| Voyager encounters a nomadic group of refugees (the Caatati) from the Borg, who ask for aid and Janeway is happy to help. These guys get self-righteous when she doesn't give them everything they could ever need, which Neelix calls out as BS, but Janeway succumbs and gives them even more stuff. Next, Seven offers to help Voyager implement transwarp drive, but a failure causes the project to fail, necessitating an ejection of the warp core. Torres takes this pretty hard, since she already had a fight that day with Paris because she didn't want to observe the Klingon Day of Honor. Before she can complain too much, she and Paris are on a shuttle together, hoping to salvage the core - which the Caatati have already showed up to claim. They damage the shuttle, leaving Paris and Torres to drift in space in environmental suits. Now with the upper hand in bargaining, the Caatati return to Voyager with the warp core and demand more supplies. Seven, who has retained the Borg knowledge of the Caatati civilization, offers to help by reteaching them how to replicate the thorium they need to power their ships. The offer is successful, and Voyager recovers its warp core, allowing them to also recover Paris and Torres - who have now made up and proclaimed their love for each other. |
Personally, my reaction to the Caatati's rant about Voyager being stingy would have been something along the lines of "Oh, see, I thought you wanted help. You're right, we do have the option of giving you nothing. Thanks for reminding me of that." Now, that sarcasm might not have done well for me in the second encounter, but even with Janeway's greater "generosity" they weren't terribly hospitable. Now, my response may be affected by the large number of people I see who come into the ER without health insurance, demanding pain medication prescriptions to feed their narcotic habits, who often launch into similar diatribes at the ER doctors who deny them. Who can say?
Neelix gets a pretty great scene in this episode, where he sees that Torres is distraught, and offers to be a (verbal) punching bag. With all the whining about emotional maturity that I did in the Scorpion, Part II review, I've got to say that Neelix jumped up a couple notches in my estimation here. This is the kind of Neelix I want around: optimistic, resilient, and eager. He's always had bits of those qualities from time to time, but they've always been obscured behind bizzare emotional outbursts; here's to hoping that the writers see that this works for him.
As for Paris and Torres, the stranded-on-a-desert-island routine was old the other times I complained about it, but that's not what bothers me here. Trek is not so great with the romances in general, but it gets worse when it tries to analyze them. Paris' armchair psychoanalysis of Torres uses some very worn-out phrases, and they're made even more painful by the addition of Trek terms like "first contact" as a euphemism for sex. I feel like Paris is fairly condescending towards Torres in this episode, so I'm disappointed that not only does it take Torres to say she loves him to break the tension, but he even makes a somewhat snide comment back without repraisal.
However, when it comes to painful dialogue, nothing beats Janeway's "Maybe it was just an unexpected act of kindness," with a smug look plastered across her face, giving Seven a big old I-told-you-so after she helps solve the Caatati problem. Left a very sour taste in my mouth after an otherwise decent episode.
Watchability: 3/5
Bottom Line: Worth it for the Caatati and Neelix, but I sincerely wish we could have missed the romance and Janeway-lectures-Seven parts.
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