Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Department of Temporal Investigations: Time Lock

Published: 2016
Acquired: February 2019
Read: September 2020

Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Time Lock

by Christopher L. Bennett

July 2384–March 2385
On the strength of The Collectors, I was really looking forward to reading Time Lock, but while Collectors was energetic and inventive, Time Lock is-- like the two DTI novels-- plodding and over-expository. Things get off to a rough start with a confusing sequence where people tell each other and/or think about a time portal recovered from the Gum Nebula, the political configuration of the Vomnin, the events of Titan: Orion's Hounds, how the Vault works, and the identities of a bunch of different DTI characters. People think to themselves, "better not be pedantic and say x," and think about x instead, which I will say is not really an interesting to smuggle in exposition that actually doesn't add anything.

I like the idea of this book, but it never takes off. That the DTI could be subject to a heist where each side uses temporal devices against the other sounds fun, but it ended up in practice being dull. Too often the DTI characters do something clever but obscure, and then it is explained to us what was done, meaning a lot of the action is retrospective and detached, which prevents us from feeling invested in it. The villain is a bit on the cartoony side, and I will admit to not strongly caring about any of the original DTI characters.

The idea of the time lock is clever: within the Vault, time keeps slowing down, so at first the Vault is a minute behind, then it's 20 minutes behind, then forty, then an hour; by the novella's end, only a couple days have passed inside the Vault, but eight months have gone by outside! This is clever, yes, but it does mean that any sense of urgency completely evaporates when the action switches to outside the Vault. Oh no, will the DTI figure it out? Well, yes, because they have months to investigate it at their leisure, actually. And these scenes are often bogged down by exposition, too, such as a long and pointless explanation of stepwells.

The problem is that the longer the book goes on, the more time the outside characters have to solve the problems inside the Vault. The end of the book tries to raise the stakes by having something go horribly wrong, but it feels arbitrary in its deployment of technobabble: suddenly it's "blah blah subspace" and the tension is just draining away. And then the resolution comes from the outside characters having months to research something that will save the inside characters.

It did have its moments, but based on The Collectors, I expected quick-fire time shenanigans as the two groups tried to outwit each other. Instead I felt like each side had just two ideas that were doled out very slowly. The end promises a sequel, which doesn't leave me very excited. (But for me, different time shenanigans with the nexus are coming first!)

from Star Trek: The Next Generation Annual #6
(script by Michael Jan Friedman, art by Ken Save & Sam de la Rosa)

Continuity Notes:

• At one point there's a recap of Orion's Hounds that is (on my Kindle settings, at least) a whole page long. I have read that book and this still confused me, but I think it could have been cut with no problem.
• There is a reference to the appearances of the rouge Aegis agents in DC's 1990s comics (previously reviewed by me). I know the novels have been using the term "Aegis" from those comics since Assignment: Eternity, but is this the first time any actual events from those comics have been referenced?

Other Notes:

• One thing I found really weird is when two DTI agents go to check out the home planet of the antagonist: "We investigated her people, the Tomika. There was no sign any of them would have the knowledge or the desire to participate in something like this. And none of them seemed to have the unusual strength and perception she's shown." They checked out an entire sapient species and none of them were interested in stealing time technology? It's a pretty improbable statement, I felt.
• There's an okay gag where someone is "aged to death" and instead of living until seventy, he died right away because, duh, he doesn't have any food or water. As soon as I read it, I thought of the Babylon 5 episode "Babylon Squared" because this trope has bothered me every since I saw that episode-- and upon reading the author's annotations, Bennett was thinking of that ep himself. But I think the moment is clunky (someone says that it always works in the holodramas, but I got it before then), and it's undermined by the fact that the victim doesn't actually die.
  
• I am delighted to report a complete lack of workplace sexual harassment in this DTI installment.
  

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: The Stuff of Dreams by James Swallow