In today’s episode, Lt. Torres isn’t looking forw—wait, never mind, she is looking forward to the Day of Honor. But she’s not above letting one bad day ruin it. Meanwhile, Seven of Nine is ready to get to work, but she might be girlBorging too close to the warp core for the tastes of some. Do we think about Lt. Carey enough? How hard is the Doctor flirting with cultural appropriation? And do we have a new champion for OC by volume? All this and more in Day of Honor: The Television Episode, the book that knows a fine wine when it sees it.

Day of Honor: The Television Episode
Author: Michael Jan Friedman (concept by John Ordover, episode by Jeri Taylor)
Pages: 241
Published: November 1997
Timeline: Early season 4
Prerequisites: Occasional callbacks to Friedman’s other Day of Honor book, but nothing too specific. Also, Seven of Nine had been on Voyager for maybe a few weeks tops at this point, so put yourself in that time frame

Whoever subtitled this book The Television Episode must have thought they were pretty funny.

The novelization of the Voyager episode “Day of Honor” is supposed to be the grand culmination of the book miniseries event. But very little of this book is about Lt. Torres. It’s all over the place, and padded to heck and back, most likely because it’s probably really hard to turn a 45-minute television episode into a cohesive full-length novel. It even starts out weird: on TV, B’Elanna begs off the Day of Honor because she’s already having a bad day at the beginning of the episode, but this time, she’s actually kind of looking forward to it, because if you’ll recall, in the books, she already had a Day of Honor experience the year prior that taught her how important it was. It’s a little clumsy because her mind has to change from that initial optimism in order to fit the mood of the episode, but at least it acknowledges what’s been happening in the printverse. Still, it does create some cognitive dissonance where for a while you feel like you’ve somehow slipped into a parallel universe.

Nothing from the episode itself happens until over seventy pages into the book, evoking memories of Vonda McIntyre’s The Search for Spock achieving similar lengths of uninterrupted OC. First we get a vignette of 5-year-old B’Elanna saving her friend from a dangerous fire plume in a backyard expedition gone too far, only for her adrenaline rush to get dashed on the rocks when she comes home to find her dad walking out on them.1Later canon would place this happening a little later in B’Elanna’s life, but either way, he was the one that did the leaving. Then we move on to Agron Lumas, one of the two Caatati captains from the episode, playing with his new realizor, which is best described as a VR headset that generates a holodeck simulation from your thoughts. He and his family are checking it out when the Borg show up in the nice little picnic Lumas dreamed up. Lumas tries to rip the realizor off his head and spring into action, but instead he collapses, not knowing that it takes a while to come down from a realizor sesh, so the Borg assimilate his wife and daughters and I guess just leave him on the floor, because who wants this lethargic nerd in their unimatrix.

Even though it eventually gets to some things that happened in the episode, that’s hardly the end of the bonus material. The Doctor figures much more prominently in this one than you might expect. He gets a huge third plot thread where he finds himself bummed out by his lack of a holiday to celebrate and goes about trying on several different ones. He takes a mildly amusing whack at B’Elanna’s holodeck program, and also tests out one planet’s tradition that vaguely resembles the running of the bulls as well as Passover. There is one surprising gut punch where the lieutenant walking the Doctor through Passover suddenly gets a little emotional because the ritual causes him to become acutely aware of missing his family. Otherwise, the episode frankly can’t really support this arc, especially since it was already splitting time between B’Elanna and Seven of Nine in the first place.

Yes, Seven of Nine. It’s a little weird to think this is the first time she appears in the books. My wife and I recently finished rewatching Voyager, and once all was said and done and I looked back on it, I had to admit Seven was probably my favorite character; she often gave voice to whatever I happened to be thinking about a given scene or plot development, usually after I had just had that thought (which was a little bit maddening when she was the lone voice of reason in Crazytown, which happened a lot, because, you know, Voyager writing). Before I read this one I rewatched the episode, and I was reminded of what a force of nature the character was even in her earliest appearances. That doesn’t come across so much in the book, but I thought it was worth pointing out in case it’s been a while since you’ve watched it yourself.

I did appreciate the token effort to humanize Lumas a little, even if it’s a mostly private struggle. The realizor gadget turns out to be more important than its initial appearance lets on, as he occasionally retreats to it in moments of stress. It fleshes out a little bit how he decides to get past his need for revenge on the Borg and accept the gift of the thorium isotope replicator without siccing the whole Caatati fleet on the warp core–less Voyager. Overall, I think softening him up a little is a good call. In the episode he’s just kind of a jerk even when he gets what he wants, but playing up the family angle, while a little schmaltzy, does wonders to make his attitude a little more relatable.

I won’t lay too much of the blame for this book’s chaos at the feet of Michael Jan Friedman, who was presumably writing both this and his original Day of Honor story about the same character at the same time. But I think this was only really an event in the minds of the people who came up with the idea, and the wow factor they were hoping for never really translated (except for maybe one time). Perhaps some single-part episodes can support a novelization, but not this one. Still, my interest in seeing the differences between an episode and its book counterpart remains ever high, and this one did deliver, if in a lumpy pile rather than a neat package.

MVP & LVP

• I think the television episode is a good showcase for a more flattering side of Tom Paris, and even though the book has a lot more flab on it, I think that still comes through. I never fully bought into the Tom/B’Elanna pairing—any time I was reminded that the couple existed, he’d do some lunkheaded thing that made me wonder why she put up with him—but I think he tunes into just the right frequency here: frustrated with the walls she puts up, yet compassionate, and persistent in a way that’s charming rather than skeevy. I don’t remember if there was anything that hinted that they were heading for a coupling before this episode. There probably was, but there’s not a lot of those early seasons that’s worth remembering, so it probably got lost in the wash.
• I just did not care for the Doctor in this one very much at all. I was not expecting another of Voyager‘s seemingly endless “Doctor tries to explore his humanity” episodes, nor was I much in the mood for it, and for some reason, the way Friedman chose to write his speech patterns made him sound even stiffer than Data. Imagine if you could count the number of times the EMH had been activated on one hand since “Caretaker”, and that’s how his dialogue sounded. A really bizarre take on the character.

Stray Bits

• Friedman regularly refers to Tom Paris as “the flight controller”, a very weird turn of phrase that annoyed me a lot more than I like to admit.
• Harry tries to get a poker game rolling in the mess hall, which he’s heard is a tradition on other ships, but struggles to do so; most of his participants don’t seem to grok the rules, the nuances, or both. The main purpose of the scene seems to be to show that there are plenty of humans, such as an officer in astrophysics named Bandiero, who don’t like the idea of Seven being on the ship either, which of course stands to reason, but it doesn’t go anywhere other than Harry telling Bandiero to shut up, which is actually kind of spicy when you consider that Bandiero outranks him (he’s a lieutenant).
• Lt. Carey gets some solid time in this one, which is nice, because I felt like the show forgot about him too often during its run (and did him extra dirty by killing him off just a few episodes from the end).
• When B’Elanna asks the clock what time it is after forgetting to set a wake-up call, it tells her “7:45 a.m.”. I feel fairly certain it would say 0745 on a Starfleet ship. Maybe as long as you demonstrate you can quickly understand both, they let you pick your preference. I dunno, I’m just grabbing at straws here. (p. 67)
• The Doctor points out a bottle of Chateau Picard ’64 on the table during the seder. A fine vintage, according to the Doctor and Lt. Rabinowitz’s holo-wife; Rabinowitz is less enthusiastic. (p. 162)

Final Assessment

Average. “Day of Honor” was already pulling a heavy load by splitting its time between B’Elanna and Seven, but the Doctor’s arc is way too much for it to bear. The amount of extra stuff Friedman had to pile on to get this book to even slightly-less-than-average Star Trek book length makes for a huge mess. Nevertheless, some of this new material manages to be mildly fascinating on its own merits, although any given piece of it struggles to stand out amid the chaos. It’ll definitely give you a lot of new angles to check out if you feel like revisiting the episode, but I wouldn’t argue any of them are terribly essential.

NEXT TIME: Geordi gets ready To Storm Heaven