With Star Trek Vol. 5: When the Walls Fell, it seems writers Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzig are getting a little punchy. It’s the final collection essentially, just short of the Star Trek: Lore War crossover and finale, and maybe that’s the reason for the book going meta, but I wasn’t convinced. In pitting Trek franchise against Trek franchise, the authors clearly favor a side, but the digs they take are mundane, nothing better than what most everyone else observed some 10-plus years ago.

At the same time, the whole premise of Kelly and Lanzig’s Star Trek centers around explaining an otherwise unexplainable Star Trek mystery, and here at the final inflection point, they seem to perform admirably. If it holds up, it feels like a win, an answer that seems perfectly obvious once given, and maybe that’s a fair trade for some silliness at the start.

As far as the IDW Star Trek series goes, I can’t judge Vol. 5 as its finale since, month to month, it really isn’t, though we do only have two more issues (within “Lore War”) to go. Which is to say, just for my own sense of orderliness, I might have liked for Walls to offer more of a closing act for the whole of the crew of the USS Theseus ahead of “Lore War,” and it does not. Just all the more pressure for Kelly and Lanzing to stick this book’s ultimate ending, and not much room to do it in.

[Review contains spoilers]

Toward the end of the book, the Theseus crew come to find that Lore has fully decimated their entire universe, with the sole remaining object being the Bajoran wormhole (or the Celestial Temple, for those who celebrate). When they fly through, the art makes a clever shift from the more traditional Trek photorealistic to Tess Fowler’s fantasy-infused painterly work, bolstered by Lee Loughridge’s watercolor effects. Only Benjamin Sisko arrives, in what seems to be ancient Bajor, before knowledge of the Prophets and before many of the Bajoran religious and political practices that we know from Deep Space Nine.

All is not yet revealed, but it rather seems like over a millennia, an immortal Sisko becomes a “prophet” to the Bajorans, teaching them of kais and orbs and the like, until he himself travels out to space and arrives at the wormhole again, with the Bajoran Prophets inside. Sisko’s mother is there, the Prophets know of him and they know of Lore — the Prophets being nonlinear, of course — so it is not as though Sisko “discovers” the Prophets, but we have a sense of a loop being closed. When the Prophets say that Sisko is “of Bajor,” it’s because he arrived from there, though in the nonlinear way of the Prophets, that’s after they told him that he was.

Deep Space Nine — like X-Files, Lost and what have you — appeared in the end to have more seasons than mythos. Thus the late-series revelation that Sisko’s human mother had been possessed by a Prophet for reasons only barely explained, and knocking Dukat into a fire pit didn’t quite seem like it. Bringing Sisko back, and explaining what never had an explanation besides “the show left it vague,” has been IDW Star Trek’s raison d’être, and here finally we have it, of sorts.

Deep Space Nine could never explain why Sisko was “of Bajor,” Walls posits, not because there wasn’t an answer, but because Sisko had not yet been “of Bajor” according to our linear time, even if it was already true for the Prophets. That’s exceptionally smart on Kelly and Lanzing’s part, an answer that works within what Deep Space Nine established about the Prophets, and one that generously recasts what came before not as questions with no answer, but questions that shouldn’t at that point have had an answer, in a very Trek-ian way.

That flash of brilliance helps to balance the beginning of the book, a crossover with the Kelvin timeline Enterprise. As IDW’s series is the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” of Star Trek, sure, bringing in the Kelvin crew is sensible, though I’m sure we can all rattle off a half-dozen alternate timelines the Theseus could have visited (not to mention we’ve yet to do the Mirror Universe with this series). But we’re in for it as soon as Tom Paris observes the other Enterprise is “swoopier,” and that continues with mention of the ubiquitous tubes, the slick floors — even lens flares get a nod.

These are in-jokes, and not that there’s not a time and place, but it felt opinionated — more about the writers than about the story. And that’s on the heels of an issue where the Theseus meets Species 8472, and despite that Voyager made a halting peace with them on the show, Walls' writers present a new debriefing from Captain Janeway where she chalks that peace up to bad judgment. Even within the story, the characters reject Janeway’s about-face as being un-Starfleet-like, mistrusting the unknown and etc., but this, too, feels opinionated — the writers disagreeing with and so putting their own spin on what Voyager established — and that didn’t sit right with me. (Though I did cheer at the Theseus using Discovery’s spore drive to get out of there.)

Arguably IDW’s Star Trek finds its finale in the single issue between the Kelvin crossover and the Bajor issues, as the crew spends a last night together as the only people in the universe. The “captain cooks for everyone” bit feels too inspired by Strange New Worlds, I felt some of artist Mike Feehan’s characters were off model, and again, the writers inject too much of themselves — name-checking Jack Kirby, for instance. But the final scenes with Sisko and Doctor Crusher are excellent, echoing Star Trek Vol. 1: Godshock, and reminding us Starfleet widowed both of these characters. I bristle a bit at the unspoken suggestion that Sisko might be closer to the Theseus crew than he was to those on Deep Space Nine, but that issue makes a good argument for it, and maybe that’s an ending?

So, Star Trek Vol. 5: When the Walls Fell reaches the cusp of this Star Trek-licensed-fiction-era’s conclusion, and spends then an entire issue suggesting maybe the clone Kahless was (again putting the future before the past) actually the legendary Kahless after all. It’s a fine issue, though I think the writers believe this to be more interesting than the audience does when there’s so few issues left. Take metaphors from that as you will. A volume of Defiant and a crossover left to go.

[Includes original and variant covers]