“Cluster” #3 introduces an element of political thriller into the series as the renegade team’s captor drop a truth bomb on them implicating all of humanity in hostile takeover of an alien planet.  There are themes of expansionism, energy conservation, ecology, and even race being brought to the surface of this once simple sci fi tale.  Once again we are brought back to the fateful drunk driving accident in one of the most out of place background narratives I’ve ever experienced.  “Cluster” is evolving, but I’m not sure if its for me.

WRITTEN BY: Ed Brisson

ART BY: Damian Couciero

PUBLISHER: Dark Horse

PRICE: $3.99

RELEASE: April 1, 2015

I was immediately taken with “Cluster’s” imaginative setting and novel premise, but as we get deeper into the world I finding it all to be a bit dense and somewhat disengaging.  Once again we flash back to the source of Samara’s guilt:the drunk driving incident that led to the death of her sister, and so far we have seen absolutely nothing that wasn’t implicit in the very idea of a drunk driving incident: she was drunk at a party, she drove home with her sister, she is in the hospital and her father is yelling at her for being irresponsible.  I doesn’t deliver any kind of new information one couldn’t have assumed, and it is exceptionally dark subject matter for this book.

In this the most dialogue heavy issue so far, the captor explains that the aliens on the planet or not hostile life forms trying to take over the planet but are in fact the natives being suffocated by the terraforming being done by the humans.  He tells Samara if she can get her dad to bankroll an uprising that he will take the ticking time bombs off her squad. This arrangement is agreed upon shortly before a big robot shootout, which is cool, but I’m struggling to get invested in this story changes directions every issue and doesn’t have any characters that I care to follow.  It isn’t a mess, it just doesn’t have any strong appeal.

I’m not sure what “Cluster” could do to hook me at this point, I was really into issue #1 because it was succinct and fresh and established an immediate conflict.  Now the book only tread familiar intergalactic ground with a rag tag team that isn’t all that interesting.  There is a twist I suppose, but it doesn’t have much impact because we don’t know much about the characters yet.  I hope things start to come together, but as each issue comes out its getting harder to recommend “Cluster.”