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"I, Enterprise" Part 2
Star Trek #32
IDW
Written by Mike Johnson
Story Consultant: Roberto Orci
Pencils by Erfan Fajar
Inks by
Erfan Fajar and Yulian Ardhi
Cover by:
Erfan Fajar
April 2014 |
The sentient planet seeks to eliminate the
contaminants on Enterprise...the crewmembers!
Read the story summary at Memory Beta
Notes from the Star Trek
Chronology
The entirety of this
issue takes place during the
flashback story begun in "I, Enterprise"
Part 1, which is shortly before the events of Into Darkness.
Didja Notice?
The Enterprise central computer claims to have
achieved sentience with the addition of the data uploaded
into the ship's computer gathered on the sentient planet. It
loses this sentience at the end of the story.
On page 6, Dr. McCoy refers to the new avatar (0718) as "Mr.
Enterprise".
On page 7, someone who appears to be Dr. Carol Marcus is
present in the briefing room as the
Enterprise avatar explains itself and the history
of the sentient planet they've discovered. But this story
takes place before Carol joined the crew in Into Darkness!
The sentient planet attempts to eliminate the contaminants
aboard the Enterprise...the crewmembers! This is
similar to V'Ger's desire to eliminate the carbon-based
units infesting Enterprise in the original timeline in
Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The Enterprise
avatar explains that the planet was once similar to
Earth, populated by humanoids who eventually uploaded the
minds of all their civilization's citizens into a master computer so they
might live forever. One might be tempted to ask if the
sentient planet seen here could be the machine planet that
reprogrammed Earth's Voyager 6 probe into V'Ger in the
aforementioned movie. But the data in that film suggested
that Voyager 6 had fallen into a black hole after leaving
Earth's solar system and was believed to have exited through
a wormhole on the far side of the galaxy, which is not
reachable with current Starfleet warp drive ships. (Note:
V'Ger appeared in the new timeline in "Voyagers".)
When the Enterprise avatar decides that the only
potential method of stopping the sentient planet's takeover
of the ship's systems is to wipe out his own memory, Kirk
compares the process to what they did when Captain
Robert April hijacked the ship's controls. This occurred in
"Countdown to
Darkness" Part 4. But this wedges yet another adventure
in between
"Countdown to
Darkness" Part 4, at the end of which the Enterprise
is ordered to Nibiru, and
"Gorn, But Not
Forgotten", at the end of which the Enterprise
is also ordered to Nibiru (for the beginning of Into Darkness).
At this point, I think we just have to pretend, for the sake
of continuity, that the Enterprise was not ordered
to Nibiru at the end of
"Countdown to
Darkness" Part 4. Instead, the ship continued onto its
next mission, the events of "I, Enterprise",
followed by "Gorn, But
Not Forgotten", then Into Darkness.
The Enterprise avatar loses
its sentience in defeating the planet's takeover of the
ship, but Spock is able to partially restore the avatar's
functioning with a prototype artificial intelligence program
he's been writing and experimenting with in his off-duty
hours. This is the version of the avatar seen in
Into Darkness, now
known as 0718. The explanation of the name is that it is his
numerical designation as the newest member of the ship's
crew, implying that the Enterprise currently has
718 crewmembers aboard.
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