Fans would be hard-pressed to find a Star Trek episode that makes use of Uhura's xenolinguistic skills as well as this issue does. Another excellent installment of a must-read Star Trek series. Read Full Review

A decent set up for the story, but the conclusion in the next issue will really decide how good this one was. At this stage this is easily the weakest of the three stories so far, and is not helped by some odd art choices in the opening scenes on the planet, which seem to have Kirk randomly beaming around so that he moves significant distances - repeatedly - during a conversation with Spock and McCoy.

One thing that kept taking me out of the story was Jody Houser's ludicrous use of "they" when referring to the Tholian child. Doing so made the dialogue clunky, and required re-reading of the speech bubble to be clear about the meaning. Houser clearly worried about mis-gendering a fictional alien (2019 really is getting tiresome)! The English language has a perfect solution to this artificial problem:"it", when dealing with the singular. Of course, 1960s Star Trek would simply have had Uhura decide whether or not the Tholian was male or female. This would have been entirely in character and likely lead to a nice exchange with Kirk, where he humourously questions her choice. Either way, it doesn't matter, but what does matter is wrapping yourself up in linguistic gymnastics to avoid offending the fictional Tholian, when there is a simple solution. more