159 – Repentance

Grade: B

Summary

Voyager rescues a bunch of aliens on a ship that is on fire. Shortly before it explodes, they beam everyone into the cargo bay. It turns out this was transport ship, which was carrying several prisoners who are scheduled to be executed soon.

Commentary

Here’s another deep character-driven story, but I didn’t like it all that much. I felt like I was being a little manipulated. I didn’t like the music either. I don’t always notice the soundtracks in these episodes, but this time, I thought the music was just off – it didn’t work for me at all.

Anyway, about the story – the Doctor heals the brain of one of the prisoners, and afterwards he actually felt remorse for his crime for the first time in his life. I thought that was interesting. I liked it that this character then agreed to pay for his crime. I think it would have been easy for the story to have tried to manipulate the audience just a little bit too far by making him beg for his life. I’m very glad that didn’t happen.

On the other hand, the prisoner who befriends Neelix just proves to be a bad guy, with very few redeeming qualities. He used Neelix to get what he wanted, and by the end of the episode, it felt like he used the audience too. That just left a bad taste in my mouth, so maybe that’s why I didn’t like this episode all that much.

One other thing I didn’t like – do we HAVE to hear about Seven’s experience in being rescued from the Borg yet another time? Seriously. This is getting old. We haven’t forgotten, so there’s no need to keep rehashing it.