Christine Chapel leads a rescue mission into an ancient prison hidden beneath the frozen world of Poilant in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — The Seeds of Salvation. Robbie Thompson delivers a thoughtful horror-flavoured Star Trek adventure with strong character work, impressive artwork, and a satisfying Trek conclusion, even if a mid-book art change and a few familiar tropes stop it short of greatness.
There’s a small moment early on that tells you more about this episode than the plot ever does. Spock looks at Balok’s face on the viewscreen, a snarling oversized puppet built to terrify, and instead of flinching he says one word: fascinating. Leonard Nimoy was still refining Spock at this point, and director Joseph Sargent reportedly told him to be different, be the scientist, be detached. That single word is where the Spock we all recognise really starts to emerge. It’s a quiet decision, and it tells you everything about what this episode is doing underneath the space bluff and the countdown clock.
A plastic dome hangs from the ceiling of a treatment room, a small light turning inside it. That is the entire neural neutraliser, the device the whole episode is built around, and on paper it is nothing. A prop the art department could have thrown together in an afternoon. By the closing minutes it is one of the most frightening objects the original series ever put on screen, and the distance between the first impression and the last is most of what makes “Dagger of the Mind” worth talking about.
The children are heard before they’re seen. Voices carry down an empty street, a playground chant bounces off buildings nobody has lived in for centuries, laughter arrives with nothing funny behind it. Spock describes them scurrying away “like animals,” and for a stretch in the middle of it, “Miri” is one of the genuinely unsettling things Star Trek made in the 1960s. Long before zombies became a genre anyone could phone in, TOS built a dead suburb full of feral children and trusted the silence to do most of the work.
Flip from the Star Trek half of this book to the Defiant half and you can feel the temperature drop. One minute you are looking at Ramón Rosanas’s clean, sunlit bridges, the kind of art that makes the 24th century look like somewhere you would actually want to live. The next you are in Ángel Unzueta’s painted murk, where a crew of rogues aboard a stolen ship glower out of the shadows like they have somewhere worse to be. The Art of Star Trek & Defiant collects two years of comics that ran side by side, and the cleverest thing about it is that it never once pretends they were the same show.
There is a profound gulf between a clean, mid-century sci-fi concept and the messy realities of a weekly television production schedule. Robert Bloch, the mind behind Psycho, hands over a script packed with meaty questions about identity, transhumanism, and the exact boundary where a machine begins and a human ends. It is a fantastic template. What the production does with it is more complicated.
The reputation arrives before the episode does. Search “Mudd’s Women” in any Trek forum and you’ll find the same verdict repeated until it looks like consensus: rampant sexism, a story about space hookers, early TOS at its embarrassing worst. I read enough of it that the sheer volume eventually had the opposite effect. I sat down specifically to watch it and have my say.
Star Trek has always been willing to try horror. The follow-through is another matter. “Catspaw” dressed up a base-under-siege story in Halloween trappings and lost the tone somewhere in the second act. “Wolf in the Fold” gave us a serial killer mystery and a villain genuinely disturbing enough to stick around, if anyone ever thought to bring him back. IDW thought to bring him back.
There’s a version of Star Trek that exists slightly to the left of the one you know.
The phasers are called lasers. The shirt colours are wrong. Spock occasionally behaves in ways that would make the television Spock raise an eyebrow. Kirk is a straightforward space hero rather than the complicated, contradictory, occasionally reckless man William Shatner was building on screen. Yet despite all that, the stories are recognisably Trek-shaped. Strange worlds. Impossible problems. Civilisations in crisis. The Enterprise arriving somewhere unusual and trying to think its way through a situation that shouldn’t have a solution.
