Assimilation^2
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IDW Comics Assimilation^2 |
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| Published | 2012 |
A Review by Charles Berman 13/7/13
A crossover story that allows characters from Star Trek and Doctor Who to meet is something a lot of fans (of both series) will have given a lot of idle thought but not something that I would have thought necessarily needed to happen. The fact that it actually happened is somewhat surprising and remarkable, but I went in thinking the comic book medium would work against it. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, comic books are mostly pictures and are fairly short. Would eight comics be enough space in which to do justice to a meeting of these very detailed science-fiction universes?
Fortunately, Scott and David Tipton take advantage of the fact that for both the respective inhabitants of the TARDIS and the Enterprise, their counterparts represent a fairly representative archetype. The Doctor has encountered hard-nosed, rule-bound but humane starship captains before on dozens of occasions, and there's no reason he should treat Picard differently. Likewise, Captain Picard is not unfamiliar with flippant, highly powerful and inscrutably mysterious aliens who materialise on his ship and cause chaos. Hence the sense that the Doctor is getting something of the Q treatment here.
It's to the story's credit that it doesn't get bogged down in the momentousness of this meeting, because once such a process got started it could take all day. A digression to see a flashback of the Fourth Doctor meeting Captain Kirk feels superfluous, but is over quickly. I get the sense that the writers appreciated both series already, as everyone feels well and respectfully characterised. I could easily imagine the Doctor having a field say running circles around the bureaucracy of the world of Star Trek, but that is for another day as these are the characters and not caricatures -- and it's a triumph that this feels like a good story that is not too out of place in either continuity. Only a few lines -- like the Doctor commenting out of nowhere that La Forge would make a good companion -- feel like pandering in a minefield of potential pandering. Touches like Riker's concern that Amy and Rory are civillians being dragged into a dangerous conflict ring true.
The story itself is well-devised, and it seems to roll out logically from the putting of a little bit of thought into the similarities and differences between how Star Trek's Borg and Doctor Who's Cybermen operate, and what would happen if they should attempt an alliance.There's an enforced equality here -- the comic can't be seen to be show either series characters as "better" or more useful than the other's -- but that mostly doesn't cause proceedings to feel stilted. The main character conflict -- stemming from the fact that the Doctor knows the dangers of his "own" enemy and feels the Borg must be a subsidiary threat, and that likewise Picard, with his personal history, can't bring himself to assist the Borg even to defeat the Cybermen -- is again made to feel like a perfectly logical eventuality.
The artwork looks nice, but its seems to be all painted and looks based on photos, which means when characters have to do things they weren't doing in the photos the sometimes take on awkward expressions.
In all, a fun and interesting story for fans of either or both series. That's all it tries to be, which saves it from many potential pitfalls.