A Close Look at DMZ part 8: A Cast of Several

I've claimed several times in previous posts that DMZ is a series about characters in war rather than a series about the war itself. But we've really only had a handful of characters to look at: Matty and Zee primarily with Wilson and Kelly on the periphery and Amina and Soames making contributions before never being seen again. So everyone reading could be forgiven for disbelieving my claim.

Series creator and writer Brian Wood followed up "Friendly Fire", the heaviest story to this point, with the breath of fresh air that is these six character examination issues. Don't let that turn of phrase fool you, though. While these issues do step away from Matty, Zee, and their never ending quest to find meaning and justice in a war zone, they have no less depth. Art, poverty, greed, emotional detachment, culture, spiritual transformation--they're all here, playing out in a war zone. And removed from Matty (mostly), these stories can be told without having to advance a larger narrative of how the DMZ is being changed by the presence of the ersatz journalist main character.

The following contains spoilers for DMZ 23-28.

"Decade Later"

Issue 12 pulled the curtain back from the DMZ and revealed the city's rich, developing culture. Among the characters introduced was Decade Later a middle aged tagger who grew up in New York City and couldn't be chased out by war. The issue opens with Decade braving sniper fire to get across the street and break into a hardware store, his goal to acquire all the spray paint he can. From there the story cuts between the present, the start of the war, and before the war. Based on what we're shown of the past Decade has been a tagger forever, but he's never been interested in just leaving behind "some boring tag" or claiming territory. He wants to share knowledge. He wants people to find his work ten years from now and take meaning from it (that turns out to be the origin of his tag). The remaining scenes from the past show Decade working on an unspecified project having to do with New York subway cars.

A Close Look at DMZ part 7: Who's to Blame?

The term "friendly fire" is terribly antiseptic. It has the sound of something small scale and not lethal. The term can actually encompass anything from confusion on the ground to air and missile strikes and it definitely includes fatal incidents. The casualties might be military personnel. They might be peaceful civilians, perhaps civilians under that military's protection. And the unfortunate truth is they happen in every war. Given this, any extended story about a war would be remiss if it failed to address the topic, and that brings us to this story.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars saw their share of friendly fire casualties. Some were American soldiers. Some were Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. Some were civilians. One of the more notorious incidents was the Haditha Massacre. Brian Wood has spoken about how the coverage of that event, specifically the media's treatment of the soldiers involved, led to him changing this story to examine how soldiers put into impossible situations might make a mistake and then be hung out to dry by those higher in the chain of command.

The following contains spoilers for DMZ 18-22.

Lit-Verse Retrospective: Star Trek Destiny - Gods of NIght

Gods of Night opens with a Borg invasion already underway, and this time they're annihilating rather than assimilating. The Borg's transwarp hub to the alpha quadrant was destroyed by Voyager in "Endgame", though, so no one knows how the Borg are entering Federation space. They're also back to being unbeatable. Starfleet is losing ships left and right and while Enterprise is having success against them using transphasic torpedoes, Starfleet is afraid to transmit the plans throughout the fleet for large scale usage because the Borg could adapt and they would lose their only weapon.

While Starfleet is getting their backsides beaten in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, the USS Aventine, captain by Ezri Dax, is exploring a crashed starship in the Gamma Quadrant. Ezri was the ship's third officer when the Borg invasion began. Aventine lost its captain and commander in their first battle with the Borg. Ezri took command and received a battlefield commission immediately thereafter. The crashed starship, USS Columbia NX-02 which went missing during the Romulan War, was discovered by Jadzia Dax in the days after the events at Gaia in "Children of Time". There are no remains from the crew aboard but it was put on autopilot before it crashed. Dax's hope is that discovering how Columbia traveled from the Beta to the Gama Quadrant will tell Starfleet how the Borg are arriving from the Delta Quadrant.

The events of Columbia's past are interspersed throughout the larger story taking place in the 24th century. The ship was critically damaged in a Romulan ambush in 2156 and lost both warp drive and subspace communications. With no hope of repairs and a near zero chance of being discovered and rescued, Captain Erika Hernandez cranked Columbia's impulse engine way past its safeties, accelerating to near light speed in order to reach a (relatively) nearby planet that might be able to help them. The time dilation means that Columbia will reach the planet in roughly 60 days while 12 years pass for everyone else. So two months later Columbia, in the objective year 2168, encounters a high (very high) tech civilization called the Caeliar. Unfortunately the Caeliar value their privacy. The will not, however, take life or through inaction allow life to be taken. So instead of harming the crew, the Caeliar refuse to repair the ship or let it its crew leave.

A Great Second Act: Revisiting the Star Trek Lit-Verse That Was

Star Trek: Nemesis released to poor reception in December 2003. Two and a half years later Star Trek: Enterprise aired its controversial final episode, "These are the Voyages..." on May 13, 2005. An uncertain future in television and movies meant that the universe could only go on in ancillary media: comics, games, and books. Growing out of this was an ambitious project (more than one, really) that grew the Star Trek universe beyond the movies and episodes--following long-established characters, introducing many new characters, revisiting story threads established in the previous series and movies, and telling brand new stories spanning decades of the franchise's future history.

This is the starting point for a book-by-book retrospective of the Star Trek lit-verse. It will encompass both the post-Enterprise timeline and the 24th century timeline from Star Trek: Destiny forward. It will lead off with the 24th century storylines with Enterprise books peppered in along the way.

The Run-Up

The first building blocks were laid in 2003. May of that year saw the publication of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Avatar, the first book in what would be called the Deep Space Nine Relaunch. This two book series picked up in the immediate wake of Deep Space Nine's series finale "What You Leave Behind" and would eventually encompass 20 books, the last of which was published in 2009. A month later in June Star Trek: Voyager - Homecoming, the first novel set after the completion the finale "Endgame", was published.

The following year a series of nine novels referred to as Star Trek: A Time to... was published. They covered a period of time beginning after Star Trek: Insurrection in the wake of the Dominion War and ending immediately prior to the opening of Star Trek: Nemesis. The series followed the crew of the Enterprise 1701-E through a number of different events and included explanations for some apparent continuity problems between the two films.

A Close Look at DMZ part 6: Blackwater Meets Haliburton Meets Evil Without Nuance

Remember when I said at the beginning that DMZ doesn't shy away from arguing a viewpoint? There's probably no better example in the series than how Brian Wood depicts the fictional company Trustwell, an entity that is an amalgamation of multinational corporations and military contractors. Both kinds of entities were often subjects of Iraq War discourse as the United States' nation building efforts stretched on.

Frequently talked about in the years preceding DMZ's publication was Halburton, an oil services company that received lucrative contracts and "sweetheart" deals, and whose former CEO was the sitting vice president, Dick Cheney. Haliburton, of course, was hardly the only American corporation profiting off efforts to rebuild Iraq. And reconstruction efforts weren't the only thing enriching American companies.

Military contractors were a significant part of the United States' presence in Iraq. In 2007 the Defense Depart concluded that almost 160,000 private contractors were employed in Iraq (roughly equal to the number of U.S. troops in the country at the time). With American military forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq it was necessary to supplement their numbers. In 2007, several months after this story arc was published, the military contractor Blackwater was involved in an incident that became known as the Nisour Square Massacre.

Given all that, it makes for these subjects to be explored in the series. And it's not really inappropriate to make an unambiguous judgment about them. At a certain point, though, criticism becomes farce.