Books: Star Trek: Coda: Oblivion's Gate by David Mack (2021)

 

"At the end of Moments Asunder, author James Swallow’s middle chapter of the Coda trilogy, our reneged Starfleet folks have taken shelter in the Mirror Universe to escape Admiral William Riker, who is being influenced by some kind of temporal personality disorder, and the Devidians’ attack across all of time. Here we meet new versions of our familiar characters, including Luc Picard, the captain of the CSS Enterprise and Director Savvik of Memory Omega, a scientific facility that houses all kinds of advanced technology. It is also here that the team of Data, Spock, and Wesley, using the Bajoran Orb of Time, learn a horrible truth about their existence and what they’ll have to sacrifice if they’re going to stop the end of the universe."

 

While Oblivion‘s Gate hits the ground running, once I got some fifty pages into it and learned that entire two decade run of Star Trek novels since Nemesis (well, really since First Contact) has actually been set in an alternate branch of the Prime Timeline seen in TNG, DS9, and VGR –called First Splinter- and this revelation left me cold. I mean, I’ve not read a lot of those Star Trek books that have been published in the last 20 years, but then I began to think about those long time readers who have. So then comes the Coda trilogy, and watch out, because this series is now saying that every single event these readers have read in those books, every character moment they have loved, every emotional loss and success that the crews of various series has encountered, has now been explicitly erased –they never happened. So all those relationships the readers have invested in, the ongoing Picard and Crusher relationship, or Janeway and Chakotay one, all the journeys these characters have been on in the last two decades are lost, leaving no mark in the extended Lit universe of Star Trek.

 

While the notion of First Splinter tangent was created during the events of Star Trek: First Contact film is an intriguing idea, as I read, I began to realize the cause to effect of this revelation and then it makes me feel there should’ve been a better way to close out this portion of the Trek-Lit line. Sure, the writers of this trilogy remind us what Star Trek has always stood for: self-sacrifice, the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, that giving up their lives in the service of stopping the Devidians is a noble cause, but it comes with the idea that nobody will know what they did.

 

This theme has also been done many times before on the Star Trek live-action series, especially on Voyager, in the two-part Year of Hell, Timeless, and series finale, Endgame. It’s a shame that this was the only way three talented writers could end this two decade period.

 

Sure, Disney labeling their Star Wars EU novels as “Legacy” tales not connected to the franchise relaunch back in 2015 angered long-time readers, but they have (for good or bad, depending on your view) cherry picked some of the best characters and situations from them, especially for both the animated series and Disney+ live-action series. So repeating this error with the Star Trek books was not going to work.

 

For good or bad, for me, the Coda trilogy does not end on a hopeful or optimistic note. In addition, while as I've said, I’ve not devoted a lot of time to these various novels over the last twenty years, I can see where some that have will not be pleased with what has been done here. Then again, there may be an equal number who loved all of it.

 

But for me, the series (and this book) has too much going on, too much jumping around, too many characters to keep track of, so it became an effort to keep things in some cohesive structure. Had I read the seventeen novels and other short stories that comprise this conclusive series, I may have felt more connected. Try as they might, I do feel anyone reading this series will need to have read those previous books to really get a better perspective from them.

 

But again, this was all designed to retcon Star Trek Picard into the literary Star Trek universe. My end thought is maybe they just should’ve just slapped “Legend” on the old books and been done with it.