[Report This]Date: 15 Apr 2016 19:33 Title: Star Trek: Orion - 7 - The Living Death
Certainly an emotionally intense story here, with an ending that took me a bit by surprise.
I liked the initial focus on the underachieving and self doubting DuMont here, in fact would have loved to see even more of her, i.e, her developing into a more confident command officer. Maybe we'll get to see more of that in later stories, or perhaps she will never fully emerge as a high class officer, and that's fine, too, not everybody is.
Kudos for sticking with the depressing ending as well. I was of course rooting for some sort of last minute solution as is customary in his kind of stories. But as they say, sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you.
I felt however that Baxx and the others gave up way too soon on his terminal condition. In fairness I read this story over a few days and may have missed something, but I felt they didn't try enough to save his life and exhaust every possibility before accepting the inevitable. I believe the story could have been more powerful if we had seen them try and fail at finding a way to cure him.
I also thought the ending, blowing him up with torpedoes while he was still alive, while dramatically powerful, was needlessly cruel. Surely nobody wants to die in a fiery inferno like that.
Regardless of the above, still a very engaging story in what has been a terrific series so far.