Geordi La Forge, revealing the story as an engineers' get-together. It is not exactly a whodunit, but with Data in a suit and tie for most of the story and Geordi by his side, there’s appealing shades of “Elementary, Dear Data” in this diversion from the main thread.

As I mentioned in my review of Star Trek Vol. 1: Godshock, I don’t find it hard to like Trek characters we’ve never seen on screen, from Mackenzie Calhoun and Burgoyne to Shar ch’Thane, Taran’atar, and Elias Vaughn. But I also noted from that early IDW book that new Theseus crew members T’lir and Lily Sato didn’t feel very distinct to me, and I’m not sure the writers have done enough to sell their friendship over the last three books.

To that end, I found Lily’s anger at T’lir here tedious, that she’s mad that T’lir was a “bad friend” because they didn’t reveal they were really an ancient, endangered god. I recognize we’re seeing Lily’s loss of innocence in Starfleet, a la Nog et al., but it feels a bit simplistic, and the fact that in her anger she then obeyed Section 31 orders without question, endangering her friends, and that it turned out that was a ruse by Lore, isn’t helping necessarily.

Again, writers Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing are writing fine Trek, and their writing of Benjamin Sisko up to and including Star Trek Vol. 4: Pleroma has been quite fine. But there are stumbles; I can’t be convinced “Slap my %&$ and call me Neelix” is something Tom Paris would say, and Megan Levens' art is indistinct at two critical moments — when Theseus goes through the Guardian of Forever and when it goes through a wormhole — that could just be better. I’m enjoying these books; my sense is one more volume and a crossover finale is the right way and the right time to end.

[Includes original and variant covers]