Fury

Since Kes was let go, it may be that the poor actress needed a paycheck. So what do you do? You contrive some plot and send her after her former crew, making up some kind of rant that needs to be addressed. She comes aboard and starts to tear the ship apart. Apparently, she has become delusional in her old age and is able to use her powers (for some reason!!!) I think a marriage with Q would have made a much better episode. Then one could throw all cause and effect into the dumpster.

Apparently it wasn't enough for the showrunners to kick Jennifer Lien out of the series, they also had to completely ruin Kes in the process. Jennifer Lien's return for another episode can probably only be explained by the fact that she urgently needed money. I can't explain it any other way. Her performance in this episode was lackluster and amateurish. Somehow this episode is reminiscent of "Game of Thrones" season 8 and the complete U-turn of almost all characters such as Daenerys.

The portrayal of Kes in this episode doesn't match the character development of the last few seasons at all. I was never really a fan of Kes. Primarily because her character was conceived as one-dimensional and she was basically just the nurse in sickbay and Neelix's girlfriend. The character was never developed more deeply. It wasn't until shortly before Kes left the series that her telepathic abilities developed further, which should have happened much earlier in the series to make this character interesting. Kes was always warm, empathetic and always cared about others. And suddenly she's a fury who would knowingly sacrifice the lives of the entire crew to free her younger self from the clutches of Captain Janeway? Ridiculous.

In addition, her motivation is extremely thin and based on false facts. It is not Janeway's fault that Kes suddenly developed supernaturally strong telepathic and telekinetic abilities, nor did she encourage Kes to leave Voyager. On the contrary, she wanted her to stay. If Kes is overwhelmed by this new power and feels she can no longer return to her people, then that is not the fault of Janeway or anyone else on the ship. And the fact that Kes would therefore betray the entire crew and hand them over to certain death at the hands of the Vidiians absolutely does not suit Kes.

Of course you can change established characters so that they take a different path, but this has to be understandable. There must be profound events and reasons that suddenly take a character in a different direction. Or a character must have previously demonstrated certain characteristics that suggest a dark side that just hasn't come to the surface yet. How Kes has been portrayed so far, how she has thought and acted, would not explain why she is now suddenly a mentally ill psychopath on a quest for revenge against Janeway and Voyager. The only, albeit weak, explanation: senility. I'm just not sure this applies to Kes or the writers of this episode.

Will they get Senile as well as Humans do? But I think Kes was more angry than anything else.

My only problem with this Ep is that Kes would not be a Bag Ocompan at 6 years, previously it took her almost 9 years for that to happen.

As far as the other complaints that this episode is another foot in the rump to Jennifer, those are not really valid. The reason why they are not is because I never even knew (at the "time") the reason Jennifer had been let go without one word that she was being replaced by a Borg with huge cybernetic Implants. (What do they do, spout streams of Borg Nanoprobes? Seems like the Borg would remove gender identity from all drones).

I never knew of this potentially shabby treatment by people putting on a show about an "Enlightened" Civilization like the United Federation of Planets, acting instead like Ferengi.

In fact, I don't blame the Voyager Producers any longer at all, I blame United Paramount Network/UPN as it was known at the time.

But as to why complaints about this Episode are invalid, is because (until recently) most people and myself never considered the politics of Network TV. And those most certainly were not being discussed during that time.

I never knew why Kes suddenly vanished. All I knew is that I was bummed. And I needed closure after "Scorpion pt. II" and "The Gift". So, when this episode was originally broadcast, I was excited about it because it was a Kes episode.

And I liked it.

Of course the actress had been through some rough spots, as well as the character. She had lost her trim figure... but she did the best she could as both young and old Kes. Her performance was exemplary.

In the show, we had seen Kes taken over by a Warlord and to get rid of that personality she had to use the same tactics the Warlord used- In the end of that episode, Kes worked with Tuvok to deal with the memory of that experience. But that episode did change the character, who became more quick-witted, less forgiving with Neelix' antics, and, well basically, an older, middle-aged woman. Less innocent. Smarter, funnier in a way.

So an aged, angry, and obsessed Kes was not too far of a stretch. She had been separated from Voyager for three years. She was a very powerful being as well as a very strong person. I don't believe she would have aged that much during that time, and I never believed she would set out to deliberately harm her former benefactors and crewmates. Unless it was a form of temporary madness, I can accept that a bit more.

Nevertheless I suspended my disbelief just so I could enjoy this one episode.

Let us just assume that somehow, Kes, after separating from the nurturing Voyager environment aged rapidly and started accepting more and more of the anger left in here by The Warlord. Perhaps that liaison with the Warlord was a trigger that seeped into her subconsciousness - She had been forced into inactivity while that entity took over her body and used her powers to hurt people. But she also interacted with that being, and even after he left, that memory would remain, that evil would lie dormant. They represented this by showing discussions happening inside of Kes' Mind.

So when she rams her shuttle into Voyager, destroys a whole deck and harms a crewman: this was not any Kes that I recognized, was it the Warlord's influence? Remember, she was able to remain Kes even while under his control.

Her goal now? To return home. This seething, angry person decides to give Voyager into the waiting and salivating hands of one of Voyager's most hated enemies.

This was not Kes at all. This was not the act of the enlightened spiritual being that left Voyager and shunted the ship 9000 light-years across the main bulk of Borg Space. This was the act of a person who had been left alone and had aged more quickly than she would have aged if she had stayed on the ship, and in aging let bitterness take over.

I think she was holding back, she could have vaporized Voyager and Janeway with one finger, who knows what she might have done to Neelix? But she always stopped short of doing even greater harm. I believe even in that distraught state she still had the kind Kes deep inside.

That's why I could also suspend disbelief when all it took was a message from herself to shock her back to sanity. I think she had been there all the time.

We all have the capacity to do things in great anger which we would be instantly remorseful for- The trick is to stop ourselves before this happens. If we can do it with ourselves in this life, then Kes could have done it to herself in that story.

But if we have to blame anyone for this episode, we can blame Brannon "Temporal Causality Loop" Braga. But I don't, cos I enjoyed the story, was glad to see Kes. And, we forget, Voyager was a NETWORK show, and able to be canceled like any other network show.

Remember, at the time of "Scorpion" which was the 3rd year of UPN, UPN had canceled ALL of their original "Dramatically Different" shows including "Legend" and "Nowhere Man"... except Voyager, and were running very BAD comedies in their place. And I have said before I do not dislike Comedies, just BAD comedies, which these were. So to keep Voyager voyaging for another four years, Jennifer was fired and a Borg with Huge... Implants had to be hired in her place.

Just think of how great this show could have been if Both actresses could have remained, as well as Harry Kim who was the other Voyager member to be scrutinized by the Paramount crew-removing Hatchet.

So I don't Blame Trek. I blame Paramount for Hosting a Trek show but not giving Berman full control over it. Next Generation and Deep Space Nine ran for seven years each with no Network micromanagement, bumbling, or interference with production and casting.

The most important scene is the very last scene in the transporter. I had read that they wanted to create a scene that involved closure between Neelix and Kes. But that was not really necessary, in fact much more was done with expressions and with Neelix's single line.

Kes: "See anyone ya know"?

Neelix: "Only you"

Notice that Kes and Neelix are still looking at each other as she dissolves, showing they still had feelings for each other.

Just that small interaction and the look between the two characters was all that we needed to close out the saga of Kes and Neelix.

I tried to excise some extracurricular verbosity, apologies for the tome.

I suppose that it's quite ironic that this episode needed to remind me that "it's not too bad" LOL.

I've always considered this to be almost as bad as the whole "Warp 10" episode, but you know what, it's really not. It's actually a touching episode and really not that bad and certainly re-watchable.

Kes returns to Voyager to time travel back to her past self.

This episode has been hammered enough in other reviews so I'm not going over too much detail done to death by others.

I'll start with some praise. It has good performances and moves at a decent enough pace to keep you interested.

The creative choices made with the Kes character has annoyed lots of reviewers and with some justification. Personally, I was never a big fan of how they used Kes (particularly the relationship with Neelix) so it doesn't bother me as much, however they would have been better off leaving her future unknown rather than completely undermine what went before. Also, the plot is made more complicated than it needed to be and is resolved in a pretty unimaginative way.

Having it paraded alongside 'Spock's Brain' and other low points in the franchise is a bit of an overstatement for me. It's certainly below average for Voyager, but it's not that bad.