Passage To Moauv – Stardate 5440: Assigned to transport the pet of a neutral ambassador to his homeworld of Moauv, the Enterprise crew is barely even underway before the creature escapes. Worse yet, their passenger – which Kirk describes as something “between a bobcat and a lizard” – is telepathically projecting its bursts of fight-or-flight instinct into the minds of anyone looking for it. Before long, Kirk, Spock and the crew can’t seem to decide whether to claw each other’s eyes out or avert a diplomatic incident by looking for the pet.
The Crier In Emptiness – Stardate 5444.9: A routine, even boring, survey mission is disrupted by an unusual first contact with something that communicates through sound and musical tones. Before long, the ensuing cacophony has expanded until it blocks the Enterprise’s communications frequencies – and cutting off any way for the crew to call for help.
In Vino Veritas – Stardate 5442.8: Kirk and Spock are assigned to mediate a mining dispute – a dispute to which the Klingons are also sending mediators. A third representative from the Federation also seems to be present when they arrive, even though the Enterprise wasn’t notified of a third representative. Strangely enough, as the peace process begins, each of the negotiators – even Spock – begin to insult each other at every opportunity, making the prospects for a peaceful resolution very dim indeed.
Review: Endlessly released in different combination by Peter Pan Records and their parent company, Power Records, these are just three out of a great many Star Trek audio stories released on vinyl during the early 1970s. (The record cover shown here hails from 1979, at which time every licensee who still had a product to sell was repackaging it to tie in with Star Trek: The Motion Picture.) These three stories, however, are interesting in that they were written by the author who penned that first movie’s premise – Alan Dean Foster.
The first thing one notices is that, quite obviously, the parts of Kirk, Spock, McCoy et al. are not being played by Shatner, Nimoy, Kelley, et al. (and the less said about “Scotty,” the better); and if that’s not enough, despite Alan Dean Foster’s well-earned reputation as a novelist, at times the characters are barely written like their on-screen counterparts. At times, this creates moments of unintentional hilarity; in Passage To Moauv, one can only imagine what gestures are in play when McCoy tells Spock that the catlike creature’s claws are “longer than my middle finger.” Moauv also features Lt. M’ress, a character from the animated Star Trek – one wonders if Foster had tried to submit these stories as potential scripts for Filmation’s Trek ‘toon.
Then again, Crier In Emptiness is a story based entirely on sound, so it seems to be something written specifically for audio. And one can scarcely imagine that In Vino Veritas was originally written for any medium aimed at a younger audience, with its central plot point of someone slipping everyone a mickey at a conference between the Federation, the Klingons, and…erm…”Romula,” by putting a drug in their wine – though, as the best of the three stories presented on this LP, it might have made a decent TV episode.
As stories presented in an audio medium lasting 15-17 minutes at most, they’re decent enough, if a little goofy. If you’re looking for absolute fidelity to the Star Trek saga, look elsewhere – these stories hail from an age where that was only on the minds of a few fans, and before there was really a “saga” to speak of.