71 – Day of Honor

Grade: B-

Summary

It’s the Klingon Day of Honor, but B’Elanna Torres doesn’t feel like celebrating. She’s short-tempered, impatient and angry. What’s worse, Seven of Nine has just been assigned to Engineering to assist with trying to get the ship home as soon as possible. Maybe Seven can even help Voyager create its own trans-warp conduit like the Borg are using.

Commentary

I didn’t think this episode was all that great. It’s good enough to work as a run-of-the-mill episode, and in all honesty, it’s actually better than Voyager’s average so far. It’s good that they’ve addressed the fact that Seven of Nine is on the ship and has absolutely nothing to do. It worries me a bit about Janeway’s skill as a Captain when she seems to have had no thoughts whatsoever about what role Seven should play on this ship. She seems surprised that this question even came up. When she insisted on keeping Seven on Voyager, did Janeway think Seven would be happy to just hang around the mess hall and stare out the window?

Then there’s also the episode’s Alien of the Week, the Caatati. Apparently, they were assimilated and almost completely destroyed by the Borg, only a couple of years ago. My general recollection is that we’re going to be dealing with the Borg or aliens who knew the Borg for the rest of this series. We’ll see how it plays out as I go through these episodes, one at a time.

Anyway, the Caatati are a pathetic race of aliens, but they’re smart enough to take what they can from Voyager and then present a threat to them after Torres has to eject the faulty Warp Core. Speaking of which, I never really caught the reason why the Warp Core didn’t explode once it was jettisoned into space. I also don’t know why the Shuttlecraft exploded right after Paris and Torres had beamed out into space. This episode was short on explanations.

What saves this episode from complete mediocrity is the many nice examples of character development – Voyager usually skimps on character in favor of eye candy. But at least this time, we learn a lot about Paris, Torres, Neelix and Seven, because of the events that take place and the reactions of the characters. I’m really looking forward to the development of the romance between Paris and Torres – it seems very natural and authentic so far, though it seems to have taken a bit of a step up already.

The introduction of Seven of Nine into this series has really bothered me over the years. I suppose it’s interesting in some ways to watch a former Borg drone become human again, but at least in episodes like this one in which Seven’s “uniform” leaves nothing to the imagination, I don’t get the feeling her addition was for any reason but eye candy. It’s terrible that they couldn’t find ways to boost ratings by improving their writing, the quality of the stories, or consistent characterizations. That’s actually a lot harder to do than to spray paint a costume onto a woman with an attractive shape.

Of Note

Roxann Dawson was actually 3-4 months pregnant when this episode aired. At the time, only her co-star Robert Duncan McNeill knew about it.