Kes wakes up in sickbay, very visibly aged and with total amnesia, amongst an Ocampan child and a fully-haired Doctor. She begins jumping backwards in time at irregular intervals, learning about her life in reverse-order; due to an experimental life-extending procedure, temporal radiation that Kes accrued at point in time that is after the present but before she reaches nine years old. On her trip, she gradually gathers the necessary information for stopping the process (which the Doctor manages to implement in the show's current time), but it does not work immediately, and she keeps jumping back until the point where she is a single cell splitting. For some reason, at that point she begins moving forward in time again until she is back at the present, and the Doctor finishes purging her of the radiation.
It's a bit bittersweet, watching this episode and knowing that Kes is leaving. It would have actually have been a decent send-off for her, chronicling events that could have happened if she had stuck around - and perhaps would have been more potent if she slipped through their fingers and became erased from the timeline (instead of hitting the reset button). Staying with Voyager would have indeed been the ultimate cause of her demise.
I am growing quite weary of major plot elements being resolved off-screen or accidentally. Here, it is Kes' loss of her memory of the present - she just miraculously gets it back when the radiation is gone. Not having any recognition of the characters around her as she goes backwards is a large part of what makes the plot work (or, at least, what makes the plot take a whole hour to resolve). It also continues a running alzheimer's theme in Voyager, one which I've praised on more than one occasion. To have her remember everything right away cheapens her experiences in the episode, all in the name of an easy to wrap-up ending.
The style of backwards time-shifting reminded me a great deal of a Sliders episode, which happens to be the result of both episodes drawing inspiration from the same idea. If you take time as a dimension, with properties similar to that of height, depth, and width, we seem to only travel one direction along that dimension, like a point that moves perpetually down an X-axis. In the Sliders episode, the group travels to a parallel earth where human perception is moving in the other direction. But since having the characters walk around in a world that is moving in reverse would be cost-prohibitive, that difference is expressed in discrete time-jumps, Kes-style, where the characters experience a chunk of time that moves in their own direction, then jump back to the next lump of time. I understand the technical and financial limitations that caused the writers of both shows to use that method, but the Sliders version has bothered me for a long time as not representing the fundamental idea very well - a disappointment that has seeped into my reaction to this episode.
One more thing: in my travels/research while working on this project, I've encountered the argument that having a nine-year-lifespan species is a bad idea - I disagree with that, but I'd expect more insect-like characteristics (frenzied bursts of activity, single-minded purpose, etc) out of such a character. More specifically I have seen arguments that, after it is established that Ocampans only give birth once per lifetime, the species would die out in a short set of generations. That would be true if they only gave birth to one child at a time, but it didn't seem like much of a stretch to assume that Ocampans would, as a result, give birth to whole litters at a time (despite only being equipped with two mammaries). I can only imagine that the writers received fan reactions to that effect, but here all the Ocampan births that are depicted here of single children. It's a small thing, but they had the chance to correct an internal consistency oversight and passed it up.
Watchability 3/5
Bottom Line: The last two episodes, while still arriving at the same score, took very different paths. Favorite Son didn't aspire to much, but stumbled into being more interesting than it was trying to be. This one aspired to much more, but came up quite short in too many ways for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment