The Terminator #5 // Review
March, 1965. Houston, Texas. NASA has just established a manned spacecraft center in Houston. They’ve lost contact with a couple of astronauts. It’s a bit suspicious...take-off was fine. There was a bit of a problem with weight, but the crew of the Gemini X4 were able to correct for the problems...but NASA has a rather serious problem it isn’t expecting in The Terminator #5. Writer Declan Shalvey tells a sharply concise one-shot story from the dawn of the space age. Artist Joe Mulvey launches the story onto the page with artistic precision aided by colorist Colin Craker.
NASA is going to need to send another team up to the Gemini X4 to find out what might have happened to them. Moss and Nelson of the X4 haven’t responded, so Phillips and Russell are going to have to go-up in the X5 to investigate. It might be of interest to them to know that when they arrive at the X4, Phillips and Russell are going to come into contact with a bit of tech from decades into the future. It’ll be too busy trying to kill them to introduce itself, though. They’ll be too busy trying to survive to figure it out.
Shalvey finds a nice, little corner of history for a Terminator unit to inhabit as trained personnel try their best to handle a situation that they haven’t trained for. Shalvey layers-in more than enough detail around the edges of the action to solidly render the world of space travel during the 1960s. The NASA drama feels solidly in line with many of the themes that had been explored in the original Terminator franchise. Shalvey is careful to ensure that he is expanding some of the ideas of the franchise in a way that feels consistent with what’s come before.
Mulvey manages a nice balance between sharply-rendered detail and open space for Craker to deliver the color. There’s a warmth to the human drama that Mulvey brings to the page, but there’s also a great deal of cold technical rendering in the margins of everything. Craker is given quite a bit of space in which to work the kind of magic that only a talented colorist can bring to the page. Craker’s work embellishes Mulvey’s quite a bit. The warm interpersonal personality to Mulvey’s rendering gives Craker’s colors a well-articulated space in which to exist.
In space no one can hear you say: “I’ll be back.” The tense feeling of a struggle for survival in low orbit could have hit the page with much more intensity if Shalvey and company had simply ignored all of the backstory and focussed on the struggle between the terminator unit and the astronauts in space. The overall story would have lacked the elegance of the context, though. Shalvey was smart to lower the intensity of the struggle in space to allow the reader a bit more time to process the significance of what was going on in 1965.
Grade: A
