Star Trek Early Voyages chronicled Captain Pike’s Enterprise first

The cliffhanger “conclusion” to Star Trek Early Voyages

Had the final story arc of Star Trek Early Voyages, which began in the next-to-last issue, fully played out, it might have claimed top honors.

In this story, Robert April, the very first captain of the Enterprise, beams back aboard for an inspection visit. We quickly learn that, despite his gracious handoff of the ship to Pike in issue #1, April hasn’t adjusted well to life in Starfleet’s upper echelons. (Although Star Trek: The Animated Series , in “The Counter-Clock Incident,” featured April as a commodore, he’s an admiral in Star Trek Early Voyages—either another nit to pick, or setting the stage for the untold tale of a demotion!)

April doesn’t approve of how Pike runs things. He’s resentful of the women officers—another odd note, given The Animated Series showed us April’s own wife, Sarah, was the Enterprise’s first chief medical officer—especially Number One.

While Pike is on an alien planet in an undercover reconnaissance mission, Klingons attack the Enterprise. Number One suffers a serious injury, and April seizes his moment to take command.

It’s a dramatic, high-stakes climax, never to be resolved. Marvel gave up its “Paramount Comics” imprint in 1998, and Star Trek Early Voyages came to a screeching, mid-story halt.

According to the Memory Beta wiki, the writers intended to write an afterword for the series’ re-release in 2009 as Volume 2 of IDW’s Star Trek Omnibus series, but ran out of time. And so we are left with the frustrating final text box: “NEXT: What happens will sadly be a mystery because this issue is the last!”

I’d love to see Mr. Nano or Engineer Grace onscreen. The final, interrupted storyline about Robert April’s opportunistic “takeover” of the Enterprise might make an epic season finale, keeping fans guessing until the next season began.

But I’d be surprised if Star Trek: Strange New Worlds adopts any elements from Star Trek Early Voyages. After all, the TV creative team will surely relish the chance to spin stories of new and unexpected people and events in a familiar Star Trek setting as much as Edginton, Abnett, and the graphic artists did.

And Star Trek Early Voyages will endure on its own merits. It’s an impressive and entertaining imagining of a Star Trek that never existed onscreen, but which admirably honors and expands on the one that did.