Last Full Measure
I’ve never been so aggravated with a book that I would seriously think about writing a nasty letter to the publisher, until now. I really liked Star Trek Enterprise, so I started reading the books after the show was cancelled. It’s ok because there’s only a few them, and I’m not going to start reading the ungodly amount of other Star Trek books out there. That being said, aside from the book that was just a rehash of a TV episode (“Enterprise: Shockwave“), this book really pisses me off.
This is actually a very long, yet informative, rant, so click “Continue Reading” below to read the whole thing. Suffice to say that I was unhappy with this book, not just because it was written for the fifth grade level, but because the authors push their political agenda down our throats without so much as a reach-around. And I posted the review on Amazon.com to warn off other people ahead of time.
I’ve never been so aggravated with a book that I would seriously think about writing a nasty letter to the publisher, until now. I really liked Star Trek Enterprise, so I started reading the books after the show was cancelled. It’s ok because there’s only a few them, and I’m not going to start reading the ungodly amount of other Star Trek books out there. That being said, aside from the book that was just a rehash of a TV episode (“Enterprise: Shockwave“), this book really pisses me off.
The authors of Enterprise: Last Full Measure start off by dedicating the book to Cindy Sheehan, the crazy lady that now makes a living by hounding President Bush because her son was killed in his war in Iraq. Hey, I didn’t vote for Bush, and his approval ratings are even lower than his father’s were at this point in his presidency, but I don’t think he deserves his own loony stalker. That being said, I was hoping that the book would not be all preachy with, “War is BAD. Good people DIE for NOTHING.” And unfortunately, that’s what I got.
Let’s look beyond the author’s personal bias and check the official canon here. A lot of people (seven million in this case) die in a vicious sneak attack, the survivors clamor for blood, and the good guys mobilize to kick the bad guys’ ass. Sounds like WW2 after Pearl Harbor. Sounds like Afghanistan after 9/11. Nobody was complaining about war being wrong then. Everybody wants the people responsible to pay for their crimes, and the military was mobilized with a vengeance.
So when characters in Enterprise start behaving very unlike their regular selves to preach about the wrongness of fighting a war that they didn’t make, I take offense. That’s not the character talking, that’s the author making a character talk in ways that go against the basis of what happened. At this point in the storyline, the entire Enterprise crew was united in the need to strike back at the Xindi before they could finish the job of destroying Earth. Sure, maybe Archer was overstressed and went off the deep end a bit. But no one would doubt the need to be out there to defend their planet.
The authors are not only guilty of twisting familiar personas to their own political agenda; they’re also guilty of writing a crappy story. They start by taking the characters with perhaps the most personality and sidelining them for the rest of the book. Conveniently blow up Trip Tucker and Hoshi Sato (among others) and put them in sickbay with Phlox, and we’ll not hear from them for the rest of the book. And T’Pol, you’re out too. The remaining lead characters, along with a gaggle of MACOs that nobody ever remembers, are sent off on PLOT A and PLOT B. No epic story arc here, just two plotlines like any other in any episode on TV.
And what do you think happens? Plot A and Plot B take place off-ship on shuttlepods, with both teams learning the horrors of war and watching good people die needlessly. There are some interesting, if not predictable, action scenes interspersed in here too. Archer saves his team by performing a spacewalk without his spacesuit, a la “2001: A Space Odyssey”. And to beat us over the head with it (“Hey, stupid, it’s an homage! Get it?!”), Archer goes ahead and tells everyone that he saw that stunt in “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Arg…
The two bad plots are sandwiched in-between scenes from a future period, with a very old man visiting the Federation War Memorial in San Francisco at about the same time that the Constitution-class Enterprise is being constructed in orbit. This was pulled almost directly from “Saving Private Ryan”, beginning and ending with the old man at the war memorial, proving that there is not an original thought in the authors’ heads. Anyway, here we interject with some gratuitous fan wanking, as the old man is actually a 120-year-old member of the original Enterprise crew, and he meets a very young James T. Kirk at the war memorial. “Ohhh, they brought the two genres together! Wow.” I’m sickened.
More sickening still is the identity of the weepy old man, which I won’t divulge since it would be a major spoiler. We’ll just say that this person has been hiding his real identity for almost eighty years for no good reason, and I’d be willing to bet that his false identity has played a large part in some other Star Trek book by the same others. “Ha hah! My main character is actually an original member of Enterprise crew in disguise!” Now who’s wanking who? With a twist?
I’m currently reading Enterprise: Rosetta. If this book isn’t any better, then I’m not reading any more Enterprise books. I’ve got plenty of other reading material to keep my interest without riling my temper.
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