I finally made it to the end of all the Black Panther comics I got in a comiXology sale to commemorate the death of Chadwick Boseman, but those only go up to 2020... and obviously there are five more years of Black Panther comics after that! So I'll be continuing to discuss them, switching from single issues on comiXology to collected editions on Hoopla. That begins with the fourth and final part of The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, branded as "Wakanda Unbound" on the original issues, though not in the trade.
Writer: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Artists: Ryan Bodenheim, Daniel Acuña & Brian Stelfreeze*
Color Artists: Michael Garland, Daniel Acuña, Chris O'Halloran & Laura Martin
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Anyone who's followed my reviews of Ta-Nehisi Coates's Black Panther run will not be surprised to hear that it fizzles out instead of coming to any kind of interesting climax. Part one of this storyline was gripping if confusing, part two raised lots of interesting ideas, part three returned to the meandering slow style that is Coates's typical approach... and then part four throws away any interesting ideas in favor of endless superhero punchups. I think the idea of Wakanda as an empire in itself is one that could have really had T'Challa questioning his own principles, but we just get a big battle here. Wakanda is a byword for freedom across the galaxy now! But how can it be that easy? Can a formerly oppressive regime just become a force for good? Interesting questions that a writer could ask, but this story just dodges them all in favor of a totally unearned Big Win.
For some reason, a bunch of non-Wakandan superheroes show up for the final battle, but I think only Black ones. from Black Panther vol. 7 #24 (art by Daniel Acuña)
In the end, I think Coates bit off more than he could chew time and time again. These are superhero comics, fundamentally they must be about punching bad guys in the face, but the very best superhero comics manage to do more than that. Coates was interested in Big Ideas, which I appreciate, but his run consistently failed to marry those Big Ideas to the conventions of the superhero genre, meaning almost every arc had Big Ideas that were discussed a bit but went nowhere, and boring, tacked on action. (Particularly tedious here is the largely dialogue-less, all-action issue.)
* Note that the cover gives credit to Chris Sprouse and Karl Story, but they have no work collected in the volume. I'm assuming someone copied over the cover template of part three, which they did contribute to, and failed to change the names.
This post covers the second half of the third year of Justice League International, taking us up to JLA's thirty-sixth issue and JLE's twelfth. This sequence begins with a four-part crossover, The Teasdale Imperative, that alternates between the two titles, then each series finishes out the year with four issues of its own.
Unlike in volume 1 of Justice League International Omnibus, where there was some attempt to put the stories in a reading order, the ones in volume 2 seem to just be interwoven in publication order. I don't think it works terribly well to be jumping back and forth between JLA and JLE when they are each running multipart stories that don't intersect, so I did my best to read the book in an order that made more sense.
from Justice League Europe #7
So, to that end, I recommend following Teasdale Imperative with issues #33-36 of JLA and then doubling back to read issues #9-12 of JLE. Justice League International Special #1 is placed later in the book, but I recommend reading it between issues #10 and 11 of JLE, since Metamorpho's comments about wanting to see his kid indicate he hasn't yet gone looking for him. (Obviously at some point I will need to do a "reading order" post for the series.)
The Teasdale Imperative / "Nitwits, Knuckleheads & Poozers!" / "Club JLI" / "Lifeboat" / "Gnort by Gnortwest" / "Under the Skin" / "After the Fox!" / "The Show Must Go On...and On...and On...and On..." / "Family Ties" / "Bringing Up Baby", from Justice League America #31-32 & Justice League Europe #7-8 (Oct.-Nov. 1989), Justice League America #33-36 (Dec. 1989–Mar. 1990), Justice League Europe #9-10 (Dec. 1989–Jan. 1990), Justice League International Special #1 (1990), and Justice League Europe #11-12 (Feb.-Mar. 1990); reprinted in Justice League International Omnibus, Volume 2 (2020) plot and layouts by Keith Giffen; scripts by J. M. DeMatteis, Bill Loebs, and Len Wein; pencils by Adam Hughes, Bart Sears, Tom Artis, Art Nichols, and Joe Phillips; inks by Joe Rubinstein, Pablo Marcos, Art Nichols, Bob Smith, Jose Marzon,* Bruce D. Patterson, and Bart Sears; letters by Albert De Guzman, Bob Lappan, and John Costanza; colors by Gene D'Angelo
This run begins with The Teasdale Imperative, a crossover between the two ongoings; the JLA is summoned to a village that the JLE has gone into... and hasn't come out of. I don't think this series is incapable of doing serious, and Giffen in particular has done a great job in portentous mode in other stories (notably his "Five Year Later" run on Legion of Super-Heroes, which was amazingly coming out the same time as this; the man was on fire in 1989!), but I felt like Teasdale Imperative—a somewhat grim story where the team faces down vampires—didn't quite hit the mark. I think maybe, fundamentally, I just don't care about the Gray Man or the Lords of Chaos and Order; I also never really got into the Gray Man story in volume 1 (see entry #1 in the list below).
from Justice League America #33
After this, we shift gears into a run of very comic JLA stories. First, Guy Gardner reunites with fellow Green Lantern Corps member Kilowog, who's at loose ends following the dismantling of the Green Lantern Corps. (I feel like the GLC was being disbanded or destroyed every couple weeks in the 1980s and '90s.) It's a fun story; the two have a knockdown fight... but it's all in good spirits!
This leads right into the notorious "Club JLI" story, where Blue Beetle and Booster Gold try to make some money by opening a casino on the tropical island of Kooeykooeykooey, which is technically a JLI embassy (following the events of JLI Annual #3; see item #3 below). I found this hilarious: the overly chill but well-educated islanders are always a good gag, Major Disaster and Big Sur of the Injustice League clean out the club financially thanks to card-counting, the island turns out to be alive, Maxwell Lord and a group of JLA members float around the Pacific on a shrinking iceberg. If you don't love this stuff, you don't like life. (Well, maybe you just have different tastes in superhero comics... but surely not very good ones.) Lastly, we get another Gnort story, where he faces down his archenemesis the Scarlet Skier, who he once defeated by accident. Again, hilarity ensues. (The Scarlet Skier is a Silver Surfer parody; instead of working for a massive cosmic force that eats planets, he works for one that redecorates them, but has terrible taste.)
from Justice League Europe #10
Jumping over to JLE, we follow up The Teasdale Imperative by a story where Power Girl, who was injured during the crossover, needs to undergo emergency surgery... only her invulnerability makes it impossible. Sue Dibny has the bright idea to summon Superman, who does it with his heat vision. This issue mostly seems to be there to set up a reduction in Power Girl's powers; I've read enough comics to know an editorial edict when I see one, but it's still a story with some neat moments. Then we get a story where Crimson Fox, a Parisian superhero, joins the team while foiling a group of robbers so incompetent they accidentally try to hide in the JLE embassy.
In the middle of this is the first JLI Special, a one-shot focused on Mister Miracle, setting up some changes for his ongoing series. I actually read this many years ago, but found it much more comprehensible in context... but I didn't really like it. Particularly, I don't think Scott's decision to replace himself with an android duplicate and not tell anyone, even his wife, really makes any sense at all. Like, I get it's there to set up some comedy, but there has to be a basic level of character plausibility for the comedy to work. (Note that the issue is scripted by Len Wein, as opposed to regular JLI scripter J. M. DeMatteis.)
from Justice League Europe #12
The last two issues here focus on Metamorpho tracking down his son. (The son was born while Metamorpho was dead, so he's never met him.) In the first, he faces down Guy Gardner, in the second, the Metal Men. I always like Metamorpho (at least, as he's characterized in JLE, as a Three Stooges–loving bruiser), and he's particularly well served by Bart Sears's exaggerated art style. To be honest, the whole story seems like an excuse for Sears to go all out with wackiness... and is all the better for it.
This is the fourth in a series of posts about Justice League International. The next covers issues #37 of JLA and #13-21 of JLE. Previous installments are listed below:
If I remember correctly, back in grad school, my friends Dustin and Allison loaned me this book after they read it for some kind of book group. They had hated it, and they wanted me to read it so that I could agree with them. I added it to my reading list. This was back in 2014; by the time I moved away from Connecticut in 2017, I had of course not actually gotten around to reading it. I gave them their copy back—and they expressed disappointment because they didn't want it back!
But I did keep it on my reading list, and once it finally surfaced earlier this year, I checked it out from the local library. The novel is about the life story of a woman, from childhood up to old age across the course of the nineteenth century; her father is an English grower of plants, her mother from a Dutch business family; and she is raised by them in America, outside Philadelphia. She is fascinated by mosses, and struggles against the strictures of her father and the world in which she lives and her own limited understanding of herself and others.
I didn't hate it, but I wouldn't claim to love it either. Gilbert can create an affecting scene at times—the image of the party where the attendees are all positioned like the planets in the solar system, the final meeting between Alma and Alfred Russell Wallace—but I didn't have a strong feeling of what it was all for. Or perhaps more accurately, I didn't feel like the length of the book (around five hundred pages) was proportionate to what it was trying to do. Obviously I don't mind a long book, I'm a Victorianist, but the payoff of what Alma learned about life (and thus what the reader learns about life) didn't really seem to correlate with how much time we had to spend reading about it.
It was a total coincidence of timing, but I definitely benefited from reading the book shortly after Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and David Quammen's The Reluctant Mr. Darwin. The former's depiction of the brutality of the early United States resonated with what we see here; the latter gave a lot of background and context for Alma's ruminations on evolution and eventual meeting with Wallace.
Oz-story Magazine ran for six years, collecting a mix of archival and original Oz and Oz-adjacent fiction and comic strips. It was published by Hungry Tiger Press, with editing by Hungry Tiger publisher David Maxine and art direction by his partner, Eric Shanower. It contains a number of pieces of Oz short fiction you can't find elsewhere, so I decided to incorporate it into the Oz books I've been reading my kids. Even though it's called a magazine, it's bound like a book and runs 128 pages and even has an ISBN.
Oz-story Magazine, Number One edited by David Maxine art director: Eric Shanower
Anthology published: 1995 Contents originally published: 1906-95 Acquired and read aloud: September 2025
The first issue contained four short stories that I read aloud to my kids. The first was "Percy and the Shrinking Violets" by Rachel Cosgrove Payes; this brings back Percy the giant white rat from her novels The Hidden Valley and Wicked Witch of Oz. Unfortunately, even though it was just over a year ago that we read these books, my seven-year-old did not remember Percy at all! The story, where Percy—and then later, Ozma—is shrunk by a magical violet is fun enough, though one feels like Ozma and Percy are a little slow on the uptake at times.
Before Ruth Plumly Thompson became an Oz writer, she published short tales of a kingdom called Pumperdink, which she revealed in Kabumpo in Oz was actually in the Gillikin Country. This volume collects one of those older stories, "The Dragon of Pumperdink," a fun story about a dragon running out of coal (Thompson's dragons die if their internal flame dies out) who needs to seek employment.
The longest short story in the book (I serialized it over three nights) is "Gugu and the Kalidahs" by Eric Shanower. This brings back Gugu the leopard from The Magic of Oz—given we read this back when my kid was three, no way did they remember Gugu! Thankfully, Kalidahs were memorable from their recent experiences of various adaptations of the original book (both the Shanower/Oz comic and the Yoto audio adaptation have gotten recent play), because otherwise there are no familiar Oz characters. The story is about how Gugu's forest gets invaded by Kalidahs, in violation of ancient treaty. and Gugu must do his best to push them out... alone. It's a tense, dark story; it's been a long time since I read The Jungle Book, but it felt like an Oz refraction of Kipling. The illustrations are not in Shanower's usual style, but they are striking.
Lastly, there's "The Balloon-Girl of Oz," credited to Stephen Kane, but actually by Eric Shanower. This focuses on my kids' eternal favorite, Scraps the Patchwork Girl, who here swells up like a balloon, and has to desperately make her way back to the Emerald City for help without floating off into space. I always like Oz stories that put the characters in a weird situation they must think through logically in order to solve, and of course pictures of Scraps looking like a balloon are going to be delightful. My kids were very much into the absurdity of this one. I particularly liked the ending, where Scraps gets to mad at all the people laughing at how funny she looks, so she just lets go and floats off into the sky!
In addition to all this, there's a couple comics; I read "The Pathetic Losers of Oz" by Ed Brubaker, about all the Oz residents with powers not worth mentioning. I did not read Walt Sprouse's comic adaptation of The Marvelous Land of Oz, but my comics-loving seven-year-old did.
Additionally, there's two stories I didn't read to the kids. One is a nice little piece of literary fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Outside the Cabinet-Makers," which mentions Mombi, so I guess Fitzgerald was a fan!
The other is a complete novel (over fifty pages of small type) by L. Frank Baum from 1906: Sam Steele's Adventures on Land and Sea, or The Boy Fortune Hunters in Alaska. This I read to myself after reading everything aloud to the kids. I think I made the right call there, I don't think they would have been into it, but I actually found it surprisingly fun, a boy's-own adventure about an orphan boy to enters into a partnership with his late father's business partner to hunt for gold in Alaska, but ends up finding a whole different adventure instead. (As David Maxine points out in the intro, despite the subtitle, there's only one boy fortune hunter and they never make it to Alaska!) Baum is good at putting people into tough situations they must work they way out of. Maybe once we get through all the issues of Oz-story, I'll seek out the other Sam Steele novels. (The novel was not illustrated originally, but cleverly, Shanower selects a bunch of John R. Neill illustrations from various other projects that work perfectly well; you never would have guessed!)
When Big Finish's license to produce prose Short Trips anthologies ended, they did a big sale to get rid of their remaining stock before they would be unable to sell it. I snapped up the ones that sounded interesting to me but had never gotten around to; over fifteen years later, I've finally read the last of that lot.
I went into How the Doctor Changed My Life feeling a bit nervous; over the past couple years, I've read three Short Trips anthologies and, to be honest, found my enjoymentof eachfairly limited. On top of that, I knew the book was the result of a fan writing contest; Big Finish had originally reserved one spot in Short Trips: Defining Patterns for a previously unpublished writer, but had gotten so many good entries that they'd published twenty-five runners-up in their own volume. But if the three volumes of Short Trips by professional writers I'd read had been mediocre, what did I have to anticipate from a volume by people who'd never been professionally published?
Well, to my delight, the book not only defied my low expectations, but it turned out to be one of the very best Short Trips volumes I can remember reading. Surely it at least partially benefits from the fact there are so many stories here: with twenty-five stories in 184 pages, that means they average six-to-seven pages in length. So the good ones are punchy, and the bad ones are mercifully short! (Not that, however, there were honestly very many bad ones.) Additionally, the book very much benefits from the theme, which you can see right in the title: the stories had to be about the Doctor changing someone's life. This encourages perspectives from characters who are not the Doctor and his companions, and telling stories about key significant moments in those characters' lives, which plays to the strengths of the medium of the short story—no one here makes the mistake a lot of first-time Doctor Who short story writers do, and tries to cram a four-part 1970s-style serial into 6½ pages.
Doctor Who: Short Trips #26: How The Doctor Changed My Life edited by Simon Guerrier
I enjoyed a lot of these, as I said, so here I'll just try to gloss some of the ones I particularly liked and why.
Many of the stories focus on ordinary people who encounter the Doctor and find some kind of courage within in themselves, a trope that I think probably owes something to the original Russell T Davies television era (which this book came out during), but is here imported back into "classic" Doctor Who (at the time this was published, Big Finish's license only went up to the 1996 tv movie). It's a trope that works well, especially when it leans into one of my favorite things about the Doctor Who format, the juxtaposition of the fantastic with the mundane. Ones along these lines I particularly liked included "Change Management" by Simon Moore:
Fair enough, it would be bad for the economy if the Flux Beast was allowed to devour the tourist worlds, but there must be a better way of containing the Beast than trapping it in space and feeding it lots of poor people. Pip had been going to complain, but when the guy sitting next to him got vaporised while raising similar concerns, he decided to keep his head down. He would definitely do something about it if he ever got into management.
Along these lines, I also really liked "The Shopping Trolleys of Doom" by Caleb Woodbridge, where the Doctor intervenes when shopping carts begin attacking people; "The Man on the Phone" by Mark Smith, told from the perspective of someone working in a call center selling mediocre kitchens who accidentally dials the TARDIS; and "£436" by Nick May, about a cab driver who drives the Doctor and Peri around as they fight off an alien invasion.
(In one story, this even kind of happens without the Doctor turning up; in John Callaghan's "The Andrew Invasion," a guy named Andrew gets mistaken for the Doctor, and hilarity ensues. I think John Dorney's The Diary of River Song story "My Dinner with Andrew," about a guy who looks exactly like the fifth Doctor and is played by Peter Davison, is a stealth sequel to this story, but maybe I am crazy because no one else seems to have noticed this if so.)
Even though this is probably the book's most common approach, other stories go in different directions. I liked "Second Chances" by Bernard O'Toole a lot, which follows a maniacal mad scientist after he is defeated by the Doctor and Charley. How does an adult man move back in with his parents and rebuild his life after all his dreams of conquest have been crushed? Or there's Michael Montoure's "Relativity," where a kid loses his twin brother in a weird time accident thanks to the Doctor and Ace, but eventually has an even weirder chance to get him back. I also liked Violet Addison's "Those Left Behind," about one of Susan's classmates at Coal Hill School meeting the fourth Doctor. (One oddity of the book, if I'm not mistaken, is that among its twenty-five stories, it has one from every "classic" Doctor... except the first!) There's also "Evitability" by Andrew K Purvis, where the Doctor finds someone who's going to do a terrible thing as an adult and shows them the future as a child to help put them on a better path. Michael Rees's "Swamp of Horrors (1957) – Viewing Notes" is inventively told in the form of a blog post about a B-horror movie that costars the Doctor and Mel!
One of my very favorites was "The Monster in the Wardrobe" by James C McFetridge, about a man who dies every day defending his daughter from a monster in the wardrobe, but always comes back to life the next, when he always has a new job that he's not very good at but enjoys a lot, like ice cream taster or bikini inspector.
It feels a bit churlish to complain about ones you don't like, especially when they come from first-time writers, but I did find a few unsatisfying and/or undercooked: "Curiosity" by Mike Amberry and "The Last Thing You'll Ever See" by Richard Goff among them. The only outright bad one, though, was "Time Shear" by Steven Alexander, where two alien kids see their mother brutally gunned down in front of them, and the story and the character just shrug this off as a minor inconvenience in its rush to get to a happy ending.
If there's an overall fault to the volume, it's that, despite what Paul Cornell hopes for in his foreword, few of these writers ever went on to make many more contributions to Doctor Who; there were just two Short Trips volumes after this, and some contributed to one of those, and some others I think wrote for the Bernice Summerfield anthologies. Other than that, though, the only writer to go onto publishing more Doctor Who stories is LM Myles, who here writes the story "Child's Play," and has since written a number of Big Finish audio dramas. But that's not a slight on this book, it's a slight on the stale community of Doctor Who tie-in writers, whose bright young things of the 1990s and early 2000s have never moved on thirty years later.
I don't have much experience with Impulse a.k.a. Bart Allen, who was essentially the Kid Flash to Wally West's Flash—that will have to wait until I finally read my Mark Waid Flash Omnibus volumes. But as I've been investigating what JSA-related stories I might somehow have missed in my fifty-installment journey through the history of that superhero team, I discovered there was an Impulse one-shot involving time travel and the JSA, so I added it to my list.
The book came out in 1999 and is set in the then-present of the DC universe, where Impulse is trying to be of use to somebody, anybody, but keeps getting rebuffed. No one wants his help, not Superman, not Wonder Woman, not Green Lantern, especially not Batman. When will he get a chance to save the world... or even the universe?
Well, he gets his chance when Extant (villain of the then-recent Zero Hour) travels back to 1941, battles the JSA, and tricks the Linear Men into changing history. Because he was born in the future, only Impulse remembers the original timeline, and thus only Impulse can do anything to restore it. But can the hyperfast hyperactive kid keep his mind on the job long enough to do it?
Poor Impulse.
The JSA are more of a plot point than actual characters here; they spend most of the story dead, except for one sequence where Impulse crashes one of their meetings. From that perspective, I probably needn't have bothered including it in my sequence of stories. But, you know, if the point of all of this is to be entertained, then this story does a good job of it.
I don't blame Johnny.
I always like a bit of Christopher Priest, and Impulse is a character well-suited to Priest's techniques of rapid cuts and abrupt juxtapositions, as well as his tendency to mix darkness with comedy. Yes, there's a lot of Impulse goofiness here... but there's also some real tragedy as Impulse needs to reckon with the deaths of those important to him, and the fact that Barry Allen does exist in this alternate timeline, and will have to die to restore the proper the universe. (Ain't that always the case.) Artists Jason Johnson and Edwin Rosell are new to me, but they have that manga-influence, exaggerated design sense that I associate with 1990s comics in general and Impulse in particular, so that works well.
Aw, Max,
I particularly liked Impulse's relationship with the Golden Age speedster Max Mercury here, and I finished the one-shot looking forward to reading more about Impulse whenever I get around to reading all my Flash Omnibus volumes. (Impulse himself seems to have only received a single collected edition, alas. I do remember, a long time ago, reading a trade where Bart himself had become the Flash, but he was portrayed as very much a sad sack (I think this one?), nothing like the character here, and then he got murdered in Countdown. Bleh.)
Impulse: Bart Saves the Universe originally appeared in one issue (1999). The story was written by Christopher Priest, pencilled by Jason Johnson, inked by Edwin Rosell, type designed by Willie Schubert, and edited by Paul Kupperberg & L. A. Williams.
This post is the fifty-second in an improbably long series about the Justice Society and
Earth-Two. The next installment covers Dr. Mid-Nite. Previous installments are listed
below:
Back in 2018, when Star Trek received its first Hugo nomination during the CBS All Access (later Paramount Plus) era, I wrote a blog post chronicling the fortunes of Star Trek at the Hugo Awards from 1967 up to then. Well, this year, Star Trek received not just one but two Hugo Awards, so it seemed time to bring that blog post up to date by covering the last seven years.
2018: Discovery
As chronicled in my previous post, 2018 was the first time Star Trek had been a Hugo finalist since 2010. The 2018 nomination (in the category of Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form) was for the Star Trek: Discovery episode "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," which in my mind was definitely the best episode of Discovery's somewhat bumpy first "chapter"—and probably still is one of the best Discovery episodes over all, a clever time loop story for the postmodern era.
I was not surprised, however, that Disco did not win the award; the category was won by perennial Hugo darling The Good Place, and Star Trek placed down in fifth on the final ballot, below Black Mirror (a Star Trek–centric episode of it, actually), another episode of The Good Place, and Doctor Who. Most of those I can just about buy... though "Twice Upon a Time" was not, in my mind, a particularly worthy episode of Doctor Who.
Looking at the longlist reveals just one other Star Trek installment... but not an official one; an episode of the dull and mediocre fan series Star Trek Continues, "What Ships Are For," came in tenth. Fairly inexplicable, to be honest.
2019–21: Nothing
2018 was not the beginning of some kind of Star Trek Hugo renaissance, because in 2019, Star Trek didn't land on the ballot at all. The longlist reveals one Star Trek episode, down in fourteenth, so pretty far from making the ballot, the Discovery episode "What's Past Is Prologue." This is a pretty baffling choice; it was the finale of the mirror universe story arc of the first season... and like a lot of Discovery finales, long on spectacle and short on sense.
In 2020, there was no Star Trek on the final ballot or even the longlist. The second season of Discovery would have been eligible. I liked the first half of this season a lot, even though the second half got quite awful, but I don't know that there's an obvious standout for enthusiasm to coalesce around, so it's not very surprising.
2021 would also bring no Star Trek on the final ballot... but the longlist was replete with Star Trek! The Picard episode "Nepenthe" (a fan favorite where Picard catches up with Riker and Troi and their cute kid) came in seventh, just two nominating votes behind the sixth-place recipient, which did make it! Another Picard episode, "Remembrance," was down in fourteenth. Additionally, the longlist featured two episodes of Disco season 3, "Unification III" and "That Hope Is You." But on top of all that, Discovery season 3 was also on the longlist as a complete unit in Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form, though decently far down. Probably Star Trek was a victim of its own success here; as 2020 had new episodes in three different Star Trek series (Disco, Picard, and Lower Decks), nominating votes would have been diffused across a bunch of different stuff, making it hard for anything to end up on the ballot.
2022–23: Lower Decks
Finally, in 2022, Star Trek would land on the ballot again, this time for a Lower Decks episode; this one I remember I actually nominated myself! "wej Duj" is a cute episode showing parallel adventures of lower decks crews on three different ships (the title means "three ships" in Klingonese). It would not win, placing in third after episodes of The Expanse and Loki, but thankfully it did beat Arcane. Another episode of Lower Decks, "First First Contact," was on the longlist as well.
We should be skeptical of we're told about the 2023 Hugo Awards, but there was no Star Trek on the final ballot that year. However, there were three different Star Trek episodes on the longlist, from two different Star Trek series: Strange New Worlds's "A Quality of Mercy" and "Spock Amok" (which I nominated) and Lower Decks's "Hear All, Trust Nothing." If we believe the nominating data (and we should not), "Quality of Mercy" had one more vote than one of the actual finalists, but didn't make the ballot due to the way EPH redistributes nominations to increase finalist diversity.
Also, it's not branded as "Star Trek," but there was a finalist that was aboutStar Trek in the Best Related Work category in 2023, Wil Wheaton's memoir Still Just a Geek. This is, I think, the only Star Trek–related finalist in the history of the category; it finished in fourth.
2024: Strange New Worlds
After getting two on the longlist in 2023 for its first season, Strange New Worlds finally made the ballot in 2024 for its second, with two finalists. They are both the kind of thing Hugo voters love, with fan-pleasing premises. In "Those Old Scientists," two characters from Lower Decks come aboard Pike's Enterprise, transforming from cartoons into live action, while "Subspace Rhapsody" is a musical episode.
I loved both, but neither won; "Those Old Scientists" finished in a very close second, with "Subspace Rhapsody" down in fifth. The Last of Us seems a worthy enough victor, but I'm less convinced that Doctor Who's "The Giggle" was better than "Subspace Rhapsody"!
It was a very good year for Strange New Worlds, with two other episodes on the longlist: "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" and "Ad Astra Per Aspera."
I am a bit surprised, though, that no episode of the fan-favorite Picard season 3 was even on the longlist!
2025: Lower Decks, Lower Decks!
In 2025, Lower Decks got on the Best Dramatic Presentation ballot again... twice! The last two episodes of the entire series, "Fissure Quest" and "The New Next Generation," were both finalists. Honestly, this was a bit disappointing to me, in that when I caught up on the series, I found there were three 2024 episodes of Lower Decks I would have placed above either of these. To my surprise, "The New Next Generation" ended up winning; as I feel like often happens with the Hugo, it seems more like a vote for the series as a whole than for the specific episode per se. But series creator Mike McMahan gave a pretty nice speech about what the Hugos meant to him.
Season five of Lower Decks as a whole was also on the longlist for Long Form, and a nonfiction book about Star Trek, Nana Visitor's A Woman's Trek, on the longlist for Best Related Work.
But the real surprise was that a work of Star Trek fiction was a finalist in Best Graphic Story. An original tie-in graphic novel, Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio, placed on the ballot.
Tie-in fiction has not often made the Hugo ballot. To the extent that it has, it's largely been confined to the Best Graphic Story category: comics based on The Dresden Files, Serenity, Doctor Who, Cyberpunk 2077, and the Dune movie have all been on the ballot. There was also one year where a Magic: The Gathering story made the ballot for Best Short Story. None of these have ever won.
But all that changed this year, when not only was a Star Trek tie-in a finalist for the first time ever, but Warp Your Own Way actually won the category! And justifiably so, in my opinion. Most tie-in fiction, in my opinion, is frankly not Hugo-worthy (the tie-ins that have made the ballot since I began voting in 2017 certainly haven't been), but Warp Your Own Way does genuinely clever stuff with the narrative form of the choose-your-own-adventure story.
So, thanks to Lower Decks, Star Trek not only scored its first Hugo Award in thirty years (it last won in 1995 for The Next Generation's "All Good Things..."), it actually scored two!
Final Thoughts
There have been five Star Trek shows of the streaming era. Of these five, two have never made the Hugo ballot: Picard and Prodigy. And while Picard made the longlist a few times, Prodigy never even did that.
I'll be curious to see if Star Trek makes the ballot again any time soon; with Lower Decks over and Strange New Worlds winding down, it seems like the opportunities are dwindling. But perhaps Starfleet Academy will surprise us all and produce some smashing episodes!
This collection of Black Panther comics was recently added to Hoopla; it consists of six stories from non–Black Panther books (mostly Avengers, with one Fantastic Four story), mostly not set in the "main" Marvel Universe. In original release order (which is not the order the stories are collected here), they come from The Avengers #52 and 62, Marvel Adventures: Fantastic Four #10, Marvel Adventures: The Avengers #22, The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #1, and Marvel Universe: The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #8. Of these six, I'd already read three of them: the two regular Avengers stories were collected in Mighty Marvel Masterworks Presents The Black Panther, Volume 1 and the Fantastic Four story in Marvel-Verse: Black Panther.
Thus, I'm just reading and reviewing the three new-to-me stories collected here.
Writers: Jeff Parker, Marc Sumerak, Christopher Yost, Elliott Kalan, Roy Thomas
Pencilers: Manuel Garcia, Ig Guara, Patrick Scherberger, Christopher Jones, John Buscema
Inkers: Scott Koblish, Jay Leisten, Patrick Scherberger, Pond Scum, Vince Colletta, George Klein
Colorists: Andrew Crossley, Ulises Arreola, Jean-François Beaulieu
Letterers: Dave Sharpe, Clayton Cowles, Sam Rosen, Art Simek
I think that far too many Black Panther stories released prior to the character's MCU debut feel the need to introduce him by making him the ruler of this mysterious land our heroes know nothing about. That was the approach taken in Marvel Adventures: Fantastic Four #10, collected here, among other stories, and it's also the approach taken in Marvel Adventures: The Avengers #22 ("Wakanda the Wild Side!" by Marc Sumerak, Ig Guara, and Jay Leisten). I guess it's a perfectly valid approach to introduce the character... but it also makes for a pretty boring story in this particular instance, as the Black Panther is thus mostly a side presence. Which I guess is okay, this is an Avengers comic, not a Black Panther one... but then why put it in a Black Panther book? Anyway, I didn't think this one had much going on. Also, what a weird Avengers line-up: Captain America, Wolverine, Storm, Spider-Man, the Hulk, and Giant-Girl (nee the Wasp)... can you even have X-Men on the Avengers? It doesn't seem right.
The other two stories are, thankfully, ones where Black Panther actually is in the Avengers. The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #1 ("Trust" by Christopher Yost and Patrick Scherberger*) is a six-pager about Black Panther teaming up with Hawkeye. It's fine, though I didn't find the bickering terribly believable.
Next panel: Black Panther getting overwhelmed, of course. from Marvel Universe: The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #8
I did find the bickering believable in Marvel Universe: The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #8 ("Mayhem of the Madbomb!" by Elliott Kalan, Christopher Jones, and... Pond Scum!? I guess not everyone's parents can be good at naming kids), where Black Panther is forced to team up with the Hulk when literally no other Avenger is available to stop terrorists from setting off a "madbomb" on the Empire State Building. Never were two superheroes less well-matched, and both story and art are fun. Clearly the best of the three new-to-me stories.
* On the collection's credit page, the artist is given as Scott Wegener, but in the actual story, Patrick Scherberger. As far as I can tell from the GCD, Wegener did the art for the main story in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #1, not the back-up, which is what's actually collected here.
The last pre-Flashpoint Blackhawk story was Blackhawk Down, which appeared in four issues of the continuity-light Batman title Batman Confidential. In this story, Batman investigates a theft at Blackhawk Industries only to run into Zinda "Lady Blackhawk" Blake who is investigating the same thing, and faces machinations of various Blackhawk villains... only to discover that the supposedly long-dead Janos "Blackhawk" Prohaska himself is actually alive!
It is, to be quite honest, pretty bad, full of twists for the sake of twists and an execrable ending where Blackhawk and Lady Blackhawk become a romantic item for no reason other than to demonstrate that old men deserve hot women as long as they are alive. Lady Blackhawk is particularly poorly done by here, serving as a damsel-in-distress and no more. The art is muddy and dull in a way that feels annoyingly typical of 2010s comics. It's one of those comics that's so bad but so uninterestingly bad, that I can't even must up any enthusiasm for writing a detailed negative review. Read it if you're a completist (I am) but know what you're in for if so.
Did not expect a Sky Skull reference in the year 2010! At least Royal McGraw read his classic Blackhawk issues. (Or perhaps the DC wiki.) from Batman Confidential #38
The only to thing to like here, as far as I am concerned, is the book's catholic approach to Blackhawk continuity. Blackhawk is called Janos Prohaska, as he was post-Crisis, when Lady Blackhawk was Natalie Reed... but Lady Blackhawk is Zinda Blake, as she was pre-Crisis, back when Blackhawk was Bart Hawk. Obviously there have been post-Crisis stories with Janos and post-Crisis stories with Zinda, but I think this is the first story to mix the two. There's a lot of other pre-Crisis Blackhawk continuity thrown in here, too, like Ted Gaynor, the Chop-Chop substitute from the Evanier/Spiegle run (see item #9 below); references to the clone Blackhawk, also from that run; a subplot about Zinda's time as Queen Killer Shark (see #5); and even the Sky Skull from the short-lived late 1960s revival (see #6), the first time that's ever been referenced as far as I know. Post-Crisis it can be pretty hard to tell what "counts," but I appreciate any writer whose attitude is that it all counts.
The artist was so proud of this that on the full page, it's got their enormous signature emblazoned on it. from Batman Confidential #38
Blackhawk Down originally appeared in issues #36-39 of Batman Confidential (Early Jan.–Late Feb. 2010). The story was written by Royal McGraw, pencilled by Marcos Marz, inked by Luciana Del Negro, colored by David Baron, lettered by Sal Cipriano, and edited by Mike Marts.
This is the penultimate in a series of posts about the Blackhawks. The last installment covers their post-Crisis continuity. Previous installments are listed below:
So the ongoing thread of the second season of my Star Trek Adventures campaign has been the Haradin, an alien species my players bump into a lot. Across the course of the season, they've discovered that many Haradin have transmitter/receivers in their brain, that Haradin consider their homeworld space itself, that some Haradin thus perceive the Federation as an invading aggressor, and that General Zotabia—who the players have battled a couple times—is the face of a rising authoritarian/fascist movement among the Haradin.
Going into the campaign with all these ideas seeded, I knew I wanted to have a finale about this. Specifically, inspired by one of the published STA missions, "Ends and Means," I knew I wanted the season finale to be about about a vote. But instead of voting to join the Federation (as in that mission), there would be a vote on a Haradin clan-ship about whether or not to align itself with Zotabia's "Return to Harad" nativist movement.
What really unlocked the whole season for me was listening to an episode of WNYC's On the Media about shortwave radio, "The Divided Dial." What that episode discusses is how shortwave radio served as a medium largely invisible to both society at large and the government in particular, allowing for the proliferation of hard-right voices that no one knew about, leading to radicalization. I listened to this right at the beginning of the summer, and I came up with a science fiction take on it: the Haradin would have receiver/transmitters in their brains (as in M. T. Anderson's Feed), which would mean that authoritarian propaganda was being beamed right into their brains but no one would know about it.
(As it developed, the idea was that the Haradin maintained cultural unity despite being spread across a wide range of space through a transmitter network using subsubspace: a central transmitter connected to clan-ship transmitters, which then relayed to individual Haradin. The government ran this, a sort of NPR/BBC-like feed, but around six years before my current campaign, the government collapsed, and so the feed was shut down. Zotabia's group took possession of one of the clan-ship transmitter dishes and covertly reactivated it, changing it to only transmit to Haradin who adjusted their receivers with a certain code, meaning those with the potential for radicalization would spread it to each other, but to people on the other side, it would be pretty much invisible.)
I ran 13½ prewritten STA scenarios before I finally wrote my own for the first time this summer (see #5 in the list below), and I have been growing increasingly comfortable with both 1) coming up with my own ideas, and 2) not having the whole mission planned out ahead of time. Going into this mission, I knew I needed a number of things:
To explore what a Haradin clan-ship was like: massive ships ten miles across and a hundred miles across, connected internally via a monorail system.
Obviously to deal with the vote itself. Zotabia's people would be claiming that their opponents were rigging the election; but those opposed to Zotabia would be complaining of harassment at the polls. The players would be called in as a neutral party to help keep things aboveboard.
The players had met a couple pirates in episode 1 of the season, including an earnest young one who (it would turn out) was being radicalized by Zotabia's feed; I wanted him to come back in some way.
In our first episode of the season, I had introduced a couple NPCs based on Deep Space 10, the Starfleet outpost in the Ekumene sector my players' ship is based out of; one of them was a female comms tech, Chief Susu Webb, and it seemed to me there was potential for a thing between her and Nevan, my engineer. In episode 2, I had her slip Nevan some special tea. How could I keep this going? I came up with the idea of Nevan and the ship's Intelligence analyst, Frector, being tasked by Starfleet Intelligence to figure out more about the Haradin transmitter, and Chief Webb being sent along to help. This would give Frector and Nevan a nice subplot, and also give lots of time for Nevan and Webb to be in close quarters.
One of my characters, Mooria, has the value "Protect Critters," and in our session zero, her player had requested "critters"... something I hadn't been able to work into any previous missions! So I knew I needed to do it here. I came up with the idea there'd be a disease of some kind among the livestock on the Haradin clan-ship; this would give both Mooria and the doctor, Gurg, their own subplot to pursue.
Other things I had in mind, more vaguely: hacking the transmitter dish, the players having to drive a monorail themselves, the Klingon captain Akul (whom the players had promised to hunt Zotabia with) turning up, the clan-ship's ancient warp drive being reactivated, the Diversitas's resident alien AI (Mercury) playing some kind of role. As you'll see I didn't get to all of this!
The other thing I knew going in: I kind of wanted the nativists to win the election. Not because I am a mean old GM or anything, but because 1) it seemed to me that dealing with the fall-out of this would be potentially very interesting, and 2) as someone who currently lives in the United States, I just couldn't imagine how someone could stop a rising authoritarian movement! But more on that as I go.
"Captain’s Log, Stardate 54006.3. The Diversitas has once again been summoned to Deep Space 10 for a meeting with Consul Vrossaan. I can only assume this relates to the situation with the Haradin—as we made our way back to the station, we observed ever increasing numbers of Haradin ships streaming to an unknown destination somewhere within the depths of the Ekumene sector."
I had four weeks for the mission, so I planned it appropriately. Unfortunately, I had to cancel two sessions for various reasons, and so had to schedule two make-ups, but we did get there in the end! This is who I had per session:
Ryan as Rucot, captain (sessions 1-4)
Debi as T'Cant, first officer/science officer (1-4)
Kenyon as Nevan Jones, engineer (1-2, 4)
Claire as Mooria Salmang, pilot (1, 3-4)
Cari as Jor Lena, security officer (1-4)
Austin as Frector, Intelligence analyst (1-2, 4)
Andy as Gurg bim Vurg, medical officer (1, 3)
I tried to make it work that all players would be present at the big finale, but unfortunately Andy got sick on the day! (His wife played for him, though; I thought it would unfairly handicap them to be down a player.)
Mission Directives:
As always, the Prime Directive is in effect.
Protect democracy.
Investigate the mysteries of the Haradin.
I'll recap here on an act-by-act basis.
Act I: True-Born in Vacuum
Haradin clan-ship Marvek
This act covered their briefing on Deep Space 10, and the first half of their first day on the clan-ship—they arrived two days before the election. A lot of the very first session was them getting the lay of the land: having to get through Customs, meeting the matriarch of the ship-clan, and so on. The players came up with the idea that in the chaos of Customs, the group assigned to investigate the transmitter (Nevan, Frector, Chief Webb) would actually sneak off on their own and play tourist so they could get a look at it themselves. After meeting with the matriarch, the remaining players split into two groups: Gurg, Mooria, and T'Cant would look into the plague among the plorthik ("puddle-pigs") while Jor and Rucot would investigate election security.
As always, the players surprised me. I made the NPC the players met on a puddle-pig farm someone who had been radicalized by the transmitter network, and thus she was reluctant to deal with Starfleet. I had thought the players would probably appeal to her desire to protect her animals, but instead they played up the fact they had actually worked alongside Zotabia a couple times, and convinced her they were sympathetic to finding out the "truth" that the mainstream media was refusing to tell people... and thus she gave them the access code for the Haradin transmitter network! (Earlier, Gurg had built his own receiver, so they had this to tune into it.) I had thought they might gain access in some way, but not this one. They figured out the puddle-pigs had the anatid space flu, but to know more, they needed to take a sick puddle-pig back to the Diversitas; Mooria had to drive a monorail very gently to stop from disturbing the poor plorthik.
interior city on the clan-ship Marvek
Meanwhile, Rucot and Jor learned how the election was going to be run; Ryan, who plays Rucot, is a sociologist, and so asked me a bunch of detailed questions I wasn't expecting about election mechanics that I had to think about between sessions! The idea ended up becoming that when the transmitter dish worked, clan-wide elections would be held via the Haradin feed, but since then, elections had to be held in person. Each district on the clan-ship had come up with its own system for electing representatives to the ship-clan legislative assembly, but this would be the first vote since then, so the first time all those 794 district systems had to be coordinated as one.
The players also discovered there were Haradin who were not biologically Haradin, but culturally, living on the clan-ship: Orions, Yridians, and Lisspians. Zotabia's people were casting doubt that these were "real" Haradin and harassing them at the polls, particularly in the district nicknamed "Oriontown," the only one with a majority population of non-biological Haradin. Rucot and Jor worked with local officials to train election security.
clan-ship monorail system
Meanwhile meanwhile, Frector and her group approached the transmitter dish; they ended up playing enthusiastic tourists, and bribed a guard at a loading dock to let them look around, claiming they just loved transmitters so much. They had to sneak around until they found a maintenance computer, and they downloaded the schematics for the dish.
The first act culminated in two simultaneous Extended Tasks:
When Jor was talking to Esha Vortan, the friendly ex-pirate (now part of Zotabia's paramilitary honor guard), at a polling place in Oriontown, other Haradin began harassing an Orion coming into register to vote. Jor had to defuse a potential riot. This one I made timed; if she failed to do it in four rounds, it would reach a tipping point where she'd be unable to stop it. (I had thought Rucot and/or T'Cant would be with her, but the way the players had split up, she was on her own... thankfully, she had a security squad with her!)
Nevan and Chief Webb had to download the schematics; I did this one as the player's Extended Task track competing with an Extended Consequences track from me; if I got 5 Setbacks before they got their necessary 5 Breakthroughs, they would be discovered. But the players could do things to slow down the Extended Consequences Track.
I'm always experimenting with different ways to do Extended Tasks (to me, the best mechanic of STA and thus the reason I refuse to switch to the second edition); in this case, I gave each one a decent amount of Resistance (1 for the riot, 3 for the hacking) but tried to balance it out by making the starting difficulty less than the total number of Breakthroughs needed, so by the end of each Extended Task, it would be Difficulty 0. I think this ended up making them too easy but oh well! I do think Jor's player was pretty proud to defuse a riot single-handedly.
Act II: Their Gravity-Choked Values
This act was the remainder of the first day. At the beginning, the players reconvened on the Diversitas to consider their next move... but this was complicated by them receiving a distress transmission from Orvan Jadrel, the friendly Haradin professor they'd met in the previous episode. So they split up into three groups again: Gurg and Mooria would look into curing the puddle-pig, Nevan and T'Cant would deal with tuning into the transmitter network and validating the election algorithm, and Rucot and Jor would go to answer Professor Jadrel's distress signal. (Frector's player, Austin, was out that week.)
I ended up having a lot of fun with the transmitter network; when the players tuned into it, they picked up a broadcast, which I got my wife to prerecord with me (it was two hosts going back and forth), and played back for the players during the session. The players had the idea that they would reach out to the transmitter network and offer to validate the election security live on air; I was skeptical the people at the network would think this would make for riveting broadcasting, and so made it Difficulty 5... but they nailed it!
University of Marvek
Meanwhile, the group going to help Professor Jadrel discovered that, inspired by what the players had said to him in the previous episde, he'd taken to speaking out against Zotabia's movement... and his provost had suspended him, claiming he was making campus unsafe, as protestors were coming on campus to speak out against him in turn. Of my seven players, five are university professors (and the other two are married to professors)... and we live in Florida... so this hit pretty close to home! And of those five, one is a former University Senate president and the other the secretary of our AAUP chapter, so they were very concerned with whether appropriate protocols had been followed, and what kind of rules the Haradin university had covering extramural utterances.
(When Jadrel popped up in the previous episode, he had been so helpful the players had been suspicious; I toyed with having the cost of this being that he died, but decided that was probably too mean, and settled for him losing his job instead. One of my players: "This is hitting too close to home." Me: "Back in session zero, you told me one of the things you liked about Star Trek is the way it reflects current events." Her: [big sigh] "Yes, I know...")
They decided to take Jadrel back to the Diversitas, so he could broadcast from safety. But they were confronted by the Provost. Me: "Convincing the Provost will be a Difficulty 5 Task." Ryan: "What!" Me: "Ryan, I know you know that convincing a provost of something is much harder than Difficulty 5 most of the time." Anyway, they succeeded (and filed a complaint with the Haradin Association of University Professors)—it's nice if a game can provide a little wish-fulfillment!
Haradin puddle-pig on an interior farm
In the previous session, the players had expressed interesting finding the origins of the anatid space flu, so I set that up as an Extended Task. To make an effective antiviral, they would need to find out how the virus had mutated by tracing its origins back from the clan-ship farms to wherever it came from... but the plorthik in sickbay was dying, and would be dead if they didn't move quickly. (One of my players: "I think I wrote on my 'lines and veils' sheet no animal deaths." Me: "You'd better hope they succeed then!") Claire and Andy as Mooria and Gurg had fun with this, tracing the infection back to a ship recovered by a Haradin salvage crew, and posing as people interested in buying it. Andy in particular spouted bad fake Engineering jargon while secretly obtaining medical samples from the recovered derelict.
So all along, I'd been agonizing over my idea that no matter what, the players would "lose" the election. I kept talking to my wife about this—was I just being mean? railroading them? She told me I should just do it, but I called my friend Adam, a longtime GM in many different systems, and asked for his advice.
He said it was okay to have a downer ending, especially if it would set up more for the players to do in the long run, but suggested two things: 1) There needed to be a clear point where the players could do more but chose not to. Like, they could interfere in the election to make sure a certain side won... but perhaps they'd choose not to because of their Mission Directive of "Protect democracy." 2) The episode would need to end on some kind of victory, even if small. This was very helpful advice, so thanks Adam.
Thus, I had Act II end with the players getting a call from Consul Vrossaan on DS10, spelling out that Starfleet's opinion was that the election would almost certainly go bad: “Look, I’ve been trying to do what I can diplomatically for months now. But you guys are on the ground, no Federation team has spent more time with the Haradin—I saw you work miracles with the Ithik when no one else could. To quote the poets: 'only a fool waits for the thaw when the bridge must be cut.' The Federation needs a win here. The last thing we need is to be tangling with another authoritarian power on our borders, even a smaller one like the Haradin. A lot of people—both inside and outside the Federation—are going to suffer if Return to Harad wins this vote.”
The players then had a great conversation: considering that Zotabia's movement was pretty undemocratic itself, could you do something undemocratic to stop it from winning? How did that accord with their Mission Directive? They bandied about some crazy plans (sabotage, hacking the network to make it seem like Zotabia was calling for violence), but they ended up noticing a thing I hadn't really thought about: I'd established that the defunct transmitter network was very important to the Haradin—it's one of the meanings of the word Harad—and it had been turned back on by Zotabia's people... which was being kept secret from most of them. The Haradin were being denied their own heritage! It was a great conversation, very Star Trek and very much what I love about STA... and for the first time, I believed there was a way for them to win to the election.
The second act (and third session) ended with Zotabia arriving on the clan-ship. I played a nativist speech from Zotabia (I got AI to read it, since I don't think my voice is very suited to being a fascist dictator), and the players decided if they could embarrass Zotabia by having Rucot hug him as an old friend. I thought this seemed unlikely and set up a bunch of Difficulty 4/5 Tasks... but they pulled it off!
Act III: We Will Purify Our Skies
Going into the last act and the last session, I was clear that things were going to be hard. (I established that due to how tense things were, all Tasks would generate Complications on 19 and 20; I needed to rebuild my Threat pool for the climax!) I said this wasn't because I was being mean, but because a victory is only exciting if it's difficult. I said it was like the climax of a D&D campaign, but instead of fighting a balrog, they were fighting fascism itself—I wanted them to win, but I was also going to make them work for it.
The last act and last session covered the day before the election and the election itself. I began the session with another broadcast from the news network recorded by me and my wife: the hug had caused people to look into the past associations between the players and Zotabia, and notice that they had worked together sometimes, including Zotabia even speaking in Rucot's defense at his inquiry.
(My seven-year-old kept asking if they could do a recording, too, so I did a "vox pop" piece on the election day: PARENT: “Zotabia speaks plain. He remembers what the old space-lanes were like—before the offworlders took them from us. I want my kid raised Haradin, not kowtowing to the Federation.” CHILD: “I wanna be a ship-guard like Zotabia. He doesn’t take orders from planet people.” Everyone loved this.)
The players first went to the ship-clan matriarch to ask what she thought they should do, but having her make up their minds seemed dramatically inert, so I had her be a fence-sitter: basically, she didn't want to lose her power by becoming beholden to Zotabia, but she also didn't want to make any overt anti-Zotabia moves in case she did become beholden to him. My players decided she sucked. (Not wrong.)
They chose to do the following:
Disseminate via traditional Haradin media that the network was back.
Help Jadrel broadcast from the Diversitas.
Analyze the Haradin transmitter in case they wanted to hack it.
Go on a goodwill tour of Haradin farms, emphasizing that it was thanks to the Federation the puddle-pig plague had been cured.
They succeeded at all this, but I told them it wasn't enough—news wasn't being spread fast enough, they needed to do something bigger to move the needle. Their news about the transmitter being restored just wasn't disseminating quickly. I had expected them to hack the transmitter and put Jadrel on it (this is an idea they had bandied about during the previous session), but they came up with a different plan: capitalizing on the questions being asked about Zotabia following him being hugged by Rucot, they'd offer the Haradin network an exclusive interview with Rucot, one where Rucot would be able to drop in that Zotabia worked alongside Starfleet a couple times, that some of the stuff Zotabia was claiming credit for had really been their doing, and that Starfleet had defeated Zotabia a couple times. Was this guy really going to stand up to outsiders as he was promising?
Of course, I made it into an Extended Task, Rucot rolling to be compelling and persuasive during the interview. The limiting factor here was that after each time Rucot rolled, one of the other players would have to attempt a Difficulty 3 Task representing some kind of prep they'd done to help Rucot before the interview. If any of them failed, Rucot would choke and the whole interview would be over. They did a good job coming up with various things each could do: Gurg used his Value of "Rigorous Debate" to spar with Rucot ahead of time to get him ready; T'Cant pulled footage of Zotabia (when he was a pirate captain) running away from the Diversitas; Nevan provided validation the footage was accurate; Mooria reached out to the governor of Ryuku (the planet where they first met Zotabia) and got her testimony; Jor led Rucot through some Bajoran yoga exercises to keep him centered; and so on. It was tense, but everyone succeeded on their Difficulty 3 Tasks, so Rucot was able to succeed even when in the last round he rolled two Complications, meaning I increased the Task's Resistance from 1 to 5!
Haradin lined up to vote
This took us into the climax of the episode. My idea was that we would alternate between me rolling Challenge Dice and the players attempting Difficulty 5 Tasks to allow them to roll Challenge Dice. The rolls on those Challenge Dice would represent votes: mine votes for the ship-clan joining Zotabia's movement, theirs votes against. Like in an Extended Task, they'd get to roll 2+Discipline. I'd get to roll 6... unless they'd succeeded at the previous scene's Extended Task, in which case it would be 5. (On the other hand, if they'd decided to do something foolish, like overtly messing with the election, it would have been 7.) Whichever side had more tallies at the end would win!
The five Tasks I gave them:
Maintain order in polling places: Daring + Security
Help Jadrel with his speeches: Presence + Command
Monitor the transmitter network: Reason + Engineering
With seven players, plus Chief Webb, it would be up to them to decide who would do what and what would get an assist. Of course a lot of them spent their Determination here... but some had already used it on the Extended Task.
The players were very smart about how to do this, thinking about how to do ones where they had Advantages early to make them easier and generate Momentum. For example, if Nevan monitored the network from the ship, he could use the Engineering Department to help, do it in a lab they'd configured, and use the Sensors, each of which reduced the Difficulty by 1, so it was just 2!
I had 10 Threat going into this, so I aimed to spend 2 per round, either letting me reroll Challenge Dice if it seemed necessary, or just adding to my rolls. If the players rolled Complications, I let myself spend more. At first they had a commanding lead...
Things got a bit tense, though, when on the second-last go, Frector only got 4 successes on her attempt to help Jadrel with his speeches. The players decided to reallocate Gurg from helping on the plorthik goodwill tour so he could roll an extra assist (I know this is technically not within the rules), which he did succeed at. Austin made Frector's Challenge Dice roll, and then I made my last roll... and I was up 3 over them.
There was just one roll left, Control + Conn for the goodwill tour... and only one player to do it! It was all down to a single roll by Claire as Mooria whether the Haradin would descend into fascism or not. Even thinking about it as I type this up, I get chills— I don't know that you can ask for anything better or more exciting as a GM.
She used her Value to spend Determination, spent all the Momentum remaining in the pool, added more dice with Threat... and she did it! She rolled nine on the Challenge Dice, meaning the players beat me by seven points!
I had prepared two speeches for Zotabia, a victory one, and one where he lost (but claims it was rigged) and then slinks away. I played the latter, and we just had a couple things to wrap up:
Consul Vrossaan called them to congratulate them: "Thank you for your hard work on this. To quote the poets: 'the glacier moves only a finger’s width, yet reshapes the world.' Hopefully this is the beginning of a more fruitful relationship with the Haradin."
Kenyon decided that Nevan would respond to Chief Webb's flirtations by inviting her to play a game with him, and then giving her a copy of it when they parted company.
Plato the Puddle-Pig
And lastly, the puddle-pig farmer the players befriended came aboard the Diversitas to tell Mooria she'd voted against Zotabia, and to gift her with a runt just born—too small for the farm, but suitable for a pet. Claire seemed quite delighted! The crew now has its own puddle-pig. (Ryan: "Rucot is not a pet person. This thing is all Mooria's responsibility.") Claire named it "Plato" as a symbol of democracy.
To me, it was one of the best episodes I've run. I did a post-campaign poll about which episodes the players liked, and one cited it as their favorite: "I like that we were talking to lots of different people who had diverse agendas and we had to cater to those agendas while also keeping our mission directives and principles in mind."
If my campaign gets a third season, I definitely have lots of ideas of how to develop the storyline from here. But that will have to wait until next summer!
So the ongoing thread of the second season of my Star Trek Adventures campaign has been the Haradin, an alien species my players bump into a lot. Across the course of the season, they've discovered that many Haradin have transmitter/receivers in their brain, that Haradin consider their homeworld space itself, that some Haradin thus perceive the Federation as an invading aggressor, and that General Zotabia—who the players have battled a couple times—is the face of a rising authoritarian/fascist movement among the Haradin.
