Trillium #8

chapter 8:  two stars become one

by Jeff Lemire

The final issue in Jeff Lemire's sci-fi romance Trillium prefers suggestion to conclusive declaration.  There is perhaps a tidy, decisive explanation for the final few pages, but if so, I don't have it.  It's a solemn but hopeful culmination to a series characterized by its soulful lyricism more than its sci-fi apocalypticism.

Nevertheless, most of "Two Stars Become One" is occupied with resolving Trillium's thriller plot components, saving the human race in the final years of the thirty-eighth century from the viral Caul.  It gives each of its central characters—Nika, William, and Clayton, even perhaps A.I. system Essie—his or her hero moment.  With the last infected ship of colonists hurtling toward the Ark, Clayton flies his spaceship to intercept the contaminated vessel, sacrificing himself to give William, Nika, and the Ark a window for escape.  With their ship crippled from the shrapnel of Clayton's blast, Nika and William abandon the Ark to Essie so that they may manually separate the bleeding Command Deck from the life-sustaining Cryodeck, providing its inhabitants, the last few thousand people in the universe, one final chance at survival.  Considering Trillium's final panel of a crowded and youthful community, they are—against all odds—successful in preserving the human race.  It's a satisfying, if entirely ordinary, conclusion to the action plot.

The mythology of the series is much more difficult to tease out.  What relation Nika and William's double lives—alternate twentieth century and distant thirty-eighth—have to one another remains obscure?  If Clayton in his final moments alive remembers his other life, if Nika and William each exist in both times, equally knowledgeable and educated for life in both worlds, what truly are the consequences of this tandem existence?  Is it a by-product of their time-traveling adventures through the pyramids, or do their double lives exist independent of it?  What of the Atabithians?  What of the architects of the "Mouth"'s technology?  While their journey side-by-side into Trottier-6, the "Mouth of God" and the location of the time-travel networks, is emotionally satisfying, a fitting ending to the romantic arc, it does little to clarify Trillium's earlier prophesies.  But the (sometimes frustrating) beauty of "Two Stars Become One" is that ambiguity.  When the young white-haired child, a striking double for young Nika, draws the "Mouth" and a single star on the wall of her teepee, the cosmic union of the series' two lovers, the love story seems to begin again.

[June 2014]