Star Trek: Voyager – Seven’s Reckoning: What Was The Point?

The premise and story beats this comic touches on are interesting and seem to fit their main characters. As a Seven of Nine’s long-time fan, the idea of seeing Seven take part in an insurrection to liberate a subjugated class of an alien race is compelling, and how that feeds into her conflict for individuality, pluralism and her cult-like raising by the Borg makes the stakes high. Angel Hernandez’s art is incisive, with sharp lines and a taste for detail and expressionism that would fit within Vertigo’s catalogue in the 90s, with a distinctly sci-fi coloring by Ronda Pattison that rounds up the feeling of a great-looking Star Trek comic, a little bit dull or monotonous at times, but always fitting the demure tone of the story.

The main problem I have with this 4-issues miniseries is where exactly lies the point it tries to reach across. The revelations and cliffhangers from some of the issues play into ideas like class structure, royalty, right of blood, injustice and exploitation. And the way the comic dances between these ideas and plays with the ‘shared story/memory’ of the Ohrdi’nadar is intriguing for most of it. But the constant sense of intrigue and overarching themes that could be talking about almost anything gets more tired as the story beats unfold, and as back-and-forth scenes that are sometimes indistinguishable from one another befall. And it’s at the end of it that I feel it has not discovered anything essentially new about the characters it chose to represent.

Supposedly, Seven’s realization of humanity and empathy is where the last point of the story lies. But, nevertheless what Seven does feel (and how much the comic makes you believe that her humanity is what’s a stake there), the circles of oppression and injustice not only continue, but get justified by Janeway in a bit of a “prime directive” move that serves to put a close the story, but it’s less than convincing. Janeway’s final talk to Seven kind of undermines some of the ideas of the book, leaving it up for interpretation of the reader to a point where I’m not sure the writer wanted to tell me anything in particular. I was thrilled for what was to come, especially with Seven’s Raven reference, but it finally disappointed more than delivered.