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Published: 2014 Acquired: April 2019 Read: October 2020 |
2380 / some indeterminate anniversary*
Picard and Crusher entered into a romantic relationship in Death in Winter and got married "off-screen" between Before Dishonor and Greater than the Sum. Q Are Cordially Uninvited...
opens on their anniversary, where Picard and Crusher are forcing La
Forge and Worf to watch a holo-recording of their ceremony. (They must
be good friends indeed to suffer through such a thing.) This leads into a
revelation that they did not have an uneventful little ceremony
as we were told, but that Q showed up on the night of the wedding to
whisk Picard away on an adventure.
But why? Why did there need to be an untold adventure on the eve of the wedding? After reading Q Are Cordially Uninvited...,
I still don't know. This book doesn't really tell us anything about
Picard, Crusher, or their relationship. Q brings Vash into the
adventure; at first this seems to be because he wants to try to reignite
the Picard/Vash thing, but instead it turns out that Q is the
one who wants to be with Vash again. Most of the book is spent with
Picard, Vash, and later Crusher searching for some ancient
archaeological treasure on an alien planet, but the book doesn't exactly
have the thrills of Indiana Jones. It's a pretty generic Star Trek ancient mystery, and it's hard to care about any scenario that is orchestrated by Q, where anything can happen, and does.
I did think Rudy Josephs had a good handle on the voice of Q; there were
a couple lines in particular that really nailed John de Lancie. But Q
is actually off-screen for big chunks of it all.
At the end, Q makes a special wedding for Picard and Crusher, the big
one they won't "actually" get. This felt more like fannish wish
fulfillment than anything anyone should have actually written. And then
the book... just stops. I literally said "that's it?" when I turned the
"page" on my Kindle, so abrupt was it (the frame story is not returned
to), and so pointless did it all seem. This seems to mostly exist to
plug a gap, but I'm not convinced anyone actually wanted this gap
plugged. Even more weirdly, the writer of Greater than the Sum informs me that that book was purposefully written to seed a gap that a later book would go back and fill, but I wouldn't have guessed it, because there's nothing at all interesting in what Greater than the Sum says about the wedding. Not in a bad way; I mean, in GttS
it just basically seems to be, "they went and got married," like normal
people do. (As I recall, anyway; it's been over a decade, but I did
skim some of the relevant bits to write this.) There's no hint that there's a gap to fill, yet here we are.
- Weirdly for a book seemingly designed to plug a continuity gap, the body of evidence indicates Rudy Josephs knows little about the Destiny-era continuity. The only Enterprise crew to come to Picard and Crusher's holo-recreation of their wedding are La Forge and Worf-- screen characters both-- and at the actual wedding we're just told that "Picard's current crew" are there. Couldn't even look up Kadohata and Leybenzon on Memory Beta?
- Picard and Crusher only know of Q's wife from Voyager logs... but they met her in The Q Continuum trilogy. Additionally, Picard doesn't seem to remember that he learned there were reasons behind Q's various visits to the Enterprise in Q & A.
- Greater than the Sum said that Guinan officiated Picard and Crusher's wedding, which is not what we see go down in the official ceremony here. Can we blame Q's interference for this somehow?
Other Notes:
- I feel like you can do one joke in your title ("Q Are Cordially Invited" or "You Are Cordially Uninvited"), but two is overegging the pudding.
I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Fall: Revelation and Dust by David R. George III
* The frame story doesn't specify what anniversary it is for Picard and Crusher, who got married in September 2380 as per Greater than the Sum. I think I picked here to read it assuming it was the fifth, but that would overlap with The Fall. If it's the fourth, that would put it before The Stuff of Dreams, either just before or just after The Body Electric, which takes place in September 2384. I think it could literally take place on any of the first four anniversaries, though, and possibly on later ones as well.
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