Fury

I'd really like to know what happened to Kes. She would be a powerful resource to find borg. Could also beat the continuim. But this episode just said nothing

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.

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.

The start of this episode had some great moments. There was some interesting action and I always love a good time travel story. But the payoff absolutely wasn't there. I expected more of a conflict at the end, something more interesting to happen. Not sure to be honest. But what we got was a letdown. The episode ran out of steam and wrapped things up too quickly. This might have been better if there had been more to it... some time to breathe.. not sure. It just wasn't that great. Weak final act and that really brings down the score in my opinion. 6/10.

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.