Star Trek: Encounters with the Unknown by Jeffrey Moy, W. C. Carani, et al.

Star Trek Classics #3: Encounters with the Unknown

Collection published: 2012
Contents originally published: 2000-01
Read: April 2026

Written by Nathan Archer, Janine Ellen Young & Doselle Young, Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, Kristine Kathryn Rusch & Dean Wesley Smith

Pencils by Jeffrey Moy, David Roach, Robert Teranishi
Background Assists by Philip Moy

Inks by W. C. Carani, David Roach, Claude St. Aubin

Colors by Dan Brown (with Nick Bell)

Letters by Ryan Cline (with Jenna Garcia) & Naghmeh Zand

Like Enemy Unseen, this "Star Trek Classics" release on Hoopla from IDW takes a Wildstorm trade paperback from the 2000s and rebrands it. While Enemy Unseen collected several otherwise unrelated Next Generation stories, this one collects four Voyager stories, three double-length one-shots and one three-part miniseries. I was surprised that the obviously intentionally vague title Encounters with the Unknown is actually pretty applicable to all four stories even though it feels like it could be applied to almost any Star Trek story if you squinted hard enough!

The first story is "False Colors," whose basic premise is that Voyager encounters what seems to be a Borg ship, but turns out to be something else entirely, and then Seven, Chakotay, and Tuvok must infiltrate it in the guise of Borg drones... leading to Seven possibly starting her own little collective. Like Perchance to Dream from Enemy Unseen, it reads like it's written by someone who is new to the comics medium: lots of word balloons, few visually interesting things near the beginning, the kind of stuff that might make for a fine episode of the tv show but is dull on the comics page. When the interesting conceit of the story finally turns up—would it be ethical for Seven to establish a "collective" of her own if it helps protect Voyager? how would she feel if she did?—it's not really used in an interesting way, the characters don't seem to actually face a dilemma due to it.

I felt like the whole comic might have been constructed around the idea of the shocking cover image of Seven as a Borg—which to be fair, was similar to how several actual Voyager episodes were developed.
from Star Trek: Voyager: False Colors #1 (script by Nathan Archer, art by Jeffrey Moy & Philip Moy and W. C. Carani)

The second story in this volume is the one story I can say I've wholeheartedly enjoyed across both volumes of Star Trek Classics that I read. "Avalon Rising" is about the Doctor being sent to an alien planet to recover an artifact blocking transporters; the planet is in a medieval time period, and its knights and squires interpret the Doctor as a wizard from a distant land, a role he ends up leaning into. It's delightful stuff: visually interesting (artist David A. Roach proves every bit as adept with this Doctor as the one he normally illustrates) and the dialogue and character arc for Bob Picardo's Doctor are pitch perfect (the writing is by the unknown-to-me wife-and-husband team of Janine Ellen Young and Doselle Young). It's the kind of premise you could image them doing on screen, but they never did, reminiscent of some screen episodes (sort of a mix of "Heroes and Demons" and "Muse" and "Living Witness") without being derivative of them. Neat conceit as the Doctor retells stories of Voyager's adventures through a medieval lens, a nice heartwarming ending. Honestly, one of the best Star Trek comics I've ever read.

Unlike any other story in the volume, this one was clearly constructed around interesting visuals suited to the comics medium.
from Star Trek: Voyager: Avalon Rising #1 (script by Janine Ellen Young & Doselle Young, art by David Roach)

Next comes "Elite Force," which I guess must be an adaptation of the videogame of the same name. Despite writing by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, stalwarts of space adventures comics in general (e.g., Legion Lost) and Star Trek comics in particular (e.g., Early Voyages), I found this hard to grab onto; the "Hazard Team" characters just don't give us enough to care about. Plus (and this isn't their fault) two stories about derelict Borg and scavengers in one volume is too many!

This guy's entire personality is "dumb jock."
from Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force #1 (script by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, art by Jeffrey Moy & W. C. Carani)

Lastly there's Planet Killer, a three-part miniseries about Voyager coming across another iteration of the same weapon as in "The Doomsday Machine" from the original series. The beginning is too slow and obvious considering the reader already knows what's up even if the characters don't; the second issue wastes half its pages on Harry Kim laboriously recapping "Doomsday Machine" for some reason; the third issue is very rushed, with a lot of stuff happening in reported speech or narration, instead of on the page. Like "False Colors," too talky for a comic, and despite some good efforts by artists Robert Teranishi (who I don't know) and Claude St. Aubin (who did strong work on DC's R.E.B.E.L.S. a few years after this), the action sequences lack the necessary intensity to make the premise work. The guest character feels like an afterthought (contrast them to Commodore Decker in the episode this story very closely mirrors).

Probably the best part of the art were all the ship-in-danger shots; very well done.
from Star Trek: Voyager: Planet Killer #3 (script by Dean Wesley Smith & Kristine Kathryn Rusch, art by Robert Teranishi & Claude St. Aubin)

So, on the whole, aside from "Avalon Rising," there's little here I'd call "classic." (Oh, also my Hoopla edition has a mistake where what's included as the first page of "False Colors" is actually the first page of "Elite Force." I think the first page of "False Colors" is missing as a result.)

The Title Fonts and Logos of Star Trek, Part I: Television and Film, 1966-95

Star Trek has had a variety of fonts used in its title, many of them iconic. But many of them are not iconic and, indeed, often forgotten, even by the franchise itself. I want to talk about all of them. Partially this post draws on the excellent work of Dave Addey's Typeset in the Future and Yves Peter's "Typography: The Final Frontier: The Fonts of Star Trek."

The original Star Trek (1966-69) featured a distinctive font that Addey says is called "Horizon" or just "Star Trek." I'm sure you know it:

For a long time, this font was only used for the original Star Trek; none of the films or spin-offs made use of it. But in 2009 it got brought back in a non-italicized form as the basis for the three reboot films:

I can't say why it wasn't italicized, or what effect that that has. Does it seem less cheesy or something? I'm not sure. I will note that the posters for Star Trek (2009) actually used the 1960s italicized version: 

But the posters for Star Trek into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond matched how it was actually used in the films. (One thing that was pretty neat is that some posters for Beyond actually didn't put the words "Star Trek" at all; just "Beyond" in the Star Trek font with the Enterprise zipping by. Though maybe that strategy meant no one knew it was a Star Trek movie, as Beyond had a disappointing gross.) 

Interestingly, the original "Star Trek" font was used for the "Star Trek" part of the title of Star Trek: Picard...

...but only in promotional material and tie-ins. The actual title sequence of the show used a different logo, which I'll get to in a future post.

---

When Star Trek returned in 1979, it brought with it a new logo:

The font here is called "Star Trek Film" or "Galaxy," and was custom created for the film. Peters says the type "embodies many of the ideas people had about futuristic typography in the late ’70s," and Addey says that, like Star Wars, the logo "follows an emerging seventies trend: Movie names beginning with STAR must have long trailing lines on the opening S." It looks pretty rad on the poster for The Motion Picture:

Look at that cool rainbow border!

This is the logo that would form the basis of most of the rest of the original series films. Here's a table I made of Star Treks II through VI, with the logo used in the film on the left, and the logo used on the film poster on the right:

Interestingly, the Galaxy font is not used in the film for Star Trek II, but it is used on the poster, and thence in the film for every subsequent one. Peters argues, "By then [the time of Star Trek VI] the original movie logo had gone through several rounds of small tweaks, losing some of its charm in the process. Gone are the quaint abrupt contrast in the ‘R’ and the interruption in the middle stroke of the ‘A’ and the ‘E’, and the tiny serifs have almost disappeared." I tend to agree; I don't think any of the implementations here are as successful as the the original one.

One thing the designers clearly don't know what to do is with the long horizontal line that originally came off the K. For some of the logos (poster for II, film and poster for III), the line on the K is integrated with the bottom line on the Roman numeral. I think this looks okay; it is probably most effectively done in the film logo for III... but for some reason that logo doesn't elongate the S!

In others, the Roman numeral is given its own horizontal line. The film logos for IV and V both do this-- and to my eyes, both look particularly ugly. Why does every downward stroke in "STAR TREK" have a different stopping point in IV's film logo? I think they're trying to give the top row sort of a triangle shape on its bottom, but it doesn't work for me. And the imbalanced V in Star Trek V's almost looks like a mistake. I like what they did with the poster logos for both of those films, which I think integrate the (probably innately difficult from a design standpoint) Roman numeral in more effective ways.

The film logo for Star Trek VI, on the other hand, looks to me like someone just gave up and typed out "STAR TREK VI" in a word processor and applied some shading to it. Which is a shame, because I do like the poster logo a lot for Star Trek VI, which I think succeeds by using the VI as a background element and a different typeface for the subtitle. (Peters identifies it as ITC Bolt. It has a quasi-Soviet look to me, which seems appropriate for VI's heavy-handed Cold War allegory.)

Also why for the poster logos of Star Treks IV, V, and VI did they add a horizontal line coming off the R of "STAR"?

Oddest of all of these is perhaps the film logo for Star Trek II, which features a typeface that has never been used before or since in Star Trek, as far as I know. None of the tie-in merchandising for Star Trek II used this logo, even. There's a fan-made recreation of it called "Montalban"; I'm not enough of type guru to know if it has some kind of previous existence, or is based on something older. Neither Addey nor Peters even mention it! It has a very 1980s vibe I am fond of. Like, I think it should have been used in the logo of Blade Runner or something. (A commenter on Peters's post identifies it as "Corporate URW.")

The end of the original series films with 1991 didn't mean the end of "Galaxy," however. Even though Star Trek: The Next Generation used a different logo (more on that in my next post), "Galaxy" transferred over to the tv shows with the 1993 debut of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

It's definitely the bulky, late-period form of Galaxy; it's also the first form (and only?) to feature a horizontal line dividing title from subtitle... one wonders why...

Star Trek: Voyager used a pretty similar logo in its 1995 debut:

Voyager brings back the long lines on the S and the K, hearkening back to the original use of this font for The Motion Picture. I don't think I ever noticed until now that it inverted the colors of the DS9 logo. The proportions are slightly different, too; I think this E is skinnier/taller than the E of the original Motion Picture logo. I like the thin elegance of the original better than this.

I'll talk about it more in a future post, I think, but to me this logo is the Star Trekkiest of them all, I guess because of its ubiquity when I was growing up in the 1990s... but for similar reasons, it also kind of feels like Star Trek at its most generic.

On to next week's discussion of The Next Generation tv shows and films and Enterprise...

All the Star Trek Stories You Need to Watch before Viewing Picard Season One

(Season one of Picard finished three months ago; I may or may not bother to write up a review of it. However, I started this post when the season was airing and so wanted to finish it off.)

from Picard 1x05: "Stardust City Rag"

Back before Picard started airing, my wife and I viewed a series of episodes I thought might give her context for Picard: she's seen little Next Generation and less Voyager. This definitely helped, but even at the time, I knew we'd left some stuff out-- and I was mostly just guessing based on the trailers and rumors. There were several other episodes I had not guessed would turn out to be relevant. (Definitely some random guest stars!)

So once the whole season was over, I sat down and figured out every episode you needed to see to understand the new show. Either because it directly fed into Picard, because it gave some useful character context, or because it set up another episode on the list. Now, you don't really have to see all of this (Hayley had seen only thirteen of them before Picard began, though we circled back to watch a couple more once I realized they were relevant), but they might help give you maximum enjoyment of the many callbacks and Easter eggs, and make you care about some stuff you wouldn't otherwise.

On the other hand, they might make you like it even less! (I found that some of the stuff Picard did did not ring true with "The Measure of a Man," for example.)

from TNG 4x02: "Family"

I've separated out my rationales into a separate list at the bottom of the post because knowing why some episodes fit in will spoil some aspects of Picard clearly designed to be surprising. Note that the list does assume you have a general familiarity with both The Next Generation and Voyager already: I did not go so far as to, say, include "Encounter at Farpoint" to introduce you to the Enterprise-D crew, or "The Child" to introduce Guinan and Pulaski, or "Endgame" to explain how Voyager got home.

1. TNG 1x13: "Datalore"
2. TNG 2x09: "The Measure of a Man"
3. TNG 2x16: "Q Who" 
4. TNG 3x16: "The Offspring"
5. TNG 3x26: "The Best of Both Worlds"
6. TNG 4x01: "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II"
7. TNG 4x02: "Family"
8. TNG 4x03: "Brothers"
9. TNG 4x11: "Data's Day"
10. TNG 5x23: "I Borg"
11. TNG 6x26: "Descent"
12. TNG 7x01: "Descent, Part II"
13. Star Trek: First Contact
14. VGR 3x26: "Scorpion"
15. VGR 4x01: "Scorpion, Part II"
16. VGR 4x02: "The Gift"
17. VGR 4x06: "The Raven"
18. VGR 5x15/16: "Dark Frontier"
19. VGR 6x16: "Collective"
20. VGR 7x02: "Imperfection" 
21. Star Trek Nemesis
22. Star Trek (2009)

from VGR 6x16: "Collective"

Rationales

1. Prerequisite for #8; first appearance of Lore; first discussion of Data's backstory
2. First appearance of Bruce Maddox
3. Prerequisite for #5; first appearance of the Borg
4. Data's first attempt at creating a daughter
5. Picard is assimilated
6. Continuation of #5
7. Continuation of #6; first appearance of Chateau Picard
8. Prerequisite for #11; first appearance of Soong
9. Data's friendship with Maddox established
10. Prerequisite for #11; first appearance of Hugh
11. Prerequisite for #12
12. Final pre-Picard appearance of Hugh
13. Picard re-encounters the Borg
14. First appearance of Seven of Nine
15. Continuation of #14
16. Continuation of #15
17. First exploration of Seven's backstory
18. Further exploration of Seven's backstory
19. First appearance of Icheb
20. Significant point in Seven and Icheb's relationship
21. Final pre-Picard appearance of all TNG characters; death of Data; first appearance of B-4
22. First mention of Romulan supernova

Preparing for Star Trek: Picard

My mom was here a couple months ago, and we were talking Star Trek: Picard; I mentioned that Seven of Nine was going to be in it.

"Who's Seven of Nine?" asked my wife.

Whaaaat! But it was true, Hayley had no idea who Seven of Nine was. And then I realized that she had only seen one episode of Voyager; when we marathoned Deep Space Nine, I slotted "Caretaker" in chronologically to give her a sense of what the Maquis arc was all for. That was literally it.

And then I realized that Seven of Nine wasn't the only returning character who would be meaningless to her. I remain flabbergasted that they are actually getting Jonathan Del Arco back as Hugh. So I worked up a plan: essential pre-Picard viewing.

All of this would have to be guesswork based on the trailers and other pre-publictiy. Next Generation-wise, we would clearly need to watch "I, Borg" and "Descent" to give context for Hugh. But "Descent" doesn't make sense if you don't know the lore of, well, Lore. So onwards and backwards. For Voyager, we needed a sequence of key Seven episodes; basically the ones relating to her backstory. But I also wanted to get one in that dealt with her just as a character, not as a backstory.

So here's what we did:

• TNG 1x13: "Datalore"
• TNG 4x03: "Brothers"
• TNG 5x23: "I Borg"
• TNG 6x26: "Descent"
• TNG 7x01: "Descent, Part I"
• VGR 3x26: "Scorpion"
• VGR 4x01: "Scorpion, Part II"
• VGR 4x02: "The Gift"
• VGR 4x06: "The Raven"
• VGR 5x15/16: "Dark Frontier"
• VGR 5x22: "Someone to Watch Over Me"

It wasn't perfect. Partway through a Voyager episode, she asked me how Picard was de-assimilated if everyone was insisting it was so impossible, and I realized that she'd never actually seen "The Best of Both Worlds," just First Contact. And then during "Dark Frontier," she asked how the Federation first encountered the Borg anyway, which made me think "Q Who" might have been of use. But by this point I was getting Borged out.

But I enjoyed it. Do you know, I'd never actually seen "Brothers"? TNG is the one Star Trek I've never watched systematically, so there are still a large number of random episodes I've never watched. (I watched the original and early DS9 on DVD; all the shows from DS9 Season 5 onward and Voyager as they aired.) And I know I saw "I Borg" after "Descent," and "Datalore" much later still, so I'd never seen these eps in their proper contexts.

Brent Spiner is great as Lore (and Noonien Soong). Greater than the scripts, to be honest; I think he plays the character more ambiguously than he is on the page, with an honest affection for Data. The actual stories he's in range from dumb to sort of pointless. Like, "Datalore" requires a lot of improbable leaps to work (the crew is not very smart), and "Brothers" isn't even a story; Data diverts the Enterprise, Soong dies, and they leave, the end. And like a lot of TNG two-parters, "Descent" sets up a lot of stuff it never really pays off because the two halves were written months apart; part I keeps asking if Picard is willing to put the Federation's survival ahead of his ethics... a dilemma never even mentioned in part I; in part I, Troi tells Data that he'd still be Data even if he was experiencing negative emotions... in part II, Lore can press a button and turn Data evil! And c'mon, Hugh doesn't even see La Forge again! And Spiner barely gets to do his Lore thing.

"I Borg" is the clear best of the lot, a great character piece for for a lot of the ensemble-- La Forge, Crusher, Guinan, and Picard all shine here. Del Arco is incredibly likable as Hugh. A good Star Trekkian piece of self-examination; how do we confront our own biases?

The Voyager episodes were interesting to watch, in that except for catching a few random ones on late at night during college, I've literally never seen a Voyager episode since the show went off the air. These episodes are now an astounding twenty years old!

They hold up. Voyager is an immensely inconsistent series, but "Scorpion" is probably as good as it got. Great action, great stakes/suspense. Surely the only episode to make a meaningful conflict between Chakotay and Janeway-- they both believe they are doing the right thing. Both the Borg and Species 8472 feel like real threats. And to go straight from "Descent" (1993) to "Scorpion" (1997) is a huge step up in quality of production in just four years. In terms of interior design, Voyager comes to life in a way the Enterprise-D just simulates. (Voyager was the first Star Trek show I watched regularly, and rewatching it, I realized that when I imagine the interior of a 24th-century Starfleet ship, I am always imagining Voyager.)

On the other hand, "Dark Frontier" is kind of dumb-- while "Scorpion" found a plausible way for Voyager to go up against the Borg and emerge intact, "Dark Frontier" can't do so again without defanging them. It's a pleasing blockbuster action film, but ultimately hollow. It's neat to see Seven's pre-Borg childhood, but the depth that was in, say, "The Gift" and "The Raven" is lacking.

I was glad I picked "Someone to Watch Over Me." Though it was more Doctor-focused than Seven-focused as I remembered, it's an episode that puts two of the three best actors on the show together, and makes something incredibly cute with them. How could you not love this, surely one of the best scenes in all Star Trek:

Jeri Ryan is excellent as Seven, something I didn't really appreciate when these episodes aired originally, determined to hate the character for her "sex sells" quotient.

We did note some continuity errors watching all these episodes back to back. According to Janeway in "The Gift,"

It took some digging through the Federation database, but I managed to find a single entry in the records of Deep Space 4. Her parents were unconventional. They fancied themselves explorers, but wanted nothing to do with Starfleet or the Federation. Their names were last recorded at a remote outpost in the Omega Sector. They refused to file a flight plan. Apparently, they aimed their small ship toward the Delta Quadrant and were never heard from again.

And then in "The Raven," Janeway says,

If you'd like to know more about your parents, there's information in the Federation database. [...] It seems they were fairly well known for being unconventional and for some rather unique scientific theories.

But in "Dark Frontier" (which also reveals that Tuvok and Seven somehow downloaded the logs of Seven's parents' ship off screen during "The Raven"), Seven's father says (in flashback),

The Federation Council on Exobiology has given us final approval. Starfleet's still concerned about security issues but they've agreed not to stand in our way. We've said our goodbyes, and we're ready to start chasing our theories about the Borg.

And her mother says,

We have deviated from our flight plan, crossed the Neutral Zone, disobeyed a direct order to return. Our colleagues obviously think we are insane. We have burned our bridges, Magnus.

They've gone from random explorers with no flight plans to people with "unconventional" but unspecified theories to Borg hunters with Starfleet-sanctioned flight plans and official endorsements from Federation organizations!

I don't think this is all a problem per se. I'm sure you can finesse it all if you want to, and this is just what tv does; as episodes need specific things to be true, they become true. One of the things that does work about "Dark Frontier" is the story of Seven's crazy, reckless parents, though it doesn't quite have the sense of trauma it originally did in "The Raven."

Anyway, this all kind of re-sparked my enthusiasm for tv Star Trek. I know it's all there on Netflix (and, one supposes, CBS All Access) but aside from rewatching DS9 with Hayley a couple years ago, I haven't watched much old Star Trek in a long time. We've gone on to watch some random episodes of the original, Next Generation, and Voyager since.

I'm excited to see what roles Seven and Hugh play in Picard (and the idea of them meeting seems quite neat!), and interested to see how right I got it. It'll probably turn out that I ought to have shown Hayley "Shades of Grey" and "The Disease"!

The Diversity of Crewmember Surnames in All Five Star Trek Series: A Statistical Analysis

Lt. Singh (TOS, Indian)

Introduction

In my post from last Friday, I argued that the original Star Trek made a marked effort to give characters names with non-British/Irish origins. Not an enormous effort, perhaps, but something of one. Ex Astris Scientia did an analysis of all human characters listed in the 3rd edition of the Star Trek Encyclopedia, and concluded that 60% of the surnames names were of British/Irish derivations. The writer of that article argues that "[n]o present-day American phone book has such a low share of non-British/Irish names," and that "[t]he situation is worsening with Enterprise where there seem to exist no humans outside the USA at all."

J.-L. Picard (TNG, French)

In my post, I said, "What I kind of suspect, though, is that the ratio is actually better in the original Star Trek than in the later series." But was this actually true? Were the creators of Star Trek better at depicting a diverse future in the 1960s than they were in the 2000s? (Keeping in mind, of course, that surname origin is presumably a crude measure of diversity.) I decided to crunch the data and figure out for myself.