Almost at the end, it seems certain Christopher Cantwell’s Star Trek: Defiant never found its direction. After a single promising volume of the rogue Defiant crew on the run, they’ve proceeded to complete just one mundane mission for Starfleet, coincidentally run afoul of parasites on the way home, and then further coincidentally got waylaid after that. There was a strong premise here of Star Trek by way of Suicide Squad or The Dirty Dozen, but four volumes in, Cantwell’s hasn’t stopped meandering enough to make something of it.

But there’s very little that can’t be surmounted when a book is good, and Star Trek: Defiant Vol. 4: The Stars of Home is very good, the best volume since the first. The loose picaresque format of Defiant squanders its promise, but who doesn’t like a gritty war story of heroes about to face overwhelming odds, and Stars delivers. Set against it, Cantwell reintroduces Trek’s favorite Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to opine on war and morality; it’s great, and with one volume left, I wish we’d gotten more of these.

[Review contains spoilers]

I decried that Star Trek: Defiant Vol. 3: Hell Is Only a Word spent its whole volume with the crew battling a threat that just happened to be on the space station they were visiting; a story, yes, but incidental to the Defiant cast. Arguably Stars of Home has the same problem, if not as severe. This is the culmination of Sela’s arc, and she’s been a mainstay on the title, but still, had Worf and the others left orbit a little sooner, they wouldn’t be involved in Sela’s machinations now. Further, as with Hell, though everyone grows a bit character-wise, the overarching story of these renegade Starfleet officers barely moves an inch.

And yet. One thread of this book is Worf, B’Elanna Torres, and Ro Laren trying to prepare peace-loving aliens for war with the Romulans, a familiar trope but one done well here, especially once things get bloody. The other is that Cantwell has Miles O’Brien and Julian Bashir on their way to assist, but not arriving until close to the end, giving the two plenty of time to consider all the shades of gray in their own lives (plus a third thread with Spock and Sela). Maybe the elements wouldn’t have been as powerful on their own, but in juxtaposition, Cantwell has managed something great.

It’s a thrill to see O’Brien here, to start with, following his appearance in Star Trek Vol. 4: Pleroma. Miles is Deep Space Nine’s preeminent innocent, despite or even because of all his dark times. We know Miles has killed in war, we know he has prejudices, but at heart he’s a family man, meaning no harm, just trying to get through the day — it’s this dichotomy that made it so fun for DS9 to put him in wrenching situations. Those two sides are immediately at the forefront: Miles is teaching a straightforward engineering class at Starfleet Academy when he’s accosted by a cadet calling him a “war criminal.”

Soon after that, O’Brien is on the move, and it’s not too long before Bashir joins him. Again, Cantwell works in coincidences — O’Brien, we understand in the end, doesn’t even understand the message Worf has sent him, but ventures out anyway; Bashir manages to catch up with and disable the Defiant, really coming out of nowhere, and we get no sense of Bashir’s current status whatsoever. In all of this, Cantwell demonstrates O’Brien and Bashir’s utility as far more thematic than necessarily driven by the plot.

But that’s fine, because these two DS9 stalwarts deliver an excellent DS9-esque morality play. O’Brien worries over whether having created weapons, even “for good,” makes him a war criminal, mitigated only by the fact that making war with weapons is a step up from when he’s killed in battle face-to-face. In one of the friends' best scenes, Bashir is mostly stoic, but Cantwell and artist Angel Unzueta wisely turn the camera to his face at key moments, subtly referencing Bashir’s own struggles trying to use Section 31 for his own ends without betraying his ethics.

This is set against surprisingly bloody scenes for a Star Trek book, with Worf lopping off heads and arms; Worf’s former colleagues may worry over their souls, but Worf (and Torres and Ro) seem to have no such concerns. We have here, again, a remote and peaceful people, the Antarans, drawn into a conflict with the Romulans for want of their planet, not anything the Antarans did personally, and it ends with an Antaran villager killing the head of the Romulan empire. While O’Brien and Bashir fret in the sky, on the ground war is distilled into something much simpler, equalizing the participants irrespective of species or age or rank.

Unzueta’s work landed better for me here than it did on Star Trek: Defiant Vol. 3: Hell Is Only a Word, matching more what I liked on Star Trek: Defiant Vol. 1. I can’t explain that, necessarily — when the same artist looks different on two different books, check the inker, though in this case, Unzueta inked all his own volumes. I can only assume that the attempt at gritty space horror art in Hell simply didn’t pan out, and I’m glad to see Stars is back up to form.

Again, all of that makes for a strong book, if not a strong Defiant story. The last volume and crossover will tell the final tale, but there’s concluding here as if Star Trek: Defiant Vol. 4: The Stars of Home could function as the finale itself — Worf giving over the Defiant to Torres, and a poignant good-bye between Worf and Spock, ambassadors two. Maybe we’ll see the Defiant along to rescue Worf and his son Alexander a chapter hence — that’s keeping to an extent with Christopher Cantwell’s aesthetic for this book — but I wouldn’t be disappointed if the cast indeed went their own separate ways into the actual end, too.

[Includes covers]