In Review: Star Trek: Picard—Countdown #3 (of 3)

Synopsis: Jean-Luc Picard has traveled to the furthest reaches of the galaxy, defeated impossible foes, and survived in the face of unthinkable odds, but it’s the end of this one mission that will change his life forever.

Review: The final issue in the prequel comic to the television series only really tells of Picard’s involvement in evacuating the various Romulan worlds and doesn’t touch on the Synthetic’s attack on Mars, which was discussed in the premiere episode of ‘Star Trek: Picard’, which is somewhat of a disappointment.

The Story

With the Governor of Yuat having taken control of Picard’s ship the U.S.S. Verity. Picard is aided by his two new friends Zhaban and Laris to get his ship back, but as always things are not as simple as they seem. Pretty much as soon as Picard has command back. The ship is hailed by a lone Talshiar vessel, which is looking for Zhaban and Laris to complete their mission.

The Artwork

Angel Hernandez does a solid job of the art and gets the likenesses of the characters pretty much on the button considering that this story is set 14 years before the events we see in the TV series. I particularly liked the moment where the two Romulan ships come to Picard’s aid toward the latter part of the book. The way this was drawn put me in mind of any number of TNG episodes. Overall throughout the book. The art has been of a solid standard in terms of composition as well as how well the artist picked up on character facial expressions and so forth.

Overall

This final issue only wraps up part of the backstory to ‘Star Trek: Picard’. We close out with a couple of panels where Picard is talking to LaForge who is at the Utopia Planitia shipyards. This is fairly ominous given that we now know that the shipyards are going to be attached by the Synthetics at some stage in the near future. Before the comic released I thought we may have seen that attack take place or at least part of it, but sadly it wasn’t to be. Which is a little disappointing.

Overall. This is a pretty good prequel story. It at least tells the backstory of Zhaban and Laris and how they came to be living with Picard, but we are still in the dark as to whether or not Geordie LaForge survives the Mars attack. Hopefully, we will see the backstory to the synthetic attack of mars played out in another mini-series or novel because that for me as a life long Star Trek fan is as intriguing as the backstory was to Khan and the Eugenics Wars were.