123 – Barge of the Dead

Grade: C

Summary

B’Elanna Torres comes back from an away mission and crashes onto Voyager. She barely survives, but somehow makes it. Then they find a piece from a Klingon ship that had found its way onto the shuttlecraft she was flying. Then the piece of metal actually bleeds on her table, but when she turns to look again, the blood is gone. What’s going on here?

It turns out that B’Elanna has actually died and is now on the Barge of the Dead. She finds her mother there, who is being punished for B’Elanna’s lack of honor. B’Elanna needs to rescue her mother from this ship and from her eternal fate.

Commentary

This episode is kind of a mess. Actually, I didn’t expect much from this episode when it first started. It seemed like a random “Torres is in trouble” episode like the one when she wastes time on the Holodeck with the safeties turned off. This is the first time I had ever heard of the Klingon Barge of the Dead, or in their concept of Hell.

I thought this could have been an intriguing episode, though honestly, it turned out to be rather weird. I really don’t know what happened, even after having seen it multiple times. Suddenly, B’Elanna is back in Sickbay and everything is ok, including with her mother. We get the feeling that perhaps none of this really happened at all. It’s a new twist on the dreaded Reset Button. And yet, I can’t really fault an episode that features B’Elanna. She continues to be my favorite character and actress in this series.

Of Note

The first clue that something is not quite right in this episode is when Janeway calls Torres simply “Lana”. Then Torres says “that’s what my mother called me”, and that’s when I knew this isn’t quite reality.