Star Trek – Enterprise, Daedalus & Daedalus’s Children
I tried to enjoy this story, but it was an unpleasant experience for me. It starts with the Enterprise NX01 crew investigating an anomaly in a distant system. They visit the system to study the anomaly and they suffer a swift invasion by the system’s inhabitants and the crew are arrested. Trip and Hoshi manage to avoid arrest by launching away in a small, highly advanced Suliban cell ship and are picked up by an opposing faction of inhabitants who reveal that the system is in the middle of a long standing war. The capture of the powerful Enterprise threatening to tip the scales of the conflict to a rapid conclusion.
Much of the story has a lot of padding and are drawn out, there’s some good scenes where Trip shares his engineering expertise, but lots of time spent discussing how the alien food makes them sick. Here lies my first major problem; our main characters are haunted by illness throughout the story. This ever occurring deterioration of their health creates a lot of unneeded negativity for the reader. I disliked this, it often put me off my breakfast.
Later in the story, Trip and ‘The Guild’ faction launch a mission to rescue rebel fighters. To Trip’s surprise, he finds his old Engineering professor, Victor Brodesser. Dr. Brodesser was thought to have been lost along with all hands on the experimental starship, Daedalus. There’s some intrigue when it’s eventually revealed that the Enterprise crew is trapped in a parallel dimension. This accounts for the survival of the Daedalus crew, out of which, Archer’s wife was among.
Around the beginning of the second volume, we follow Captain Archer and his crew, being held in the opposing faction’s prison, from which they make a daring, inevitable escape. Scenes like these were honestly pretty impressive, the opening scenes were good and Trip has a couple of gripping scenes, but I feel like these gems are rare islands in a seeming ocean of bland, uncomfortable material. We learn that Archer’s alternate dimension wife had been married into the ruling family of the dominating faction, and passed off Archer’s son into the bloodline.
Right here I can’t help but feel like this whole thing has been a forced, belaboured attempt to emulate Star Wars. When you stop and take it in, that’s what you’ve got, just a cheap, drive-by Star Wars-ing for no real reason that they can conveniently never come back to. It’s different to some degrees, but I really fail to see why these similarities are necessary.
So guess what happens, just guess. They rescue the Enterprise, they fix the diplomatic problem, they go back to their home dimension and leave the alternate dimension version of Archer’s son in the alternate dimension, where he belongs. Wooptie-doo!
Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t care for these books, even though I read through both volumes. I tend to agree that Star Wars is one of the greatest stories ever told, any attempt to change or adapt or borrow from it is obvious and shameful. Not recommended.
