Review of
The Good That Men Do
Published:
February 2007
Reviewer Rating:
Avg User Rating:
(4.07)
Mangels and Martin basically rewrite and restructure the much-maligned series finale of Enterprise with this book. They take a number of ill-conceived plot elements are either rework them or refocus them to make sense in the greater over-all Star Trek canon and provide fans with a more palatable version of the story. Furthermore, they tie it all into the unresolved plotline of the brewing Romulan War that the TV producers never got the opportunity to explore.
M&M pull deeply from the events of the final Enterprise season to power this story in continuity. Gone are troublesome moments from the finale like the nonsensical time gap, silly motivations for certain actions, and the uncaring death of a favorite character. Instead, these things have been replaced with a tighter, more intense story that provides a platform for further stories to come after. They've taken some of the throw-away storylines for characters like Shran and provided more important plotlines that will grow and develop. The authors seemed to feel they needed to match the inclusion of Next Generation characters in the TV episode with a framing sequence featuring characters from Deep Space Nine. This wasn't really necessary, but felt like one the ways they threw some shade on the original writers.
The downside to the story is that it leaves a lot of the regular Enterprise crew on the sidelines. H0shi and Travis are little more than background characters, and Reed, Pholx and T'Pol have little to do but react to the action around them. I know not every story can provide meaningful moments for everyone, but this really short-changed a lot of the cast.
My biggest complaint in this book would the stretches of believability in the secondary spy story. I just felt that infiltrating a society you know nothing about would be next to impossible, and the support our infiltrators got wasn't enough to pull this off. With no real understanding of the language and culture, this should have been impossible. There were several ways to pull this off more believably, but that didn't happen. So you really need to suspend that disbelief a bit to get through the spy story.
This book does a nice job setting up the future for the book series. I look forward to reading more about the Romulan War and seeing how the Enterprise cast fits within it, not to mention how the novels will color the future of Star Trek.
M&M pull deeply from the events of the final Enterprise season to power this story in continuity. Gone are troublesome moments from the finale like the nonsensical time gap, silly motivations for certain actions, and the uncaring death of a favorite character. Instead, these things have been replaced with a tighter, more intense story that provides a platform for further stories to come after. They've taken some of the throw-away storylines for characters like Shran and provided more important plotlines that will grow and develop. The authors seemed to feel they needed to match the inclusion of Next Generation characters in the TV episode with a framing sequence featuring characters from Deep Space Nine. This wasn't really necessary, but felt like one the ways they threw some shade on the original writers.
The downside to the story is that it leaves a lot of the regular Enterprise crew on the sidelines. H0shi and Travis are little more than background characters, and Reed, Pholx and T'Pol have little to do but react to the action around them. I know not every story can provide meaningful moments for everyone, but this really short-changed a lot of the cast.
My biggest complaint in this book would the stretches of believability in the secondary spy story. I just felt that infiltrating a society you know nothing about would be next to impossible, and the support our infiltrators got wasn't enough to pull this off. With no real understanding of the language and culture, this should have been impossible. There were several ways to pull this off more believably, but that didn't happen. So you really need to suspend that disbelief a bit to get through the spy story.
This book does a nice job setting up the future for the book series. I look forward to reading more about the Romulan War and seeing how the Enterprise cast fits within it, not to mention how the novels will color the future of Star Trek.
