not appear to be manipulative for the sake of male viewers, but added that the ending was expected and that the episode never communicated to the audience the need to care about the duo. Handlen wrote that the overall story itself was "shallow", as the episode suffered from an "enervating lack of fun" which was only saved from "complete tedium" through "strong acting and an admirable lack of stigma". Keith DeCandido, in 2014 review on Tor.com, compared "Rejoined" structurally to The Next Generation episode "Lessons", which also had a "love-interest-in-danger climax". He praised the episode, saying that at the time of broadcast it was considered "radical" and said that both Farrell and Thompson managed to get across the romantic message. He called it a "Trek message" episode, but said that it was one of the better ones as it "shines a light on an inadequacy in our own culture via an alien culture, but in this case it muddies the waters a bit because the taboo actually makes sense on the face of it". He gave "Rejoined" a rating of eight out of ten. Reviewer Jordan Hoffman commented that Farrell's acting "really steps up to the plate" for this episode, and rated the episode five out of five. Writing for Playboy.com Hoffman ranked the episode 256th out of 695 episodes in the Star Trek franchise. In 2018, SyFy included this episode on their binge-watching guide for episodes featuring Jadzia Dax. alien kisses Dara Gellman, an independent Canadian video artist, used the kiss sequence in "Rejoined" as the basis of her 3-minute 1999 project alien kisses. In this piece, the kiss scene is manipulated—the video is slowed, the image enlarged and digitized—and trance music is added. New media scholar Carolyn Guertin argues that this serves to make the footage "even more alien", presenting queerness as "unearthly". Jean Bruce argues that, despite the inherent ambiguity of the scene in the episode, "the image is still one of two women kissing, which opens up the possibilities of queer desire on its own terms". Similarly, Guertin argues that Gellman translates the (not truly queer) scene into an "expression of gay love that is alien and apart, but no less erotic for being so". In using the scene in isolation, alien kisses, Bruce argues, "strips away the gender equivocation by imposing a new queer vision". She suggests that alien kisses works as an "antidote" to