Friday, December 28, 2012

Day of Honor

 *** (3 stars out of 5)
It's a Very Klingon Yom Kippur and B'Elanna Torres is having one of those days.

Broken acoustic inverter in her sonic shower makes her hair stand on end. Chakotay orders her to take baby bird Seven into her engineering nest. And to top it all off, some hobos steal her warp core.

Didn't Voyager meet some Caatati off-screen in season two? Rhetorical question. They did. I looked it up.  Caatati must be a very common race name. Well, not THAT common any more, what with how THESE ones were mostly destroyed by the Borg.

Torres wants Seven to feel remorse or guilt from the death and horror inflicted across the galaxy by the Borg. Well, tough. She doesn't. What do you want?  Raised by a cult of mechanistic monsters, remember?

Nonsensically, the Caatati visitor happens across Tom and Seven in a random hallway. Based on a cursory glance at an unfamiliar human with one metal eyebrow he leaps to the absurd conclusion that the woman is a different species. Tuvok unhelpfully informs him that she's Borg. As you might imagine, the Caatati flips out. Forcing our dashing crew to shelter her. How the boys love their new Borg!

Torres doesn't want Neelix's traditional Day of Honour blood pie or to self-evaluate the last year. She found Klingon ritual hateful as a child, yet now she's not so sure. (I'm pretty sure. Klingons are made of anger. Anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering. Heh. Yoda.)

With a deeply optimistic sense of trust in a dangerous sociopath who betrayed them mere days earlier, the crew try to use 7 of 9's atrocity-fueled knowledge to make a transwarp drive. This fails instantly and spectacularly. When Tom and Torres fall overboard trying to fish back the ejected warp core, B'Elanna finally confesses her love for the ship's resident bad boy as their oxygen dwindles away.

"Day of Honor" is a tie-in to a handful of novels loosely linked by taking place on this Klingon holiday. The episode forces me to like the Torres story and roll my eyes at the Seven story. Is this how it's going to be for another 4 years? Every B story will be about Seven of Nine now?

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