'Repentance' Reviews

• The first reviews for this week's Voyager episode, 'Repentance' are out, and the reaction appears to be rather mixed. First off the mark, there's Michael Marek of Cinescape. He thought the episode was quite worthwhile.

  I must commend the Voyager production team for taking on a serious issue, and doing a nice job with it. Star Trek tends to work best when it draws its drama from the characters, and not from external threats and explosions. "Repentance" is well worth watching, but expect a heavy story that does not end with everybody happy.

  To read his full review, drop off by Cinescape.

• Secondly, there's Mania's Michelle Erica Green who offers her take on the episode. She, as it seems, was rather less impressed.

  One of the most heavy-handed "issue" episodes ever seen on Star Trek, "Repentance" makes The Next Generation's "Justice" and "Angel One" seem subtle by comparison, and also makes one long passionately for Picard's sane attitude towards the Prime Directive. Janeway's is inconsistent, wishy-washy, and often revolting, as is her record on the rights of the individual. She saves the Ocampa in clear violation of the PD (and all power to her). She goes berserk trying to save one member of Species 8472 hunted by the Hirogen -- to whom she later gives holographic technology that comes back to haunt them all, because of the autonomy she grants the Doctor on rare occasion. But she refuses to let Torres choose to die rather than accepting medical treatment on ethical grounds. She threatens to execute Noah Lessing for not turning over Captain Ransom to her vigilante justice. She does execute Tuvix over the objections of many on her crew.

  Again, for the full review, please follow this link.

• Next up there's TrekWeb's O.Deus who actually seemed to think that it was worth a watch, despite uneven presentation.

  The death penalty is an issue that has come into play more and more in recent years especially what with our new president never having met a method of execution he didn't love and the debate over its validity and associated issues is only likely to keep on growing. The problem of course is that usually when Voyager or Star Trek in general tries to address a "timely" issue, the results often come out looking like last week's Lineage. In other words, well-meaning and sincere but fairly one-sided and not really thought out. And while Repentance certainly suffers from these problems, its core success is as a series of quiet character pieces rotating around the implications of the difficulties of making both moral and just choices.

  O.Deus's full review of 'Repentance' can be found here.

• Meanwhile, T’Bonz (Bonnie Malmat) of Section 31 gave the episode a B- or 7/10 in her review calling it "reasonably well done", while IGN Sci-Fi's Jason Bates could only find about three paragraphs worth of comments for his review, most of which were negative, despite his score of three out of five.

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