Day of Honor: B'Elanna's Holodeck Ceremony Goes Completely Wrong

Title: Star Trek: Voyager #16 - Day of Honor
Authors: Michael Jan Friedman and Jeri Taylor
ISBN: 978-0671019815

B’Elanna Torres sits in the mess hall picking at lunch like it personally offended her. The Day of Honor is winning. Neelix shows up with rokeg blood pie and a morale-officer grin. Last year she walked out on his Klingon feast. This year she tells him she is done with the holiday entirely.

Neelix sweeps the pie off the table, then offers to be her pressure valve. Yell at him anytime. He will not take it personally.

B’Elanna asks if she should still do the holodeck ceremony she and Tom built. Neelix says traditions matter. She admits the Klingon rituals her mother taught her do not feel as hateful as they once did. She tells him to bring back the blood pie. She can do this.

Caves of Kahless

Tom poured real effort into the Caves of Kahless. Torches, fog, candlelight. Moklor the Interrogator demands to know if she came to have her honor challenged. B’Elanna says yes.

Eat sanctified targ heart. Drink mot’loch from the grail of Kahless. Explain how she proved herself worthy of the name Klingon.

She talks about forcing a culture to admit genocide. Moklor wants battles and body counts. When she calls the Borg dishonorable machines, he disagrees. B’Elanna snaps. Maybe honor is just gibberish.

Moklor describes twenty painstiks, bat’leth combat, and sulfurous lagoons of Gorath. She tries to leave. Moklor grabs her. His helpers hit her with painstiks. She shoves him, knocks one warrior cold, and walks out.

Couch Breakdown

Back in her quarters, B’Elanna curls up on the couch in a fetal position. Tom arrives. He knows she was in the holodeck. He also knows she left it running. Moklor is still in there nursing a black eye.

Tom wants details. B’Elanna does not want to give them. She says the whole thing was meaningless posturing. Tom pushes back. Honor matters because it is part of who she is. She has been running from that her whole life.

The fight turns ugly. She tells him to leave. He says if this is how she treats people who care about her, she will end up alone. Then he actually leaves.

B’Elanna puts her head in her hands. She just sent away the one person on the ship with any shot at understanding her Day of Honor mess.

The Doctor Walks Into the Wrong Cave

The Doctor requests a Talaxian resort program. The computer drops him into the Klingon caves instead. He meets Moklor, says sure when asked about honor, eats targ heart, drinks mot’loch, and lists medical victories: burn victims stabilized, radiation sickness cured, viruses destroyed by the hundreds.

Moklor finally lights up. Diseases as enemies. Hundreds slain. Now that is honor worth telling. The Doctor hears about painstiks and sulfur lagoons, terminates the program, and returns to sickbay to research other celebrations.

Nicoletti in Sickbay

Susan Nicoletti and Chafin pick up an unknown virus, delta nine-nine, probably from a rough space station. The Doctor cures it fast, but treatment takes hours on the biobed.

Nicoletti wakes cleared of the virus and heads for engineering. The Doctor asks if she is a virgin. She bolts. He was researching an ancient Tiraccus ritual requiring a symbolic virgin sacrifice. He tries the Betazoid Wedding of Rixx program next, discovers the procession is entirely naked, and ends that one too.

Trouble Returns

On the bridge, Janeway sees three battered Caatati ships on the viewscreen. Chakotay says they look as bad as Rahmin’s, maybe worse. The center vessel hails. Commander Lumas appears, even more hollow-eyed than Rahmin.

He admits contact with Rahmin. He wants a private word with Janeway. Tuvok advises caution. Janeway beams Lumas aboard anyway. She already suspects what he wants. Refugees in worse shape than the ones they just helped.

She sighs. Subspace anomalies she can handle. Hostile aliens she can handle. A people who need more than she can give? That is a different kind of problem.

My Take

This is where the book hits emotional nerves. B’Elanna wants connection to her Klingon side, but the ritual exposes how little she shares with traditional values. Tom is not wrong to push her. She is also not wrong to feel ambushed by painstiks.

The Doctor wandering into the same program is perfect comedy. He gets further than B’Elanna because he reframes medicine as combat. Moklor approves. B’Elanna gets called a p’tahk for walking away.

By the end, B’Elanna is isolated, the Doctor is embarrassed, and Lumas is heading to the briefing room. The Caatati arc is about to get a lot less friendly.

Previous: Day of Honor Shipboard Tensions Next: Day of Honor Lumas Bargain Warp Core