The universes of Star Trek and X-Men have collided three times now, with the storylines getting weirder with each encounter.
Star Trek/X-Men 1996
During a spacefaring mission, Captain Kirk accidentally slipped through a vortex to an alternate universe, where he met the X-Men. Kirk and the X-Men were up against a resurrected Gary Mitchell and the mutant Proteus in this chapter. This crossover, which is best known for the fight between Wolverine and Spock, was strange enough, but nothing compared to the sequels involving the Next Generation Enterprise crew.
Star Trek: The Next Generation/X-Men: Second Contact 1998
Following up on the events of the last film, the crew of the Enterprise-E attempts to return home after their struggle with the Borg. The Enterprise appears in an alternate reality of the 1990s, orbiting the X-Earth, Men’s after creating a displacement field to return to their own time. The team encounters the X-Men while attempting to fix their technology, beaming down directly into the X-mansion. Men’s The two parties decide to join forces after a brief skirmish in which Data handily defeats both Wolverine and Colossus.
Michael Jan Friedman’s Planet X 1998
The inhabitants of the planet Xhaldia are rapidly mutating, changing physically and gaining bizarre new abilities. Picard and his crew are dispatched to defuse the situation and come face to face with the X-Men, who are later discovered to have been drawn into this dimension by a meddling Q. The two teams connect and enjoy each other’s company while aboard the Enterprise with the X-Men. Picard and Storm take a cup of tea and discuss the pressures of leadership, which Friedman suggests is a mutual attraction.
Friedman emphasises the physical parallels between Picard and Professor Xavier in the story’s most intriguing touch, with characters noticing that the two have a remarkable likeness to one another. Given that Planet X was released two years before the first X-Men film in 2000, this is extremely foreboding. Despite the fact that Picard and Xavier never really meet, the storey concludes with the Enterprise being fitted with a holographic projection of the Professor that Picard can converse with whenever he wants.
While the 1990s were a golden age for comic book crossovers, The Next Generation and the X-Men had two of the oddest. Neither Second Contact nor Planet X cater to newcomers, as the first book necessitates a thorough understanding of both Star Trek and X-Men history. Second Contact’s conclusion is unusually complicated, including Wesley Crusher and The Traveler, and culminates in a major fight against Kang the Conqueror, the Borg, and the Sentinels. In more ways than one, the Mutants are on the Enterprise crew’s home soil on Planet X. Star Trek tie-in novels are a hugely popular tradition, and Friedman takes them very seriously, giving them a lot of thought.
The X-Men find optimism in the Federation, imagining a future where others’ uniqueness, whether mutant, human, or extraterrestrial, are celebrated. The Enterprise crew meets formidable new friends and allies in the X-Men. This is a unique fusion of the sensibilities of both universes, resulting in two of the oddest crossovers each team has ever seen.
