It's the holiday on which Klingons compare their accomplishments to the great figures of history. B'Elanna is conflicted about taking part in the tradition, and her feelings aren't eased by the horrible day she's having: a transwarp experiment fails and forces them to eject the ship's warp core, and efforts to retrieve it wind up with her and Paris alone in spacesuits in deep space. Meanwhile, Seven of Nine continues to adjust to her new life as an ex-Borg, dealing with hatred for what she used to be.
Executive producer Jeri Taylor wasn't writing as many scripts herself by this point in her tenure with Star Trek: Voyager. But it feels like she seized the reins of this one so that she could steer the story in a direction that others in the writing staff were reportedly reluctant to go. Most, it seems, were happy with the sort of "will they, won't they" dynamic between Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres; Taylor wanted to advance the couple into a true relationship.
My memory of Voyager is that the Tom-B'Elanna pairing eventually works well enough. But I'm still not that sold on it at this point. It feels to me like Tom is always pushing her to be someone she doesn't necessarily want to be: more Klingon. He accuses her of using hostility to push others away, but he is often just as eager to avoid serious conversation, deflecting with humor. It's unclear to me at this stage how much Paris truly loves B'Elanna as opposed to desires her; it feels very awkward to me at the climax of this episode when she finally says "I love you," and he doesn't reply at all (not even with something pithy like an "I know").
The concept of the Day of Honor, in which all of this is explored, is in a similar space for me: it sort of works, but sort of doesn't. The idea of a Yom Kippur inspired holiday in which Klingons take stock of their lives is clever (and, apparently, was first created for a series of Star Trek novels before it appeared here). But the particulars we see in this episode feel more like Cinco de Mayo: inauthentic cultural mimicry. Before B'Elanna bails on her Day of Honor ritual, we're told it will involve eating and drinking challenges, painsticks, and bat'leth fights. It's just as well we don't see most of that, because we've certainly seen it all before.
Instead, the show spends its budget to maroon Tom and B'Elanna and spacesuits for the back half of the episode. It's a great idea, and they certainly do the best they could for late 1990s television. Still... it doesn't look great. The floating is awkward, the compositing on the space background is often obvious, and there are lots of weird reflections on their helmets. Yet actors Roxann Dawson and Robert Duncan McNeill really worked hard for it to look this good: fans had to blow constantly to keep their helmet glass from fogging, so they could not hear each other and they had to re-record all the dialogue later. Both spent days of shooting in a variety of uncomfortable rigs, Dawson revealing to only a very few people that she was actually a few months pregnant at the time!
A subplot with Seven of Nine is similarly good in concept but not great in execution. Having Seven face hatred from aliens who were decimated by the Borg is a great idea, but the way these aliens are written borders on tacky. The Caatati are refugees in great need, but they behave like con artists giving a shakedown. Their dialogue is written as if by a Reagan-era conservative: they don't say what people in need would say, they say what a "needy Welfare Queen looking for a free handout" would say.
And I think not enough is made of Seven's naivete here. She gets a big growth moment where she volunteers to hand herself over to the Caatati so they'll spare Voyager. But she can't understand the full context of what the aliens would do to her. She wouldn't be in for more taunts like B'Elanna trying to make her feel bad. She would be tortured and violated in ways admittedly not to be discussed explicitly on a family show... though to not voice this even obliquely seems like a wild omission to me.
Other observations:
- Vorik is back. Jeri Taylor wrote her son Alexander Enberg back into the show. (And why not? Minor characters should recur on Voyager.)
- Neelix offers himself up to be berated by B'Elanna whenever she's feeling bad. I know I for one would enjoy seeing her take him up on that some time.
- Paris is more willing than most to overlook Seven of Nine's past. This feels authentic to his own history and having been given a second chance.
- The "space walk" effects may be spotty, but the visuals of the warp core ejection (and the empty space that leaves in Engineering) look great!
- We lose yet another shuttle. Feels like we're going through those faster than photon torpedoes.
- B'Elanna says floating in space is like floating in the womb. Who remembers that?
- When rescue arrives for Tom and B'Elanna, they're told to "prepare to beam aboard." What's to prepare? We're dying here, beam us up!
A good idea that's quite rough around the edges, I see "Day of Honor" as a B-.
No comments:
Post a Comment