The second Star Trek: Picard tie-in novel hits stores this week, and James Swallow’s The Dark Veil is a great story that will deepen your appreciation for the show’s first season.
Set about one year after Admiral Jean-Luc Picard resigned from Starfleet — around a year past the conclusion of The Last Best Hope and about 13 years prior to “Nepenthe” — the events of The Dark Veil focus on Captain William Riker and Commander Deanna Troi on the USS Titan.
“Nepenthe” is widely considered to be the standout highlight episode of Star Trek: Picard’s uneven first season, and The Dark Veil provides new backstory that will deepen your appreciation for the episode.
Most notably, the book introduces us to the character of Thaddeus Riker, the son of Will and Deanna who had passed away by the time of “Nepenthe.”
The boy, who has a gift for languages and an active imagination, is a full and vibrant character in this novel — and he’s a young child who is already to developing the Ardani language and cultures that would be his legacy.
Getting to know the character in his earlier years makes his death — and the Rikers’ mourning of his life — all the more poignant. The depiction of Thaddeus Troi-Riker in this novel is pretty well aligned with the notes released last week by Season 1 showrunner Michael Chabon; I wonder if Chabon releasing those notes was just a coincidence, given how well everything fits together.
Our introduction to the pre-Kestra Riker family is set in 2386, amid the backdrop of ongoing intrigue with the Romulans. By the time of this book, the supernova that would destroy the Romulan homeworld is close but has not yet happened. The Federation has abandoned its rescue efforts, Mars has been attacked, and synths have been banned by the Federation.
The story begins aas the USS Titan is on assignment to deliver several members of the mysterious Jazari species back to their homeworld, set near the Federation-Romulan border. When the Titan arrives, they discover that the Jazari are in the process of leaving their homeworld (and local space) behind entirely. However, they are set back by a catastrophic accident which requires the help of both the Titan and a nearby Romulan warbird.
As the story unfolds, the Titan assists the Jazari in completing their mission, while aboard the Romulan warbird a power struggle ensues between the principled Romulan commander and his Tal Shiar executive officer who may have additional loyalties.
James Swallow is an accomplished Star Trek author, who has written a gripping book that fits very comfortably into the Picard aesthetic, but also feels like a comfortable bridge between The Next Generation movies and Picard. He renders Riker and Troi as the accomplished, confident officers that they are at this point in the timeline, with Riker having been in command of the Titan for a number of years at this point.
For Picard fans who might have been disappointed not to get more Starfleet based action in the series, The Dark Veil is a nice accompaniment that deepens the Picard story through a very typical Star Trek tale. It is difficult to go into too much detail without getting into spoiler territory, but there are a lot of themes from Picard — and not just the characters — that get explored in this book. There are also two deeply surprising tie-ins to The Original Series; one is fun, and one is extremely poignant.
Fans of the previous Star Trek novel continuity will find some surprising similarities between the Titan crew in The Dark Veil and the crew of the Titan from the novel continuity; two of the primary characters from the ‘old’ Star Trek: Titan books have moved into the new continuity.
And though the new characters introduced to fill out the remainder of the Titan’s senior staff are not quite as imaginative as in the previous novels, they are still interesting characters in their own right.
The Dark Veil also has a strong Romulan subplot that continues to explore the race’s predicament, now very close to the supernova that we know will ultimately destroy their homeworld. The two main Romulan officers lean a little too hard into the archetypes of the stereotypical evil Romulan and the noble commander who stands by his principles, but both have several layers that elaborate further on things that we saw in Picard, particularly as it relates to the Romulan stance on artificial intelligence.
Overall, The Dark Veil is another great addition to the backstory for Picard. As last February’s The Last Best Hope gave much more backstory to what Picard had been doing between Star Trek: Nemesis and “Remembrance,” The Dark Veil gives us more backstory on the Riker family and gives us the opportunity to see them all in happier times.
I doubt we’ll get anything as ambitious as the eleven books of the previous Star Trek: Titan series, but I would love to read some more Titan stories about the Riker family before they moved to Nepenthe.