I actually bought volume 4 of Star Power, titled The Lonely War, a few years ago, but didn't get around to reviewing it. I asked Alex for Volumes 3 and 5 for Christmas a couple years ago, he bought 4 and 5, and here we are. Well, the copy he bought is in better condition than mine, anyway.
Volume 3 (which I ended up reading online just to see what I missed) revealed the origin of Danica's powers, and also introduced a robot sentry. His designation is "T-O.M", and he's thousands of years old, so Danica naturally named him "Old Tom". With his permission, of course, because she's considerate like that.
Tom factors into a theme of characters wondering if Danica is up to the challenges of wielding this power. There are certain precepts a Star-Powered Sentinel is meant to uphold, and if she doesn't meet the standards, Tom's supposed to deal with that. Terracciano teases that out over the course of five issues, through a series of conversations between Tom and Beena, an archaeologist who had been a background character trying to befriend Danica in the first 2 volumes, and joined the main cast in the third story. So she gets her own little arc of being friendly with, then terrified of, Tom, before finding her resolve to learn from him as a way to protect Danica.
Danica herself is elsewhere, as she's been transferred to a special ship the Millennium Federation uses to travel to star systems beyond their "jump-gate" network. Danica questions whether she's up for making first contact with new worlds, considering her previous experience was the fighting a homicidal Scintillian queen in volume 1. She's also questioned by a psychological operative, or "psi-cop" (that Terracciano and Graham introduced in volume 3) under the pretenses of friendship. The mission involves her being far away from the friends she's made through the first 3 stories.
That the world she reaches is embroiled in some old race war between two groups who no longer remember why they originally started fighting doesn't help. Graham draws the two groups as distinguished by hair color, ear shape, and the color of their eyes. Not all that different from Danica (something she immediately notes), probably for the purpose of emphasizing how ridiculous it seems to her that these two sides are determined to commit genocide against the other.
All Danica's attempts to protect them accomplish is making her an enemy of both sides. The commander of the emissary ship tells her to simply observe and report back, but Danica can't just float there and watch people kill each other. Worse, Mitch is receiving some sort of upgrades, but it's rendering him unable to communicate with her. So she's really on her own (though Mitch does eventually return late in the proceedings, with a solid light form that's kind of Gumby with a messy pompadour.).
Terracciano has Danica come close to breaking down a couple of times, including fleeing her observation post for a time. Which comes back to Tom's mission to make certain she's a proper host for the power, as well as the psi-cop's concerns that she may not be ready for the less-civilized circumstances beyond the Federation's borders.
(There are also references to Danica's relationship with her parents, where she seems to get along well with her dad, but her mother is overbearing and Danica's feelings for her are complicated. It seems to be her father who instilled in her the idea she needs to help people in a crisis, while her mother's the one who makes her doubt she's ever doing anything well enough.)
We get several panels switching between her watching with increasingly horrified expressions and the two races fighting and dying. Graham doesn't make it gory, mostly bodies slumped and staring vacantly, maybe some (purple-colored) blood stains. But there tend to be several dead bodies in those panels, and the places they're fighting are usually damaged or crumbling, indicating this has been going for a while. Either nobody has time to repair their homes, or no one bothers.
Danica does eventually find a way to help at least some people. The story avoids having her stop the fighting or convince everyone to get along. Instead she finds locals who don't divide themselves, and are considered heretics by both sides. I expected Graham to draw some of the children as having mixed characteristics, but he doesn't. Maybe to emphasize they're more different than Danica thinks from just looking at the surface?
There are also some background plots involving Grex, the angry lady in the panel at the top, interviewing one of those three pilots that tried killing Danica in the first story, and have kept popping up since then. Burke turned on the other two in volume 3, but his backstory here makes it seem like he was a decent guy who made a rash decision, then compounded it with more poor decisions. Making him discuss working for the Void Angels forces Grex to deal with her own past doing the same.
There is a lot going on in these five issues, most of it pretty heavy. So Terracciano lightens things up with brief cuts to Danica's friends back on the space station watching a show called "Psi-Cop", which includes an episode titled, "Showdown on the Bikini Planet." It's ridiculous, but having the story begin and end with that brings it around nicely to how much Danica relies on her friends and likes having them around, and how difficult it was being away from them.
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