Stardate not given: A boarding party from the Enterprise is trapped aboard the derelict Copernicus, which is infested with Regulan bloodworms – an infestation which demands the immediate destruction of the Copernicus and the sacrifice of anyone left aboard her, per Starfleet regulations. But the boarding party includes Spock, Rand, DeSalle and Captain Kirk’s nephew Peter, so he’s in no hurry to execute the mandatory order to destroy Copernicus. Scotty tries a last-ditch maneuver, beaming the boarding party to another deck of the Copernicus – one where, amazingly, Spock’s team finds survivors, including Dr. Jenna Yar and the secretive Commander Blodgett. Dr. Yar claims to be working on a cure for the plague spread by the bloodworms, but McCoy dismisses her proposed treatment as impossibly dangerous for any patients subjected to the process. With time running out, McCoy comes up with his own alternative to Yar’s treatment, and insists on beaming himself to the Copernicus to administer it; if it doesn’t work, he’ll be sentencing himself to death along with the boarding party. In the midst of this already-bleak scenario a Klingon ship arrives, commanded by Kirk’s nemesis Commander Kargh, who is ready to destroy the Copernicus and all aboard if Kirk won’t.
written by Carlos Pedraza & David Gerrold
directed by David Gerrold
music by Fred SteinerCast: James Cawley (Captain Kirk), Ben Toplin (Mr. Spock), John Kelley (Dr. McCoy), Bobby Quinn Rice (Ensign Peter Kirk), Evan Fowler (Alex Freeman), Denise Crosby (Dr. Jenna Yar), Bill Blair (Commander Blodgett), John Carrigan (Commander Kargh), Charles Root (Scott), Jay Storey (Kyle), Kim Stinger (Uhura), Ron Boyd (DeSalle), Andy Bray (Chekov), Meghan King Johnson (Rand), Nick Cook (Hodel), Paul R. Sieber (Agrens), Patrick Bell (Xon), Debbie Huth (Fontana), Jeff Mailhotte (Sentell), Joel Bellucci (Bren), Anne Carrigan (Le’ak), James Avalon (Klaar)
Notes: Dr. Jenna Yar (full name: Jenna Natasha Yar) is the grandmother of Lt. Tasha Yar from Star Trek: The Next Generation; by this stage she has already had a daughter, presumably Tasha’s mother, who is safe on Earth and isn’t seen in this story. Section 31 is retroactively worked into the classic Trek timeline here; it was actually first mentioned in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the 1990s, and later in Star Trek: Enterprise.
Review: The long-awaited second half of this Trek cliffhanger arrived more than a year after the first part hit the web, and even so, I’m writing this review based on a mostly-complete pre-release edit whose final two acts are still in the “temp edit” stage. (more…)
Stardate 6050.5: The Farragut is dispatched to the vicinity of an enormous gas giant, the last known location of the Federation starship U.S.S. Azrael, which was initially sent to study it. The Azrael is discovered intact, but it fires torpedoes at the Farragut with surgical precision: the ship’s ability to move and fight are damaged, but that’s all. Smithfield and her engineering crew begin repairs, while Captain Carter quizzes Prescott about the service record of the Azrael’s Captain Glenn, under whom Prescott served on a training mission. Tacket and Carter find an interesting mention in the log entries transmitted to Starfleet from the Azrael before the ship fell silent: alien devices are surrounding the gas planet and gradually sapping it of its energy. They may also be behind the behavior of the Azrael’s captain and crew…but how can Carter stop the same from happening to his own ship?
Stardate not given: After a pitched battle with a Klingon cruiser, the Enterprise is left battered, but a distress call from the U.S.S. Copernicus prevents Kirk from putting in for repairs. The Enterprise limps to the Copernicus’ aid at a low warp speed as a result of the damage, but what the crew finds is almost beyond explanation: the Copernicus is adrift, only a few hours away from sliding into a stream of matter connecting a binary star system. The Copernicus will be destroyed, but it appears that something has already killed the crew. As Kirk selects a boarding party to find out what happened on the Copernicus, he carefully omits his nephew, the recently-arrived Ensign Peter Kirk, from the mission. This draws a note of caution from Spock, and an anguished protest from Peter: if the crew feels that he’s receiving preferential treatment keeping him out of harm’s way, Peter will have to request reassignment. Peter wants to be treated as just another member of the crew – and that includes requesting that Captain Kirk officiate his upcoming wedding to another crewman, medic Alex Freeman. Kirk accedes to both requests, assigning both Peter and Freeman to the Copernicus mission. Soon after arriving, they both wish they’d stayed on the Enterprise: the Copernicus is infested with Regulan bloodworms, a life form so fast-speading and deadly that Starfleet has only one protocol for dealing with them – the immediate destruction of any ship found to be infested. With both his nephew and Spock aboard the Copernicus, Kirk has no plans to follow that order, but it may be too late to save his boarding party anyway, as they’re surrounded by swarming bloodworms.
Stardate 4901.2: Investigating dilithium readings on an otherwise unremarkable planet, Captain Carter and geologist Dr. Bishop find indications of vast mineral wealth both promising and dangerous – not only is starship-powering dilithium abundant, but so is tricobalt, an ingredient for destructive weaponry. And it turns out that the planet’s mineral riches haven’t gone unnoticed by the Klingons…a fact that almost escapes Carter as he and Bishop – who were an item earlier in their Starfleet careers – enjoy a romantic moment. Not only are the Klingons killing the mood, but they might kill a Starfleet captain as well.
Stardate not given: Convinced to join Uhura and Kitrick (a man whose real name, before his freedom fighter days, was Pavel Chekov) on the planet surface, Harriman is branded a traitor by the crew of the Conqueror and sentenced to execution…as soon as he returns to the ship. But for now, he and the others have encountered a different version of Charlie Evans, one whose destiny was not interrupted by James T. Kirk. Convinced to set history back on its original path, Charlie discovers that there’s an obstacle in his way – another being with godlike powers. Harriman and Kitrick know him as the ruler of the empire; Uhura somehow recognizes the same man as Gary Mitchell. Harriman and the others are beamed back to the Conqueror, and they’re only able to escape with one last act of heroism by Ragnar and his shape-shifting ability. Harriman and Kitrick commandeer the bridge and take on the forces of the empire with just a single ship, but the two men’s fierce cunning and skill allows them to inflict more damage in the ensuing battle than anyone expects. Charlie makes one last sacrifice to stop Mitchell, but it will cost him everything.
Stardate not given: The G.S.S. Conqueror captures a shuttle fleeing from the rubble that was the planet Vulcan, and its crew of two – Tuvok and Uhura – are thrown into a cell with the freedom fighters Kitrick and Ragnar. Though Uhura condemns Kitrick’s track record of death and mayhem, saying he’s no better than the Galactic Order itself, she finds herself remembering him as well, though the two have never met. Tuvok performs a mind-meld on Uhura, and stumbles across parallel memories – memories in which she has lived on Vulcan for so long, and memories in which she served aboard a starship with the man who appears to be Kitrick. She calls him Pavel, a name that Kitrick says he hasn’t used in years, and tries to convince him that they should work together – but she runs into trouble when she tries to convince him that they’ll also need Harriman, who she also remembers.
Stardate 6712.4: Captains Uhura, Chekov and Harriman convene for the dedication of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-M – a museum aboard a fully functional replica of the Constitution-class Enterprise – 12 years after 
Stardate 4847.3: Farragut arrives in the Solon system, home to a society where scholarship and the study of history have attained a level of importance beyond anything in the Federation. The Solonai are now making diplomatic overtures toward the Federation, and Captain Carter and his crew have the honor of making first contact – despite Science Officer Tacket’s misgivings about unusual background radiation near the planet. When they go to beam down, though, Carter and his small landing party find themselves not on an alien world, but on Earth, specifically Pennsylvania, 1776, on the eve of Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River. Their attempts to stay out of history’s way are thwarted when a member of the landing party is shot by a revolutionary’s musket; now, contrary to staying out of history’s way, Carter now has an audience with General Washington himself, and worries that anything he says could alter history. In orbit, Tacket and Chief Engineer Smithfield grow increasingly suspicious of the Solonai’s lack of concern about their missing landing party…and their lack of knowledge of how to get them back.
Stardate 5013.1: The Exeter is en route to check up on a Federation Starbase on Corinth IV that has fallen out of contact. When the ship arrives, the planet is in ruins – a once-vibrant ecosystem reduced to a volcanic, earthquake-ridden world – and the Starbase is gone. Another Constitution-class ship sent to investigate, the U.S.S. Kongo, is found crashed on the planet – or at least its saucer section is. Captain Garrovick orders a search for the rest of the Kongo, and it’s found adrift in space at the center of a series of gravitational disturbances. The crew, including Garrovick’s former captain, is found dead – and so is a boarding party of reptilian Tressaurians, a species with whom Garrovick has had a very dark history. An alien device is discovered below decks, the source of the disturbance, and when Tressaurian ships arrive to retrieve it, Garrovick has it beamed to the Exeter and detonates the Kongo’s engines by remote. Science Officer Jo Harris, however, doesn’t believe that the device is of Tressaurian origin – and when another attack wave of Tressaurian ships is destroyed by a group of Tholian ships, it seems likely that the device’s inventors have come to collect it.
Stardate 6283.4: A distress call takes the Enterprise into the Neutral Zone, where they see a helpless cargo ship destroyed by Romulan Birds of Prey using a new weapon not seen before by the Federation. After it destroys that ship, however, the weapon backfires, enveloping everything nearby in an energy field, including the Enterprise. Sulu and exo-tech expert Lt. Chandris take a shuttlecraft to the wreckage of the lead Romulan ship to learn more about the weapon, but waves of instability wreak havoc with the ship’s structure, tearing it apart and leaving only seconds before the warp core breaches. Sulu and Chandris run back to find their shuttle has been lost, and when Sulu calls the Enterprise for an emergency transport, he’s literally a different man when he returns: he has aged over 30 years, and Chandris doesn’t rematerialize at all. Sulu explains that a rift led them to safety on a habitable world in another dimension, and they spent that time settling down and starting a family. Sulu introduces his crewmates to his daughter, Alana, whose transporter pattern Scotty can barely lock onto. The only way to keep her molecules from scattering is to create a field that stabilizes her pattern. Every time Kirk orders the Enterprise to try to break away from the distortion generated by the Romulans’ weapon, Alana starts to fade out of existence. With mere hours before the distortion destabilizes the space within it enough to destroy the Enterprise, Sulu must try to recover his memory of how to navigate a ship through the distortion – with the full knowledge that escape may condemn his daughter to death.