S6 E23: Fury

Kes is back, and she is angry. She rams Voyager with her shuttle, beams aboard, blows up bulkheads in her wake, taps into the warp core (thereby zapping and killing Torres), and phases herself into the past. Once there, she incapacitates her past self and gets in touch with the Vidiians. Meanwhile, Tuvok is having visions of the future, but is incapacitated before he can do anything. When the Vidiians catch up with Voyager, Janeway has put the pieces together, and subdues old Kes before she can run off with young Kes and return her to the Ocampan homeworld. Then she convinces young Kes to film a holographic plea for old Kes, so next time she visits Voyager in the future, Janeway can play that plea for her, and convince her that she doesn't actually want the Voyage crew dead. Instead, sad, old, broken Kes, miserable from her years of not being on Voyager sullenly gets back on her shuttle and heads for home.

As much as this is not really the capacity in which I had hoped Kes would return, I did greatly enjoy the visuals of the first five minutes of the episode. During that time, it isn't clear yet why she's angry, so I could just sit back and appreciate the wanton destruction. Maybe she was possessed, or incensed by some future Voyager action that hasn't happened yet. Either way, seeing her grimly stagger down the corridor with chunks of wall exploding behind her was pretty awesome.

My hopes were raised even higher when Tuvok got to be important to the plot due to his Vulcan mind stuff! It was going to be great! Tuvok was always the most compelling pairing with Kes, and he was going to be the one who figured out what was going on, who could reach out to her, who could bring her back to reality. Their chemistry was underused before, but now it was going to be different.

I was so naive back then. Of course he was going to be incapacitated and his hallucinations would only serve as breadcrumbs for the real hero, Janeway. Only Janeway could be smart enough to find the tachyons, only Janeway could resist Kes' mind bullets, only Janeway would have the strength to shoot her dead. Of course Janeway would be the one to talk her down the second time, not Tuvok or, god forbid, Neelix. You know, the two people who actually had strong connections with her.

Kes, underutilized, underappreciated, abandoned Kes. I do miss her, even though looking through the reviews with the Kes label doesn't turn up many high scores. And yeah, she's back, but most of this episode isn't even really Kes. This episode reminds me of a number of whedonesque themes, but this will contain major spoilers, so if you haven't watched Buffy, read no further. It reminds me of Buffy's return from death, where she's all shell-shocked, and unable to relate to those around her, unable to forgive them from returning her from heaven. That worked over the course of a series of episodes, finally culminating in the cathartic Once More, With Feeling, wherein her secret, her reason for hating her friends, is finally revealed. Kes' return is big, it deserves to be big, and the way it is dealt with here is small.

Watchability: 1/5

Bottom Line: This episode has piled up a number of negative reviews, and it is not hard to see why. Kes was reasonably well liked, and here, in her last appearance, she is just a shell of her former self. I don't mind emo Kes so much, but if the writers wanted to deal with her loss of innocence, it deserved more than just a five minute coda at the end of the episode. This episode's sin is not in its content (although that's pretty lame too), but in the lack of content.