Kim starts behaving erratically: he opens fire on a friendly (Nasari) ship (they later discover that the ship was charging weapons), grows some face-spots, and leads Voyager to a world (Taresia) where the inhabitants defend them from the new enemies that Kim made. The new friends, on the other hand, have spots just like Kim's, and identify him as one of their young that they implanted into a female on earth in the past, a technique similar to that of the founders. The Taresians are almost all female, and faun over Kim, urging him to stay with them and have sex a lot. Voyager makes a side trip to negotiate with the Nasari, who are no longer angry at them because they no longer have Kim on board; the Nasari hate the Taresians, and warn Voyager that people who come "home" to Taresia never leave. Voyager is prevented from returning to Taresia by a forcefield, and Kim, suspicious that Voyager hasn't returned, starts snooping. He finds the dessicated corpse of the only other male he's seen, and realizes that the males are killed in the mating process. The Taresians, now sinister and evil, surround him, but Voyager, aware that Kim is not really Taresian, beams him out at the last second.
Per memory alpha, this story wasn't originally supposed to be about preying mantis women. Kim was supposed to actually turn out to really be a Taresian, and maybe even keep the spots. It would have been a story about whether Kim would want to stay in his new home or keep going with Voyager. You can see it in the Doctor's scenes - in the first one, he says that he has reviewed Kim's old scans, and they confirm what the Taresians are saying; in the second one, he says the opposite, in a manner that doesn't even recognize the previous statements. I'm not sure that that tale would have necessarily been better. After all, it seems like a recipe for hemming and hawing for an hour, angsting over choices. Also, they'd be encountering yet another fast-track to the alpha quadrant species, which is okay once in a while, but too often and I'm just asking "why aren't they home yet."
The story we do get is pretty silly, but has that TOS feel to it - not just in the plot, but even the costumes and the sets. Ever since Blood Fever, when I noted the lack of sexery, it seems to have been a lot more common as a theme. Here it is of the "don't sex, it will kill you" moral-type, which is actually a pretty common way of including it in an otherwise family show: after all, any time Angel has sex in Buffy (the show... well, I guess that phrase works for the character as well), he loses his soul. Honestly, it seems like a pretty cheap way to go for a ratings boost while having a "message" that gives the show a chance to escape censorship. But this episode seems to be more about temptation in general than just sex = death; temptation with sex, sure, but also with drugs, the seduction of luxury, of being the center of attention, of feeling special. Kim talks about feeling special in particular, that he always fantasized about being more than just a normal human kid growing up. That's part of what, in my opinion, makes superhero stories so enduringly popular.
Watchability: 3/5
Bottom Line: Silly premise, another Beam-out Ex Machina ending, but it has some elements of interest to cling to. It's odd, the last three episodes are apparently well known as being a "trilogy of terror"; a triple-header of legendarily bad Voyager episodes. They certainly weren't great, but they're nothing compared to the love triangle arc, and certainly aren't the lowest point of the season.
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