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The B’Elanna Torres/Tom Paris will-they-or-won’t-they comes to a head in “Day of Honor”, and in “Nemesis”, Chakotay finds out that not all is what it seems. Plus! Is Star Trek cool?
Trekabout Episode 281: Day of Honor/Nemesis
Christopher Rollins
-First of all, thank you for reading my comment on Rise/Favorite Son. I’m surprised at the amount of time spent on it, given I was reading from TVTropes.org and other sources. Second of all, regarding Voyager’s lack of detail, and the following is from http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org, but both Tuvok’s and Tom Paris’s rank insignia were changed from Season 1. Not the first time it’s happened in Star Trek either (case in point: Chief O’Brien between TNG and DS9), but the Voyager opening credits list Tuvok and Paris as Lieutenants in Seasons 1-3. By the time Season 2 rolls around, they both have their uniform ranks reduced (to Lieutenant and Lieutenant, J.G. respectively). Talk about inconsistent, how was that basic mistake caught by the writers, while Harry Kim being a “senior officer” and still an Ensign was not?
Eric Brasure
-I guess they figured because he’s a bridge officer he’d be a senior officer. This is usually the point when discussing Voyager that I shrug my shoulders and say “they just weren’t very good at attention to detail”.
Cliffy73
-I do think you guys are too detached from breedertown to read the Paris/Torres relationship as it was intended , although it’s not like it’s Gone With the Wind. Paris’s friendship overtures read to me, at the time and now, as him not denying his attraction to B’Elanna or taking romance off the table. But rather as him abjuring his former lothario ways — he’s saying he enjoys her compansionship and is not pursuing her strictly for a roll in the cargo bay. That he’s serious in a way he had not been serious in his former life.
Another factor is that the Torres character has become more about an insecure woman using her aggression as a defense mechanism. Dawson is really good at playing wounded, and so they started writing that for her more often. But that means she can be more passive than she should have been in the development of her relationship with Tom. Also, you know, this was 20 years ago.
Eric Brasure
-I think for me at a lot of it has to do with Robert McNeil’s go-to “I’m whiny and put upon” tone of voice. He’s playing it well but it just annoys me.
T
-I really think that as an lgbtq person of color myself, I really identify with B’Elanna’s consistent return to her Klingon issues. The truth of being different is that it comes back over and over.
You guys are often very critical of voyager for being forgetful and I think with B they are really remembering the truth of her character quite regularly and that truth is, like real people, she doesn’t just get over her deep issues of self in just one episode.
She gets over it in one way (her relationship with herself in Faces, then in a different way (her relationship with Tom in DOH) and then again with a new dimension in season 7.
Anyway, love listening to the show. Just don’t be so hard on BT for not getting over her trauma of being different.