7x23 Homestead

Still don't like him. It's not Phillip's fault. It's the way how this character was designed. What could have been another Guinan or Quark, was an annoying clown most of the time. In my mind, his character never recovered from his cringeworthy romance (or whatever that was) with Kes. There's only a handful of episodes with Neelix I enjoyed. Most of the time I hated this little leprechaun. But I always felt that he was underused and suffered from bad writing like no other cast member. All this talk about him being somehow essential for the morale was not very credible - maybe even totally unfounded. Virtually never he had a serious task at hand. This episode proves my point: Give him serious script and he'll manage just fine. It's an emotional farewell (his actual last few steps are surprisingly emotional - perhaps among the best emotional scenes this show was able to produce) but it's certainly not a great episode. However, it's a credible description of how Neelix must have felt after his loss and how he was looking for a "home" all the time (and why Voyager's crew - as kind as they are - were only a temporary family). The Tuvok-Neelix and Naomi-Neelix story come to a satisfying end. Writers never quite managed to capitalize on the relation between him and Tuvok (quite possibly it was modeled after the hate/love relation between Odo and Quark which had a unique dynamic).

I don't like Neelix but I thank the show runners to reserve one last episode for his farewell (if they only were able to tell a equally emotional homecoming episode for Voyager when they made it back). It's one of the few episodes that actually feels like Voyager's journey is about to come to an end soon.