Forgiveness

The premise of this graphic novel is intriguing: one hundred years before human history acknowledges the invention of the now ubiquitous transporter, someone *else* invented it--a melancholy genius named Colin Blakeney. But no one knows he invented the transporter a hundred years early because just as he's about to test beaming himself through it a crazed protester who thinks transporters will steal humanity's souls sabotages it, and both men are beamed away to...where?

Cut to the 24th century, where the Enterprise is headed into a delicate diplomatic situation with a race essentially given a prison sentence for accidentally releasing a bio-engineered virus that killed millions of people across the galaxy. After two generations, the guilty parties are long since dead and their grandchildren long to be free of the sphere of mines that surround their homeworld and prevent them from rejoining the interstellar community. This is, of course, the moment the Enterprise picks up an anomalous transporter signal, brings its "occupant" on board, and discovers they have rescued a 21st century genius.

Blakeney's in a kind of fugue state after the loss of his family, his invention, and, you know, floating around as data in space for a couple of hundred years. Crusher and Data walk Blakeney through his memories in a nice trick with the holodeck while a tense standoff ensues with the quarantined race and the Enterprise. The two events end up intersecting, of course, leading to a disappointingly rushed ending which sees Data do some startlingly rash things that, in 99 cases out of 100, would have led to his own nasty death and an inconvenient war between the Federation and the imprisoned planet. But everything works out in the end, of course, and everyone is forgiven--hence the title.

Writer David Brin is a veteran science fiction writer with real chops, and artist Scott Hampton's painted style is extraordinarily effective--especially in the scenes with ships in space. (The Enterprise-E has never looked so majestic.) Besides the hurried ending, I wish there had been more time to explore Dr. Crusher's infatuation with her new patient, briefly alluded to by the perceptive Counselor Troi.

I also have to scratch my head--again--at the timing of the story. For continuity reasons I can only assume were mandated by the studio/publisher, this story takes place at the same time the Dominion War is raging on at the other side of the quadrant. The Dominion War may have drawn in the Federation, the Klingons, the Romulans, the Cardassians, and the Breen, but for some inexplicable reason it hasn't drawn Starfleet's biggest, baddest battleship--the USS Enterprise. The reason in TV continuity was clear: TNG was over, and the Dominion War was Deep Space Nine's fight to win or lose. To pretend the Enterprise was simply always dispatched to some other place in the war (and off screen) is one thing, but to make it *part of the story* that the Enterprise is held *in reserve,* to "handle urgent matters elsewhere" is preposterous. Really? The flag ship of the fleet, running errands in wartime? Absolutely unbelievable, yet Brin has to waste a two page spread explaining it here, when it's totally unnecessary to the plot of his story. They pulled this nonsense one of the TNG movies too, if I recall correctly. Why oh why could they not have just made this adventure set in the nebulous post-history of DS9? Surely there's nothing in this that had any bearing on galaxy-wide continuity. Again, a head-scratcher--just a die-hard fan's minor quibble with the higher ups. ( )