After the really strong start in the first two issues of this series, I was a little disappointed in part one of “The Galileo Seven”, an adaptation of one of my favorite episodes of The Original Series. Oddly, this disappointment is mostly borne of the comic sticking too closely to the episode.

For those who don’t remember or never knew in the first place, “The Galileo Seven” sees Spock, Scotty, McCoy, and some redshirts stranded on a barren world after a shuttle crash that leaves them without enough fuel to escape the planet’s gravity. Owing to the planet’s proximity to a quasar-like event, the Enterprise can’t conduct a conventional scan to find them – the best they can do is a visual survey. To make matters worse, the Enterprise is carrying medical cargo and is on a strict schedule – if they don’t recover the crew of the Shuttlecraft Galileo, they’ll have to leave them behind.

The original episode was one of the first instances in which Spock played a significant command role, separate from Kirk, and parts of it play out like the classic lifeboat scenario – who can be sacrificed to save the rest? And to that end, this comic is pretty much exactly the same, which seems a little strange. There’s some slight modification to McCoy’s dialogue, because he’s not quite so crotchety yet as he was in the series, being as he’s younger, and there’s just a hint of, “Hey, Spock, remember that time that you marooned Kirk on a remote ice planet so that you could take command of the Enterprise?” But mostly, the script is almost word for word from the episode.

My problem with this is that I can go watch the episode and not wait a month for the second half. I’ve watched it numerous times. What I want from this series is a retelling with these different versions of these characters, in this slightly skew version of the universe. I try not to dwell too much on how, years ahead of schedule, the Enterprise has the same crew members at about the same age as in the series. Or how, years ahead of schedule, there seems to be the same blasted disease outbreak on the same blasted planet. But I do want to see a different version of the story, for the novelty if nothing else, and especially because this plot throws so much of a spotlight on Spock’s command of the away team – in a universe in which he has, in the past, chosen to STRAND SOMEONE at a remote outpost for contesting his command of a starship.

A small side note is that there seems to be some coloring errors – I noted a few panels in which people’s uniforms changed color, which just seemed a bit sloppy. The art itself is attractive enough, even if there aren’t any panels that just blew me away.

Anyway, there’s still the second half of this story to go, and maybe that will result in some newness to the plot. If not, I can still enjoy the classic story, I suppose, but that won’t stop me from hoping that the next arc will deviate a bit from the original.