It’s the third issue, and we finally find out what happened to Sulu and the man that is confirmed to be “Cupcake” (Henderoff, the man who in the main universe died at the hands of a plant in “The Apple” with a full head of hair), they are bound up in the opposing alien camp, and struggling to get free of their restraints. Good thing Sulu has permission to break about 13 uniform and weapons regulations by carrying a knife in his boot.

Also, good thing Spock is beyond emotionally compromised by planet Vulcan’s demise, and is making emotional decisions instead of logical ones, which is to say he has decided to rescue his two crew mates who are in a camp heavily fortified by hundreds of armed aliens… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

While this all goes down, Kirk is understandably pissed at Captain April, who lied about Sulu and Cupcake being safe, and is just about to make his own emotionally compromised move when Uhura meets him in a shuttle craft with Mudd in tow.

While Spock is bodily throwing aliens around as Sulu and Cupcake try to escape, Uhura and Kirk fly towards the enemy encampment. There, Uhura starts to reveal what’s going on in Spock’s head.

“He still hasn’t dealt with his grief over Vulcan. But good luck telling a Vulcan that. So instead he starts making emotional decisions and covers it up with whatever logic he can muster. It’s going to get him killed.”

With this conversation alone, I think we can have a pretty good guess as to what sort of actions Spock will be taking in the Star Trek: Into Darkness.

On board The Enterprise, even more inexplicably than the communications officer taking control of the bridge, Doctor McCoy is making command decisions, and we find out that the transporters are still not working. This news totally sucks for Sulu, Spock and Cupcake, because their stealthy plan to just waltz out of the enemy camp has understandably gone sixes and sevens, if it wasn’t already from the start. Thankfully Kirk and Uhura come in with a space craft, phaser a-blazin’, and mange to save the three Enterprise crewmen.

Some time later, back on board the ship, Kirk  and Spock interrogate April and Mudd about the inconsistencies of their stories, not the least of which is that not only was there Starfleet technology on Phaedus IV, but Klingon. And now we start to understand the hints we’ve been getting about Klingons from the movie production staff. Apparently, the Klingons are using Phaedus as a proxy war, intent on spreading influence so they can save their strength to attack the Federation.

Then we find out that Mudd got her Starfleet weapons from stealing from Federation outposts. After the conversation, Kirk sends April and Mudd to quarantine to make sure they don’t bring anything in (though, that sort of defeats the purpose of quarantine if you’ve already had them wandering about the ship infecting people before you put them in it), and Kirk and Spock have a heartfelt discussion about following orders. Spock accepts that what he did was wrong, and Kirk says that if he ever does something of the like again, he will send Spock back to HQ and get him the most boring desk job imaginable.

Unfortunately, this conversation gave just enough time for April to escape his security attachment, take over the bridge, and access an old program he had put on the Enterprise which locks everyone out of access to the ship except him. There are two notable things about this scene. The first being that this Enterprise was only just comissioned a year ago, so that means they never did a full hard drive wipe when they transferred the old programs over, which is just a bizarre concept in itself. To me, that’s like saying “Here’s a new state of the art computer… loaded with Windows 95!” The second notable thing is that for those who were worried that completely changed they be-mustached Harry Mudd’s character from the original series to a be a Bajoran female, it’s strongly insinuated that she’s his daughter. There. No more worries.

Anyway, helpless, the crew of the Enterprise watch as April takes the ship to launch an attack on Phaedus IV, which means Galactic war if the Klingons are indeed supplying one side of the civil war.

The stakes are dire, and we’ll just have to wait one more month to see how it ends! We’ll be sure to be there for the conclusion.

 

Story by Roberto Orci and Mike Johnson
Script by Mike Johnson
Art by David Messina