Star Trek: Year Four - The Enterprise Experiment
D.C. Fontana, Gordon Purcell, Derek Chester
My reason for reading this is pretty simple. I have researched and written about D.C. Fontana off and on throughout the last couple of months. When IDW launched a comic series called Star Trek Year Four it was obvious that D.C. Fontana had to be one of the writers. Released in 2006 in Fontana’s mind it is clear it takes place in the same era as the animated series that she was the story editor .
Gene Coon and Dorothy Fontana are debatably more important to the writing of Star Trek than even the show’s creator Gene Roddenberry. Much of the tone, style, and consistency was in the hands of those two writers who were in the foxhole of daily production much more than Roddenberry.
Fontana started her time at Star Trek before it was even a thing. She gave Roddenberry notes on his early drafts and answered the phones in the Star Trek offices. It is interesting that this is a sequel in part to Fontana’s episode Enterprise Incident. It was an episode that she changed dramatically from the first draft to the shooting draft, but it was a fight. Personally as someone who has read Fontana's original treatment for the Enterprise Incident, I kinda wish they had produced that. Nonetheless.
Fontana tells the story of the continued development of the Starfleet cloaking tech that the enterprise had stolen from the Romulans a year earlier. Now with Arex in the crew, this story does have a TAS feel. That is fine for me I always liked how much more Science Fiction the Animated Series felt.
This story has Romulans, a bad cloaking device that phases the Enterprise out of space-time, and plenty of legacy characters. The second half is a sequel to Errand of Mercy, just like the first ST novel by James Blish, with lots of sequels to those stories. There are callbacks all over the place to various episodes. This is where we see the most Fontana influence. Most interesting in the second storyline involves Kor trying to steal Preserver technology. A storyline that got developed in the later seasons of TNG that Fontana said she never watched.
The stories are good with a few moments that made me smile wishing we got this as an episode in a fourth season. Of course, it is not exactly that. There is a hint of modern storytelling and enough to make it feel a little deeper. Fontana re-writes her own back story for McCoy’s daughter and that was really interesting to me. It was also fun to see her use Carol Marcus a creation of Star Trek 2.
Big thumbs up.
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