beatrice_otter | (Reply)

Voyager's pon farr episodes were pretty bad. Blood Fever used pon farr as an excuse to play with the Torres/Paris UST, but they wussed out of anyone actually having sex in an episode about a mating cycle. (I mean, okay, so did Amok Time, but it was 1968 so their options were a lot more limited, and also that was a much better episode.)

To get out of actually dealing with someone having sex, ritual combat is suddenly a cure for pon farr, and Vorik and Torres are able to get over it by tossing each other about in a fight that mostly just looks like a glorified sparring match. cf. Amok Time when everyone clearly expected someone to die in that arena, and...yeah.

Body and Soul is actually worse. It's like the writers realized that it was the 7th season of the show, they had to deal with Tuvok and pon farr at some point, so they shoehorned it in as a B-plot in what is largely a comedy episode. Long story short, Tuvok resolves his pon farr in the holodeck with a fake T'Pel. The holodeck is basically glorified masturbation, and the whole concept of pon farr really only makes sense if the sex aspect of it requires two biological people to be involved. My eyes rolled quite a bit.