Star Trek: Voyager (TV Series) Barge of the Dead (1999) User Reviews

Klingon Hell, Human Bafflement

[GreyHunter · 7/10 · 8 January 2020]

I do so love a well-done surreal episode of Star Trek. Or of most tv shows, for that matter. But sometimes I wonder whether they're worth it, seeing as a sizeable portion of the viewers apparently start writing angry, scathing reviews without giving a moment's thought to what actually happened. People acting out-of-character during a surreal vision/dream? Not a goof. If everything went normally and characters behaved exactly how you'd expect a character to behave, there would be no point to the sequence being a dream or vision. A dream or vision that is indistinguishable for what passes for reality on a show...*that* would be baffling and odd. If Chakotay acts different from normal, or if the Doc can be harmed by physical weapons, it's actually consistent with the very premise.

As for the episode itself, I enjoyed the themes it tried to explore, and, for the most part, did so successfully. The main flaw in this episode is built into the format -- there wasn't enough time to give said themes full shrift, so we ultimately ended up with a conclusion that's less open to interpretation as somewhat incomplete. We can interpret what the episode is trying to drive at, but there simply wasn't enough connection between the behavior/dialogue and the resultant actions to have any particularly solid reason for our interpretations. Which is a pity, because it was a fascinating episode that developed a solid foundation for a character study, not only of B'Ellana but of the general Klingon psyche of the entire race, and the religious beliefs therefrom. I still rate it a solid 7 because it was worth watching; it just never quite closed the deal before the 40-some odd minutes ran out. It would have made a great 2-parter, but the topic itself, being so focused on one character in the ensemble, probably wasn't epic enough for the writers to sell it to the show-runners as worthy of having 2 episodes dedicated to it. Pity, because I can think of several episodes we could have done without if it meant this one got a continuation into the following week.

Midlife crisis.

[thevacinstaller · 7/10 · 8 February 2023]

I took this as B'Elanna having a near death experience and working through her mid life crisis and early childhood trauma of being a klingon/human and not fitting in or understand herself.

The plot of the episode is her journey of accepting her mother's faith and defending her mother without necessarily accepting the religion. I am a big softy for self sacrifice episodes --- what can I say?

The overall message that I took away was about living the life you want to lead. If you live a life attempting to please others or because it is expected of you .... well, one day you could be low on oxygen in a shuttle and have a life changing hallucination or you might even be grouchy to the borg cyborg who wants to mess with your engine efficiency.

I find it interesting that Roxanne Dawson was raised an atheist but became a Catholic a few years before the episode was aired. I imagine she has some interesting perceptions into faith.

This is one of those episode where Torres is just working some personal stuff out. I enjoyed the ride.

B'Elanna the Forgettable

[Ar_Pharazon_the_golden · 6/10 · 30 July 2019]

I feel like we've seen several iterations of this rather unspectacular idea in Voyager: a spirit quest. Janeway has done it with some, what were they, afterlife aliens who devoured souls or whatnot, Chakotay and his spirit guides, etc.

There is a good point in doing it once again though: Clearly, Klingon mythology is much more interesting than fake native american rituals or random one-off aliens. But this is where the episode misses the mark. Instead of dealing with Klingon hell and culture, it spends most of its time with B'Elanna being confused and trying to resolve issues with her mother - what's worse, the viewer is left mystified as to how they were resolved. In short, B'Elanna agrees to take her mother's place in Gre'thor, and then doesn't. And it's not that she achieves some kind of enlightenment or solves the riddle of Kahless, she pretty much declares "I don't understand what you want from me" and wakes up. Suuuure. You are shown the Klingon version of Charon, who also is the first Klingon, who killed the Gods (one of the cleverest bits of Star Trek lore)...and that's it. No insight. Just a guy. You have a Klingon NPC who first informs B'Elanna where she is - even he could easily become a memorable character, as a dishonored Klingon. He just never says anything again. And Gre'thor? A place of fire. Really? Come on.

I don't care how random or unjustified B'Elanna's near death experience is, I don't care how unconvincing her total conviction in it is, I don't care that Chakotay, medicine man of the seven galaxies, suddenly distrusts visions. I'd forgive all of this in a heartbeat if they came up with some kind of redeeming heroic quest for B'Elanna and some insight into the guest characters. But this was done lazily.

B'Elanna goes to Hell

[Tweekums · 7/10 · 27 March 2010]

When B'Elanna returns to Voyager after being caught in an ion storm she crash lands. When her shuttle is examined it emerges that the engine had ingested a piece of metal that had Klingon markings on it. The crew use this find as an excuse to throw a party celebrating Klingon culture which B'Elanna clearly isn't so keen on. Since getting back the crew aren't acting in a normal way... nothing too strange just slightly out of character. Things turn strange when the party is interrupted by Klingon warriors who proceed to kill everybody present. B'Elanna then finds herself aboard the Barge of the Dead, the ship which according to Klingon belief takes the dead to Gre'Thor where those who died in dishonour are doomed to spend eternity. While on the barge her mother appears then suddenly B'Elanna finds herself in Voyager's sickbay; apparently everything we'd seen up to that point was part of a near death experience. She refuses to accept that is was just imagined and is determined that she must save her mother who has been condemned because of B'Elanna's lack or interest in her Klingon heritage. In order to do this she must be taken to the point of death so she can return to the barge and offer to take her mother's place... When she gets there it is not what she expected the Klingon Hell to be like.

This wasn't a bad episode and Roxann Dawson put in a good performance as B'Elanna. The scenes on the barge didn't really feel like they were aboard a ship at see although that may have been a deliberate move to show that this was in the slightly surreal world of the dead rather than in the normal universe.

And it was never mentioned again

[newarkinvaders · 4/10 · 23 May 2022]

B'elanna learns to embrace her Klingon side because she doesn't want her mom to go to hell.

She ends up deciding to embrace her Klingon side.

She doesn't change And then it's never mentioned again.

Science fiction AND fantasy

[johnjohnson68510 · 8/10 · 23 May 2012]

This episode is packed with Klingon religious mythology. While B'Elanna is in a near death experience, she has visions of the Klingon afterlife. She comes out changed. Tom Paris asks her "Why have you become a born-again Klingon?" If you are the kind of fan who hates fantasy or anything religious or mythological in your science fiction, steer clear of this episode. But, if you believe, like Chakotay says here, that, "not everything in the universe can be scanned with a tricorder," you might find this episode worth a look.

Without going into the storyline, it has some good dramatic tension in it. The reality of the mythic appearances is ambiguous; and at a deeper personal level, this episode is about B'Elanna coming to terms with her Klingon identity, as well as resolving—or at least making a decisive turn—on some big internal issues she has about her mother.

In some ways this episode is a couple of scoops of the California Religion, but in other ways I found it interesting. While Karen Austin, as B'Elanna's mother, is given some really horrible pieces of script to deal with, we see Roxanne Dawson doing some of her best work, at least that I've ever seen. And I have to say, drawbacks aside, Ronald Moore & Co. were trying to deal with some big and serious issues here, and got a lot done in 45 minutes. I think that fans who dissed this episode by giving it low stars did so because of the Klingon religious elements; without that, I think they would have easily bulked the stars up to 8 on this one, for its acting, storyline, and even for the special effects.

To Hell and back...

[planktonrules · 2/10 · 28 February 2015]

The summary isn't exactly right about this episode. It has a rather lengthy period on Voyager first where all the Federation members start going Klingon-crazy after they find a Klingon artifact in space. However, later you learn that it's all a hallucination! What follows is also likely a hallucination...or is it?! Suddenly Torres finds herself on a barge bound for Klingon hell!! However, after a while, she is brought out of this when she is revived by the Doctor--but just as this is happening, she sees her mom drop onto the barge as well. Does this mean mommy is also dead? To find out and if she can help, Torres asks the Doc to kill her...and then bring her back after she's had a chance of a family reunion.

This is all very mystical and stupid. But what bothered me more is that it was so inconsistent. Mr. Chakotay is practically the poster child for wacky spirituality with his spirit guides, talking with dead grandpa and the like. And when Torres tries to talk to her about this, he mostly blows her off and pretty much says there's no afterlife! Huh?! Why didn't Robert Beltran at least say "This ain't consistent"...because it wasn't. So what we have is a silly episode that doesn't make a lot of sense. Not one of the shining moments in Trek history.

Not your typical Voyager episode

[MichZes · 8/10 · 18 August 2022]

I like the type of episodes that isn't your typical "time-travel", "the-captain-outsmarts-aliens", "time-travel", "the-Voyager is-in-a-battle-for-it's-life", "time-travel" type of episode. It seems much more creative to expand on the characters than to rehash the same plots. I call that the FUGITIVE AFFECT. Does anyone remember the old TV series called The Fugitive (1963-1967)? Not the movie with Harrison Ford, but the series with David Janssen. You can't get the full affect of the hopelessness of episode after episode and season after season of this innocent man running and running and running from the authorities and trying to catch the "one armed man" who was always just out of his grasp by watching the movie. It was just too short. Star Trek Voyager is very much like The Fugitive in that they never reach their goal until the very last episode of the last season. The Fugitive took only 4 years to achieve its goal whereas it is taking Voyager seven seasons to get to its goal. It is just refreshing to get a few episodes about something other than the crew fumbling through the universe trying to get home.

Science or Superstition

[markbyrn-1 · 4/10 · 30 December 2023]

In this episode, B'Elanna Torres has a near-death experience that correlates to Klingon's religious beliefs about the afterlife and their version of hell. This is despite her rejection of the beliefs as superstition. After being revived, B'Elanna is very distraught and confides with Chakotay. Surprisingly, Chakotay doesn't offer his usual assistance to find a spirit guide as he did in the past but expresses skepticism and advises B'Elanna to see the symbolism. This rather surprising rebuff from Chakotay eventually pushes B'Elanna to request to be put in a state of near-death to help her mother, whom she was in this hellish afterlife. It strained credulity on multiple levels and was like watching the Twilight Zone.

What The!!!

[Hitchcoc · 3/10 · 9 September 2018]

B'Llana Torres goes to the netherworld. She meets her mother there. I guess there is a reason for this, but I don't know what it is. Somehow she has become ashamed and needs to deal with it. One last comment because I just found this about as obtuse as one can imaging. Watch the last ten minutes of any video version of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol."

INCREDIBLE Writing & A Beautiful Analogy for Life

[chipwhiteh · 10/10 · 7 April 2021]

This episode made me cry. It was so beautiful. FANTASTIC writing.

This episode is an analogy for self-acceptance. People struggle their entire lives trying to fit in, fighting/ refusing to accept parts of themselves. People also go through life on auto-pilot, existing, resisting, struggling; never seeing the true beauty of life. B'Elanna seems to be one of these people, until she has this life changing experience (her NDE). It's about a person fighting to accept herself & finally beginning to understand the purpose of, & a true appreciation for, LIFE!

So well done! 10/10.

Overstated, like everything else Klingon

[tomsly-40015 · 2/10 · 13 January 2024]

Once again a pointless B'Elanna episode - the new hairstyle doesn't help either, Klingon remains Klingon. In the end it's just baloney again about the Klingon afterlife and about honor and dishonor. An episode that can safely be burned to ashes in Gre'thor.

I'm still not sure if anything in this episode makes any sense, or if it's just a confused collage of supernatural metaphors for life, death, honor, disgrace, family, friendship, destiny, free will, tradition, progress, faith and rationality.

At least B'Elanna speaks to my heart when she says a Bat'leth is a clumsy weapon. How such a thing ever made it into Star Trek is still a mystery to me. First of all, everyone carries phasers and disruptors anyway, so you wouldn't be able to get into melee range at all. And secondly, every sword and every spear would be superior to this crude weapon - if one wanted to use slashing and stabbing weapons. It is not for nothing that these weapons were used in every civilization and on every continent of our planet before gunpowder changed the battlefields forever. And just as no soldier shows up at the war front with a sword today, especially no one would do that in the 24th century. Klingons should finally accept that they have arrived in the future.

And I don't know, with a multi-planetary species that should certainly contain well over 10 billion Klingons, one can assume that several hundred Klingons would die every minute - in combat or from natural causes. If even 1% of them weren't so particular about Klingon honor, the Barge of Dead would have sunk in the sea at the end of the episode due to massive overload.

By the way, how is it that Mr. "A-koo-chee-moya", who usually takes everyone on a spirit quest, wants to dissuade B'Elanna from believing in an afterlife? He tries to find a rational explanation for everything she tells him. I guess, that's what you call consistency in character development.

Most surely my favorite episode of Voyager

[paul-ciarlo · 10/10 · 3 December 2018]

So this is most surely my favorite episode of Voyager, for several reasons.

One, much like a lot of Voyager and late DS9, it's just trippy as hell, and I'm a big fan of trippy Star Trek.

Which ended somewhere around the last disastrous episode of Voyager or when Enterprise jumped the shark by not only going back in time to fight the Nazis but by copying a virtually identical double episode of Voyager. What the f were they on then? The world may never know but it can't be good and TV Trek never truly recovered.

Two is that this entire episode is clearly an allusion to Dante's journey through "The Inferno" circa the thirteenth century. Surely any modern art form that manages to faithfully pay tribute to another published 700 years previous is worthy of preservation in the Library of Congress.

Unfortunately this would surely be lost on 95% of TV audiences when the episode aired in 1999 and 99% as of 2018. So this episode is at the same time a commentary on humanity's past, present, and future, by analogy to B'Elanna's Klingon past, present, and future, though clearly lost on most viewers so the producers really snuck one by Paramount's executive and test audience teams and for that I commend them.

Few things in Trek OR film or TV history ever came close to this feat of production, and for that, I shall petition the LOC to include this episode in its collection of culturally significant American works of art.

To MartinHafer I disagree 100%. Many people with spiritual traditions either derived from or similar to Native American spiritual traditions hold exactly the same beliefs, that one can both have a spiritual experience and accept that it did not occur within our familiar (at least) four dimensional physical or mathematical realm that we know as "reality."

To many people, including myself though I am not of Native American heritage, what people recognise as "reality" is subjective, and this episode at least seems to me to explore the boundaries between objective and subjective reality to an extent only ever performed on U.S. network TV perhaps in TNG's "The Inner Light" or DS9's "Extreme Measures" the latter of which coincidentally or maybe not aired in 1999 as well. Too bad it was all downhill from there as far as "Trek", Science fiction, and Television in general are all concerned.

"Wars" never came close in at least 41 years. Good luck DIS. This episode will probably enter the public domain long before Mickey Mouse by some sort of further unconstitutional legal manoeuvering ever will

IMAGINE MY SURPRISE !

[awbusa · 10/10 · 23 November 2020]

The title of my review says what I was thinking watching this episode

GRE'THOR is basically " YOU'RE OWN PERSONAL HELL IS WHAT YOU MAKE "

B'ELANNA is the most over & under developed character on STAR TREK : VOYAGER

1 episode she's wild & crazy and then she's quiet & reserved

I think that's because of the last minute production chaos of ACTORS & ACTRESSES quitting during pre production on CARETAKER

B'ELANNA was supposed to be more KLINGON LOOKING but the original actress quit BECAUSE she couldn't sign up for a 7 year series and ROXANN DAWSON didn't like the heavy KLINGON makeup

A solid Torres episode with great visuals

[snoozejonc · 8/10 · 6 November 2023]

Torres has a near death experience.

To fully appreciate this episode you need an interest in the character, her mental health issues and search for identity. I like it partly for this reason and the performances of Roxanne Dawson and other cast members.

The writers leave the reality of her near death experiences and the afterlife ambiguous, but for me this does not matter, as whatever is (or is not) in Torres' mind makes for a good character story. Who knows if this will be followed up with any continuity, but I think it works well in this episode.

Visually it is one of the most effective episodes Voyager has produced for a while, with lots of dark, creepy moments of psychological torment conveyed with effective lighting and great art design.

For me it's a 7.5/10, but I round upwards.

Warning: This is a spoiler. If you have not seen the episode, I would not recommend reading this

[nitzguy20 · 8/10 · 14 May 2006]

-Warning: this is a spoiler- When the Klingons are attacking the crew in B'Elanna's dream, someone with a Bat'leth (?) slices Seven and the Doctor across the stomach and then kills them, but the doctor happens to be a hologram and anything that hits him passes right through him, as mentioned in an earlier episode, so this may or may not be a mistake, as on the Barge, a Klingon says that the killed the dream before death, so it is unclear if the Doctor was a hologram in that time. Also, when Miral talks to B'Elanna in the final sequences of Barge of the Dead, she says they will see each other in Sto-Vo-Kor or when she gets home, but when B'Elanna returns home, her father is talking a bit depressed, so it may be that Miral is dead.