10 Greatest Redemption Stories In Star Trek

5. Fights To Fighter: B'Elanna Torres

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B'Elanna Torres never really needed to seek out redemption. Others often saw in her what she was unable to see in herself. B'Elanna's story was one of self-acceptance – self-absolution for her own perceived failings, and the rebuilding of bridges and barges with her parents.

As a child, B'Elanna was bullied because of her half-Klingon heritage, reacting with aggression, although not without a certain degree of engineering talent even then. Disengaging the centrifugal governor of the 'gyro-swing' certainly gets payback points for creativity! Still a young child, B'Elanna also had to face abandonment by her father, John Torres, for which she blamed herself and her Klingon side. Things didn't get much better during B'Elanna's brief stint at the Academy, where she threw a few punches in the lab, and eventually quit of her own accord, much to the disappointment of many of her professors.

B'Elanna barely had the time to get settled in the Maquis before being flung half-way across the galaxy. There, however, she found a space and a home for herself that she had struggled to find anywhere else, even in the Maquis. Aboard Voyager, B'Elanna went from breaking noses to fixing the warp core, from angry child to chief engineer with a loving family. Her daughter Miral might have been the literal Saviour (Kuvah'magh) for some, but B'Elanna, with help from those around her, had fought to save herself.

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Jack Kiely is a writer with a PhD in French and almost certainly an unhealthy obsession with Star Trek.