As happens every year, December is turning out to be a month of mopping up. On the bookish front, there’s the sprawling TBR (Currently at around 30 books, for those keeping track), but there’s also a few TV shows I’m trying to catch up on. This blog isn’t the place to talk about my newfound love of Dexter, but it is the perfect place to talk about Star Trek.

Yesterday, I brought you my thoughts on Mission Gamma, and before the year is out I plan to have a full series review of Peter David’s New Frontier. There are some books, however, that stand apart from these series readthroughs. Books about which I don’t necessarily have a lot to say. I don’t want to say I’m dumping them here, but in effect that’s what I’m doing. Since I’m here anyway, you can also hear my brief thoughts on the final season of Lower Decks.

Engines of Destiny, by Gene DeWeese

Though ostensibly a TOS novel, this features far more of the TNG crew. It’s a sequel of sorts to the episode Relics, and sees the out-of-time Scotty change the past to save Kirk, with Picard and company tagging along to stop him. This leads to an alternate timeline in which the Federation never existed, and the Borg have taken over the Alpha Quadrant. Yes, this is unfortunately a victim of Borg fatigue, and it’s not really long enough to properly establish the new timeline, so it all feels a bit – dare I say it? – futile. Fortunately, DeWeese’s lighter style carries the story along nicely, and there are some good moments for Guinan and, much to my surprise, Sarek.

Immortal Coil, by Jeffrey Lang

A TNG novel set after the series, and thus somewhere around the Dominion War, this one is all about Data. Incidentally, it still surprises me to see Data in these books, because he has been dead for most of my reading experience. There’s a trend in Star Trek novels to grab a bunch of existing ideas and attempt to tie them together, and this is one such novel. It concerns the spread of intelligent humanoid androids in the galaxy, tying together stories from TOS and TNG. Unlike some such efforts, however, this endeavour is successful. The scope is fairly limited given its potential, and the personal connection for Data is a strong lynchpin for the story to revolve around.

Death of a Neutron Star, by Eric Kotani

A mid-series Voyager adventure, this one is a real mixed bag. It has a brilliant, and possibly even unique story, about competing alien empires attempting to weaponise an unusual star system, that develops and resolves in a satisfying way. The characters, however, are incredibly weak. It feels as if it were written from early character drafts rather than several years into the show, with no one quite feeling like their on-screen counterparts. Janeway, by way of example, is not simply a coffee enthusiast, but a downright addict, seeming to possess a new drink every chapter in the novel’s opening stages. One final note is that although Kotani receives sole credit on the cover, the title page also cites Trek veteran Dean Wesley Smith as an author.

Lower Decks, Season 5

Like Discovery before it, Lower Decks‘ fifth season has proven to be its last, and though it wasn’t known ahead of time, the ending is a satisfying one. There’s little to say about Season 5 that hasn’t already been said about the show, but its worth pointing out that this, the show I was initially least interested in, has proven to be the most consistent in terms of quality. The effort to be both a comedy about Star Trek and a comedy within Star Trek wasn’t always handled in the best way, but this final season managed to balance big-name cameos with a focus on the surprisingly endearing central cast. With the end of Lower Decks, Picard, and Discovery, and the seeming end of Prodigy, the first wave of Star Trek’s second dominant phase has come to a close. time will tell what comes next.