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“The Quality of Mercy” (22 pages)
Writer: Martin Pasko
Artist: Gil Kane
Letters: John Morelli
Colors: Carl Gafford
Editor: Al Milgrom
Editor-in-chief: Jim Shooter
Cover artist: Dave Cockrum

Al Milgrom takes over as editor of Star Trek. That lets Louise Jones focus on Star Wars, X-Men, and the upcoming X-Men spinoff — eventually titled The New Mutants.

This issue is clearly a rush job. Martin Pasko’s script is a jumble of plot elements and twists from classic episodes of the show. Gil Kane is one of the all-time great comic-book artists, but his work here is sketchy. It looks like the whole issue was cranked out over a weekend to make deadline.

The problems start with the cover. Dave Cockrum draws a menacing, satanic-looking figure in shadow threatening McCoy, Spock and Uhura. My first thought was this would rehash the previous issue, and have Kirk turn into some version of Satan.

Or maybe it would be an alien posing as the devil. The idea dates back to the original Star Trek series. It was developed for the unmade Star Trek: Phase II series, and resurrected as the basis for the 1991 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Devil’s Due.” A three-part comic-book sequel to that episode appeared in DC’s Star Trek: The Next Generation #36-38 (Late Aug.-Late Sept. 1992).

Turning to the splash page shows Pasko has something different in mind. It’s almost impossible to synopsize this issue, but here’s what I think happens:

Wearing an alien disguise, as in D.C. Fontana’s excellent “The Enterprise Incident,” Kirk fools his crew into not recognizing their own captain. The alien design is pure Gil Kane — straight out of Silver Age Green Lantern. It’s also painfully generic, and only vaguely resembles the cover image.

The over-stuffed tale begins with the Enterprise engaging a cloaking device on a secret rescue mission to Miaplacidus V, a prison planet where death-row inmates are painfully executed. There’s an unexpected benefit to this, in that it allows Kane to avoid drawing the Enterprise. He doesn’t have the knack or the interest, and the iconic ship never looks right — or even like the same ship — throughout this issue.

Kirk reveals to his officers his orders for the Enterprise to intercept a shuttle taking new guards to Miaplacidus. Spock will brainwash the guards, who will be returned home while Kirk, McCoy, Spock, Sulu and Uhura take their place using a replacement shuttle. This has to be explained, so Spock volunteers that this will prevent the proud, xenophobic Miaplacidan guards from committing suicide. Right.

Spock and Sulu take two pages to beam over and subdue the guards using a combination of martial arts and nerve pinches. It’s generic as hell, but somehow the inking here reminds me of the work of Walter Simonson. More on him in a few issues.

In the issue’s second briefing-room sequence, Kirk reveals the reason for all this subterfuge: Starbase 9 commander Commodore Markessan married a woman from Antos IV, whose inhabitants have mastered molecular metamorphosis and can take on any form they wish. The commodore’s 18-year-old son, Tak, was involved in some sort of recent tragedy and fled in a small spacecraft headed for Miaplacidus V. The Enterprise crew is to infiltrate the base, find Tak, and bring him home. The Federation can’t be publicly involved — hence the cloaking device, coy disguises, and elaborate plots.

Having studied the Miaplacidan language and customs, Spock telepathically transmits that knowledge to his disguised teammates as they approach the prison planet. They’re greeted by Deputy Supervisor Kohll, who takes them to his boss, the imaginatively named Supervisor Viermann. He delights in showing the newbies the most recent execution in all its gruesome detail, thereby confirming his villain status.

Viermann orders the newcomers to track down a woman convict who’s escaped. Not trusting them, he commands Kohll to follow them.

Kirk and pals quickly find her remains, and deduce she was melted by the acidic spit of a creature known as a desert-devil — which then attacks the Enterprise crew.

There’s a fight. Kirk is trapped and loses his mask while escaping. How this happens is not shown or explained.

Meanwhile, Spock fires at some rocks containing magnesium, which explode in a blinding flare. McCoy deduces that Spock isn’t really Spock, because his inner eyelids would have protected him, as they did in “Operation — Annihilate!”

That introduces Tak, the subject of the mission, who has been using his powers of metamorphosis to masquerade as the disguised Spock.

And then it gets very 1980. Tak explains that the tragedy on Starbase 9 involved a girl he loved very much. He was driving home with her from a party and they crashed and she was killed. Tak was exonerated, but the truth is he was stoned on cordrazine. He feels guilty and wants to die. Using his powers to make himself look like “empty air” — this is, unfortunately, the exact term used — he vanishes.

The moral is clear. As any kid alive at the time this comic was published remembers: Don’t drink (or do drugs) and drive (or anything else). Especially if you’ve been shooting up hits of cordrazine!

Kohll shows up and wants answers, but the real Spock appears to nerve pinch him. Turns out Spock had spotted Tak a ways back — always a sign of poor plotting — and the youth used his powers to lure Spock into a pit used to trap desert-devils. Spock says it took him a while to climb out. I think he just wanted a break for a few pages.

Stuck in a plot he can’t get out of, Kirk orders everyone back to the prison complex. There, Tak has morphed into the woman convict who escaped earlier. Viermann orders her executed, but Kirk arrives with the crew to stun the guards just before they throw the switch on poor, confused Tak.

There’s another weak fight scene. Viermann shows up and is ready to kill the invaders, but Kohll shoots him in the back and identifies himself as a man of peace who wants to stop executing the prisoners. He illustrates his sincerity by explaining the woman convict was royalty on her planet, but still was sentenced to death for — wait for it — falling in love with a commoner. Silly nameless royal dead woman.

Despite all this, Kohll has to follow the law and execute the outworlders for intruding. But Kirk and crew are beamed up by Scotty on a pre-arranged schedule — quite lucky timing that — and zip out of orbit at warp factor 12.

The last page features two panels in which Kane mutilates the Enterprise like a pretzel, while Kirk and McCoy wonder if Tak will ever be — “okay.”

Forget Tak — I don’t know if I’ll ever be okay after reading this issue.

If you’ve read this far, it’s clear that this issue is an over-plotted mess. It has to jump through hoops to make sense of itself, rehashing the show’s most tired tropes along the way to make it “Star Trek.” There are no character moments to speak of.

And the art deviates so far from the established Trek esthetic, that most pages would not be recognizable as being from a Star Trek comic. This could be a barbarian comic, a fill-in issue of Green Lantern, or some other generic sci-fi comic. There’s nothing Star Trek about it. Gold Key would have loved it.

I don’t know if it’s my particular copy of this issue, or something that affected the entire print run, but the printing on this issue is terrible. The lettering is at times illegible, and the whole thing is a muddy, ugly mess.

There’s no letters column this issue, which is just as well. The writing is on the wall. The series is fading away gently into cancelation after only three more issues.

How much worse can it get? Well, next issue has gnomes in it. Yes, gnomes. Read on, bold friend, read on.