“Fury”

I've always loved Kes. Which is precisely why "Fury" is *this* close to being unwatchable. Kes returning? Great idea. Coming dangerously close to character assassination? Not so much.

Seriously, how did this script even make it to production? Here we have the return of an original cast member who's character left to experience a higher form of existence, and never got a chance to say goodbye to many of her friends, but sorry...we simply won't have time to follow-up any of that, with the Vidiians and all. What a wasted opportunity.

"Fury" is unbelievable. And I mean that in the literal sense. I'd like to know how Kes managed to forget (in *both* timelines, no less) that she was the one who felt compelled to leave the ship...and that Janeway was the one who practically pleaded with her to stay.

Continuity quibbles: It mildly annoys me when they get most of the little details right in these time travel shows, but overlook others. In this case, they got Janeway & Torres' old hairdos right, but didn't give Chakotay an appropriate haircut. Also, the fluid in the warp core was colored differently during the first season.

I have to agree! What a mess of an episode! I never got a clue why Kes would react that way, but never mind.
Shouldn't Voyager at least look like the Enterprise in "The Search for Spock"? With scars on her outer hull and burns on the walls? This would be expected of repairs done in space!
This episode also reminded me, how much I'd liked to see more "Other-Senior-Officers-command-the-bridge-during-a-crisis"-episodes. I mean, here we see Chakotay doing so and it really works for him. When I think of TNG, EVERY charakter there got to command the ship at one time or another - even TROI!!! And I always liked those shows.

This episode was a plain mess. I can't believe it made it into production. I can understand where the writers were coming from---what if Kes's transformation didn't work out and she tries to protect her younger self? Would she blame the crew for encouraging her? Fine-go from there, but the entire story of going into the past and screwing everything up doesn't make a good episode. If they wanted to go that route then the entire Action Sequence (which was really exciting) should have been wrapped up during Act Three, maybe even Act Two. More scenes in the present would have been real interesting to watch. Kes was a great character who didn't get a lot to do and the writers admitted this. Granted, I was not a fan of this decision to get rid of her over Kim, but like the Cynic said in his review, this episode is the opposite of "Yesterday's Enterprise" where we got a good-bye to Tasha Yar after a terrible one, whereas in this we get a crummy second goodbye after terrific goodbye in "The Gift" (one of Voyager's best).

This series was such a disaster. What an awful show. Just caught most of it on a re-run on Spike just now. Terrible. I really liked the Kes character, like Jammer said the writing failed the character. Very apparent here.

Forget "Threshold". THIS is the worst episode in Voyager history. The Kes I remember would never do such a thing in a million years. If she has decided to have all of her former friends and shipmates murdered, she better have a damn good reason. Something so horrible that you might make you think she had a right to be so angry. Something a little better than "I couldn't understand or control what I discovered, it frightened me...And its Voyager's fault". Ugh, this episode was BAD!

I have to agree with everyone. This show practically raped the *character* Kes just for the sake of a few gratuitous action scenes. I so hate it when writers produce utterly uncaring scripts like this one.

Don't get goofy now, 'Threshold' is definitely worse!

In the annals of Bad Trek, I find, oh, four different levels of Bad:

* 4th worse: Bad, but has some smidge of redeeming value as an inadvertent self-parody. Stuff like TOS:"Spock's Brain" and VOY:"Threshold" goes here.

* 3rd worse: Just flat out bad TV without even inadvertent parody to redeem it, but at least mostly harmless to the Trek lore as a whole. Examples: Much of TOS Season 3; that low-budget flashback ep at the end of TNG Season 2.

* 2nd worse: Bad, and screws over some beloved part of Trek in the process. Here's where our VOY:"Fury" goes.

* Worst of the worst. Anything episode centered on the moral obscenity that is the Prime Directive, at least in its full "let other people die without lifting a finger to help them form." The TNG episode with Worf's step-brother goes here, but at least a few of those natives survive. No, to win the true "Worst Episode in all of Trek" award, you gotta do like TNG:"Pen Pals" and just let 'em all die.

I watched this episode, but all I saw was Rick Berman and Brannon Braga raping Kes. It was traumatising.

OMG... if this isn't one of Voyager's worst episodes.

Did the writers actually watch the first 3 episodes of voyager before writing this episode? If you wanted to make an episode about Kes in Season 6... this is what your brilliant minds came up with? Yuck.

The thing with time travel episodes is that they often filled with holes. Going to the future to the present can work logically, but never in the past. There is thing called the butterfly effect... having all that crap happen with the Vidians will most certainly impact how their trip plays out.

Or if you prescribe to alternately created universes when people go back in time to change something... then there is still the matter of the one universe where B'Elanna is still in fact dead. But I guess we aren't following that universe anymore.

But let's ignore that... are we ready to believe that Kes forgot about her childhood on Voyager, which by and large, was positive? I can understand bad childhoods being suppressed... but people with good childhoods often remember way more details than those who had shitty upbringings. Not really buying it, even if you say that Okampa psychology is different than humans... I don't buy it. She's demonstrated the same emotional capacity and similarities as humans and other species.

Lastly, I don't know how Kes plans on getting back home. Isn't she 40,000 light years away? I mean, holy crap... unless she gets a warp-core to drain power from, I don't know how she's going to make it. She seems pretty weak.

And if she can get back to planet Okampa... why not send Voyager home then if she's ever so powerful? Hell... why do you even need a shuttle for?

Minor quibble: Kes is using the same shuttle used by the first timeship in season 3 - the one that got them trapped in the very late 20th century for 2 episodes. They've used this ship in other episodes as well. Those 3 blinking lights on either side of the pilot's face are a real give-away. It's just not believable if they keep using the same shuttle for everyone's ship!

Ugh, the episode was just bad. This isn't the way to remember Kes on this series. It has plot holes galore.

Oh, I meant to say the first 3 seasons, not episodes. My bad.

@Alex aha, so you watch Spike? Well then, you probably watched Blade the series. And we all know how "good" that was. HOW DARE YOU FLAGRATE VOYAGER AS A BAD SERIES WHEN YOU WATCH WORSE CRAP LIKE THAT! Okay, so this episode was BAD, bust geez, just shut up already. We know you hate Voyager, so just shut it.

Most of what I would've said regarding "Fury" has been said already, so I'll keep it brief. Over the years a lot of flak has been thrown regarding Berman and Braga's alleged ruining of the ST franchise. For a long time I believed it, because certain criticisms and the general lack of originality in plotting in VOY and ENT seemed to prove it. However, upon further reading, I've started to change my mind a bit. I've begun to feel that it is simply too easy to place all of the franchise's failures and shortcomings onto their shoulders.

Then there are episodes like "Fury." Character assassination, for the point of what? Ruining a beloved character who was never properly utilized on the show in the first place?

I just don't understand how the show's co-creator and Braga, whose been there from the beginning as well as writer/producer, could bring back an original character and think that this was the best Kes story to tell? I want to talk to Berman, Braga, Lien, Mulgrew and co. I want to ask them what they thought of when they were planning Kes's return. Why this was the best story to tell, rather than explore what Kes's transformation had meant. Why we couldn't get a scene between Kes and Neelix which gave a legitimate and definitive reason for their breakup in Season 3. I want to ask Lien what she felt when she read the script. Did she really feel this was a quality story for her or was she so anxious to return to VOY that she agreed to film whatever was given her. I want to ask the rest of the crew if they thought this was good stuff.

I don't know how much input Berman had in creating Kes, but it's obvious that Kes was the one main character no one really knew what to do with. All the other crewmembers had their assigned posts and their personality quirks: Paris was flippant, Torres was surly, Chakotay was spiritual, etc. But Kes defied the parameters. I guess it shouldn't surprise me that if no one could get a handle on the character during her time as a main character on the show, that her one shot guest appearance would also be mishandled.

It's a shame. Kes was such an intriguing character. And this is all we have with which to say good-bye to her. I like to think that Kes did make it back home and lived the rest of her life in peace and happiness. Which is a more dignified exit, than what was given to her in "Fury."

It was worth watching just to see Nelix get his heart broken (again)...

1.5 stars?? I don't get it: You mark down episodes replete with action and saturated with TRUE GENUINE SCI-FI content, and then you award almost perfect scores to boring shows such as the preceding one that drag on ad nauseam and are about some personal drama that wouldn't be out of place in some juvenile fantasy animation tale.

I LOVED this episode because it's science fiction at its best. How I wish more of Voyager was like this: Plenty of action, use of technology, conflict, lasers and phasers, special effects, etc. Even Kes - whom I couldn't stand - didn't spoil it. She, with her serene monotone faux-condescending voice and no personality, managed to be really interesting here. BTW, is it me or did she put on some weight since Season 3?

I have one objection: The "fight" between Janeway and Kes in the airponics bay. The psycho-Kes obviously has the ability to kill people with the power of her mind (q.v. what she did to Torres at the beginning of the show), yet she chooses to just stun Janeway, and reluctantly so, no fewer than three times when it's obvious that Janeway would not stop. And for her part, Janeway is hesitant to even take the phaser out of the holster, let alone use it, even though it's evident Kes was bent on causing huge damage. What the hell kind of confrontation is that: A tickle-fight with feather-dusters??

The ending was kinda lame but other than that, 3.5 stars minimum.

How come all of a sudden they have the ability to project holograms in Engineering?

"Mildly Miffed, But Everyone's Gonna Die Anyway."

Well, at least the review was good. Otherwise I share the others "fury" on behalf of Kes (excluding Michael).

I'll admit the episode had some problems, but my favourite part was the way this fit into the show's premise so well. With the final season approaching, every character who began in the pilot (or Scorpion) displaced from his home, will find it again through the help of a new family. Kes is sort of the Wesley Crusher of Voyager for better or worse and she could easily have been totally dropped, exploring the outer limits of existence or something, but no, the call to return home, a battle-cry which has allowed this lonely little ship to survive and accomplish so much, is much too great. Kes felt it, but only through the love and compassion of her old crew does she achieve it. With this, "Homestead" and "Endgame", the premise finds a sold fulfilment.

I watched Voyager one episode after another, after buying the DVDs.
I enjoyed, but I had never seen all TNG episodes, only a few.
Now I am watching TNG's every episode, and I am becoming aware of all Voyager shortcomings.
What annoyed me most was this episode, "Fury".
I felt that it almost managed to destroy the credibility of the entire series by its own. As it has been noticed here very well, it is the exact opposite of what we saw in "The Gift", a beautiful and "daring" episodes. This one is sheer lunacy.
There are so many contradictions I have later noticed about Voyager: Janeway can be "maternal" but she can also become unreasonable and neurotic, almost hysterical all of a sudden, without any apparent reason. What a difference with Picard!

Science fiction at its best??? You gotta be a troll or something. This goes beyond differences of opinion and into differences of fact.

This is one of those eps that I refuse to rewatch. I agree with the poster who rated it worse than Threshold. That was acceptable for the first half, and then went batshit insane. But this was just evil.

I have no problem with the basic plot, the mechanics, the time travel or anything like that. *In principle* it was excellent - but unfortunately it's let down massively by the horrible things to do to the character of Kes.

I can understand her potentially being angry that she'd been encouraged to develop before she was ready, although it's a little unreasonable since the Voyager crew certainly didn't do it through malice. But to turn to mass murdering her old friends? Excuse me? Even with the all-too-easy 180 on her 180 (It happened in another recent episode and I call it Pancake Syndrome after that episode where Torres 180s after eating some pancakes), it's still unforgivable.

Why would she think that? Why would she do that?
The only way I can accept this is by assuming that Kes in her old age is suffering from some exaggerated Ocampan form of dementia. Anything else is just ruining a previously lovely character.

Yeah it's made pretty obvious I thought that she can travel very quickly so will be home very soon. Why she didn't give them another nice 10000 light year kick or just escort them home though I don't know (aside from the fact this is only season 6). Guess she forgot.

Speaking of old characters only appearing in flashback episodes, nice to see Ensign Wildman back but where the heck is she in the present?? She's got a frickin' *daughter* to look after. I'm sure she didn't die? I remember her nearly dying (and recording a goodbye to Naomi) in a shuttle crash way back when, but I'm sure she came out of that one alive. Weird.

Good to see attention to detail like making sure Paris is a Lieutenant. It's the sort of thing I'd half expect them to forget about. I almost opened my mouth to shout when Tuvok mentioned the Delta Flyer until they were all "Delta what?" - fooled me. Cheeky :)

This should be up there in the 3+ star region but for those of us who care about the characters it drags it wayyy down. I almost envy Michael's inability to give a flying fork about the characters :P

If the writers had come up with a better last ten minutes (a more credible reason for old Kes being evil and a better solution than the 180) I think this would have been a great episode. As it was, I feel it was a good self-contained episode, but poor in the context of the show.

Good seeing Kes back again - probably my favourite character after the Doc. Wish they hadn't got rid of her. I also kinda miss the Vidiians and the Kazon. Recent villains have been pretty uninteresting (8472, The Hirogen, The Borg over and over and over again, whatever those smelly guys who pollute everywhere were called).

yeah, I agree with Kieran...the Vidiians were a pretty interesting enemy....never liked the Kazon though. lol

I think the Kazon were mishandled, but in concept they were a good idea. They were forced to eke out an existence in an area of space that had few natural resources then suddenly this starship appears on the scene that can replicate whatever it wants any time it wants. You can see where they were coming from when they were angry that Janeway would not share her technology with them.

I totally agree that this episode totally raped the character of Kes, all for a second-rate, cartoony action-adventure plot. This is where Michael is completely wrong about the lack of need for focus on characterisation. A story lives or dies on its characters - if the motivations and believabilty aren't credible, the rest of the story falls down like a house of cards. Here Kes's actions are totally incompatible with the character we know and her motivations are cringe-inducingly flimsy. There's no solid foundation to this story. Extremely poor writing.

It makes me really sad that this is our farewell to the character. I actually wish Jennifer Lien had refused to do it and prevented this travesty from being produced. As it is, she seems deeply disenchanted with the script, if her performance is anything to go by. As someone above commented, the ONLY way they could have salvaged this pile of dreck would have been to make it clear that Kes was suffering senility or Ocampan alzheimers...that might actually have been quite powerful if handled well enough. But not this drivel :( farewell Kes...

Michael "I LOVED this episode because it's science fiction at its best. How I wish more of Voyager was like this: Plenty of action, use of technology, conflict, lasers and phasers, special effects, etc"

You have to be a fucking troll, that is the dumbest thing I've ever read on this site. I didn't realize morons like you even watched Trek.

ANYWAY, the reason "Fury" was terrible was about twenty-fold but the main reason is just the stupidity of the writing. Everything from Tuvok's age being COMPLETELY wrong to the dumb "can't maneuver" at warp bullshit they pulled. The storyline was dumb and ill-suited considering Jennifer Lien's post-baby weight and the execution was even worse and frankly just upsetting. People wanted to see what Kes had been up to and reconnect with old friends/talk to Seven, not that contrived time-travel bullcrap.

Just about everything has been said, but I'll add two comments:

1. "Michael" has now clearly identified himself as a troll, and a good one at that. He pushed all our buttons and got the reactions he wanted, but praising this episode is inconceivable for anyone with any affection for Star Trek.

2. I really like 'Voyager' as a series. I like the characters, I like the situations, and I've enjoyed many of the episodes that have been nitpicked to death by others on their comments pages. But I cannot defend 'Fury.' Those who have said it is worse than 'Threahold' are right on the money.

Hey, David H., I got two words for you: Bite me!

I'm a troll because I refuse to subscribe to the Oprahesque latter-day schmaltzy sentimentality??! Well, you and your pathetic argumentum ad populum are cordially invited to kiss my six. If I want drama or the Chronicles of freaking Narnia, then that's what I watch. I have certain expectations of a sci-fi show -- particularly one whose Next Generation series I used to watch religiously and skip school for as a kid -- and Voyager by and large ain't fulfilling them.

I'm not a Trekkie fan(atic) who dresses up in silly costumes and attends "conventions," but I DO have fond memories (affection, even?) of what I would go as far as to label a genre of its own. I don't care about the characters though, no: They're too one-dimensional and cliched, too sanctimonious, too predictable. And they serve the purpose of conveying and trying to inculcate moralistic messages, which don't jive with my worldview, and which are very often not how real people (military or civilian, whichever the century) behave.

There's this fantastically awesomely incredibly talented yet rebellious pilot who has unresolved issues with his father, and that issue pops up intermittently to interfere with his duties and require a resolution. Or a hot-tempered, obstinate floozie, a loose cannon, with childhood traumas that pop up intermittently to interfere with her duties and require a resolution. Or a nondescript nebesh, completely forgettable, with self-confidence problems that pop up intermittently to interfere with his duties and require a resolution (that’s Harry “Can’t-Get-a-Lock” Kim I’m referring to here, in case it’s not obvious). Gee, how novel, how intriguing, how captivating. THAT's certainly never been done to death and back before!!

So, if I don't care about the characters, I'd better care about the story, because there's not much else that can be cared about! Now, the story itself is lackadaisical: You're stuck in an inhospitable environment, far away from home, wading your way back through a path riddled with deadly perils. Revolutionary. NOT! So, for me, to make this show interesting in the least bit, they need to add some shizzle. Give me lasers, give me phasers, give me action, give me science, even pseudoscience. Many episodes of Voyager don't, which is why I find them stale, tedious, disengaging, unimaginative... - you get the picture.

This episode, however, did catch my attention, and kept me riveted from start to finish. Voyager accomplished that with very few and far between shows.

If the above makes me a troll, then I wear that badge with honor and pride (insofar as any of this matters).

Interestingly, when I watched this episode when it first aired, I hated it with a passion. My reasoning was pretty much the same as Jammer's ("I simply don't buy her pulling this 180.") Now, many years later, as I'm working my way through the DVD set for the first time, I was dreading even watching it again.

But to my own great surprise, I had a much different reaction this time around. There's really a lot here to like. For one thing, this was a pretty good time travel episode and it was a lot of fun seeing the crew reprising their Season One roles. The inclusion of Carey and a pregnant Ensign Wildman was especially nice. Tuvok's premonitions, which included visions of Naomi, Seven and the Borg children was a lot of fun. And it was really nice to see the Vidians again, in a scene that put Voyager in real danger.

Since I went into this knowing the basic premise, I guess I had a lot less of a negative emotional reaction than the first time around. Yes, we're still left with an initially wrathful Kes, but one who quickly comes to her senses and leaves on good terms. Now that my emotions aren't so engaged, I'm seeing this elderly Kes as someone who's suffering from dementia or something similar. It's tragic, but not unbelievable given what we know about Ocapan aging.

I liked it; Ithink I'd give it three stars now.

A few things:

1) The Time Travel premise is completely laughable. Think of an N-Jump, where point A is the point at which the time traveller returns from the future. Point B, is the point where the time traveller leaves for the past. This original A - B timeline is pure - but the moment the time traveller leaves B and arrives at A, the A - B timeline is destroyed, contaminated by the traveller's very presence and point A, now becomes a new point C. A new, alternate, C - D timeline will now progress with point D replacing point B (A-B, C-D forming and N as you write it out, thus, an "N-Jump"). If at point D, the time traveller can and does return to point C with the same intentions, the timeline can progress. In this episode, Kes does not return to the past. The moment when she would have dissapeared into the past - as she was smiling and remembering - she would have ceased to exist. Everything would have ceased to exist. The new, alternate C-D timeline would have been restored to the original A-B timeline, which in turn would progress towards the C-D timeline once again. This is what is known as an infinity loop where time flow from A-B, to C-D, to A-B in a perpetual loop where there is no future beyond the points represented by B and D. This episode would have been the C-D timeline and I'll just cozily let myself imagine that right after the cameras went off, everything went back to A-B.

2) I think the ending pretty firmly established that Kes' 180 was, indeed from Dementia. I would have liked for the writers to have told me so straight out a little earlier. It makes me think of "Muse" where the poor guy who plays Tuvok worries that the audience will think he's a bad actor because they can't understand. I thought Lien's performance was wretched so I guess I didn't understand. Her performance is more palatable when reflected upon with "dementia" in mind but I still just spent 39 minutes of a 44 minute show thinking she was a bad actress.

3) Everything else aside, Micheal would have loved THIS episode - Imagine if Kes travelled back to the episode where the Viidians actually took Voyager and the parellel universe Voyager crew replaced them! It would have been Kes who had fed all that information to the Viidians and finally we would have explained the utter incompetence of the ship's response to that attack. Maybe young Kes could have reasoned with Emperor Palpatine, ER I mean, Old Kes and Old Kes could have caused the other universe Voyager to be there as well. I dunno how it would have worked but for the first 10 minutes I was hoping the plot would be that. Dissapointed it wasn't and instead we got this. Solid D from me.

Rosario, do you watch every science fiction episode or movie as you did with this one?
Sit back, relax and enjoy, bro :)

No, only the bad time travel ones. Seriously. A scenario as presented in this episode would result in no future. Somehow, someway we'll discover the secret and find the key to time travel and when we do, it will be after being fed generation after generation of disastrous time travel scenarios that are spun as being plausible. The thought of us poor, flawed human beings with that power in our hands scares the hell out of me. That's a science fiction we should take care to keep a fiction. It's not even safe to dream about. Gah, just thinking about it makes me turn into a prophet of doom so I'm going to stop before I get going and start yelling "Great Scott!"

@Michael: "If the above makes me a troll, then I wear that badge with honor and pride"

Dr. Phil? Oprah? Seriously, WTF is wrong with you? Which law firm do you work for, anyway? Zuckerkorn and Loblaw?

You're not a troll, Skeezix, you're just an ass.

Oh, and you say you're a TNG fan?? Well, no Trek series was more "feel-good" or moralizing than TNG. By your own firmly established lo-brow standards it should be your least favorite Trek series.

Now please...go take your only redeeming quality - your moderate ability to turn a phrase - and bugger off to some dark corner of the internet where mouth-breathers like yourself talk all day and night about T&A, guns, and stuff gettin' blowed up. You'll probably feel better...

Aww, but then how would we know which episodes to watch? Whenever Michael hates an episode it's invariably a wonderful character outing....

I find it very amusing that everyone's hatred of this episode stems primarily from their apparently total ignorance of the ravages of old age. Here, we see Kes is clearly a very old woman, which is normal for an Ocampan, yet everyone expects her brain to have not degraded at all? What's her motivation? Her flawed memories, brought on by old age! Seriously, how many of you know a senior citizen with a perfect memory of what their life was like a few years ago? And I'm talking about those in their 80s or 90s, like Kes is (as far as the Ocampan equivalent age is concerned). Unless there's some unspoken rule that Ocampans don't have memory degradation when they get older and do not suffer from diseases (like Alzheimer’s) that would affect their brain (and therefore memory). Why do people have such a problem even considering this most obvious of explanations?
Seriously people, she's old, her memory's degraded (as is inevitable for someone her age, or the Ocampan equivalent) and therefore she's remembering things wrong. They didn't "explain" her motivations because it's blindingly obvious.

Awful. Just... awful. A child could have written a better return for Kes. This episode could have been awesome, but at least 2/3rds of it was just watching Kes sneak around the ship. Couldn't all of that have been done offscreen to give us more time with Kes?

I think it would have been interesting if Kes HAD returned to Ocompa and found that, without the Caretaker looking after them, they had all died in darkness. That would have been a pretty excellent reason for her fury.

Hahahahahahaha. I actually liked this episode. What really cracks me up are the goofs that are so into Trek they think it's real ( at least that's how they act ). Then you have the bigger GOOFS that want to analyze it and say how much better they could have wrote the story ( that's why they hang out in review forums ). Then you have the MUCH BIGGER GOOFS that constantly announce how much they hate this series yet watch every episode so that they can come here and troll their hearts out. Too funny!

"Fury" is the anti-"Yesterday's Enterprise".

Ever since Kes left the show at the beginning of season 4, the crew was afflicted with a case of mass amnesia...like she never existed at all.

When Tasha Yar was killed of in TNG, her ghost and presence sort of hang over the show. You see her mentioned, you see her likeness. With Kes, even shows that involves flashback (Latent Image) or a hallucinatory one (Barge of the Dead), not a reference...and she is barely mentioned by the other cast members, even Neelix and the Doctor.

At the end of The Gift, we are lead to believe she have evolved into a higher state of being and I guess that was not what happened.

"Fury" was just character assassination.

Poor Jennifer Lien has fallen so far. She was arrested last July for domestic violence, and has gained about 60 pounds. Her face looks like that of crack head but that can't be unless she's the fattest crack head in existence.

Eh, I'd still hit it so long as her voice hasn't changed.

I'll tell you what this episode was about. It was a final %#$* YOU to Jennifer Lien from TPTB. The fact is, Jennifer Lien is the only established regular cast member of a Star Trek series ever to be FIRED. To add insult to injury, she was fired ONLY to make room for a large pair of cybernetic breasts. I like Jeri Ryan and I like the character of Seven of Nine, but the fact is that she was brought on the show PRIMARILY to add sex-appeal to Voyager and improve the abysmal ratings, end of story. That the character quickly went on to be much more than merely something for mouth-breathers to ogle doesn't change the fact that that was the primary motivation behind her addition to the show.

Ok, not even going to get into the obscene character rape that this episode is guilty of because it's all been said. Just a couple of observations:

1) Doc FINALLY confirmed that Ensign Wildman's almost 2-year pregnancy was because of the baby being half Ktarian. We all pretty much guessed at it, but at long last something conclusive!

2) Chakotay got a chance to be all bad-ass during an attack on the ship while Janeway was getting psychically bitch-slapped around (insert Nelson-esque "HAHA!"). I felt it really suited him. The poor guy almost never gets anything cool to do, wasting Robert Beltran's talent in the role, so this was great to see. Yeah, I actually like Chakotay, and I think he could have been a freaking awesome character if given the proper development.

Oh my gosh, this episode was awful. I had great affection for Kes and while I missed her, I thought, "at least they gave her a good send-off." Now, we don't even have that. Even if you attribute all of this to dementia (which is a fanwank,@Al, not an "obvious" fact), why do that to the character?

I could go on, but it's all been sad.

Worse than Threshold? I don't know about that, but at least Threshold made me laugh at how ridiculous it got. This one just made me angry on behalf of both Kes and Lien.

I agree with LaughOutLoud and Michael. This was a fun episode. I was not really fond of Kes as here character was usually pretty boring. the stories around 7 are much better.

I, along with LaughOutloud, am amused when i see people say how much they hate voyager but they are posting in a commments section of a voyager website.

as for michael, i cant wait for his comments. i usually know when he is going to like an episode nor not. however, unlike him i like the character develpment and interactions.

Tuvok's line about about blowing out the candles was way too funny..

i was fully entertained and i dont know why people harp on the time travel episodes. they are the BEST episodes!

@Leah "Doc FINALLY confirmed that Ensign Wildman's almost 2-year pregnancy was because of the baby being half Ktarian. We all pretty much guessed at it, but at long last something conclusive!"

Wasn't that the same reason she's supposed to grow so fast?

@azcats I'm more amussed by people who think that not liking something means completely ignoring it or not teling their opinion in a place where there are people that have a different one.

"At the end of The Gift, we are lead to believe she have evolved into a higher state of being and I guess that was not what happened."

Same thing with Wesley Crusher.

Star Trek must consider ascendance a bait and switch scam that two main characters have now fallen for.

Did I like the character Kess and Jennifer Lien's way of portraying her in season 1-3? Yes, I did.

Did I like the idea of Kess returning with a huge chip on her shoulder, wreaking havok on Voyager in the proces in visuals that kind of makes youe think of the Terminator movies? You bet I did!

Did I agree with the motivation they gave Kess in order for her to return and wreak havok? Not in the least! There was NO part of it that I bought, even in the slightest. The words "character assassination" have been thrown around quite a bit here ... and I think that is very appropriate!

An otherwise pretty exciting episode ruined by the writers presenting us with faeces - as it was the rule rather than the exception on Voyager.

Boo hiss!

Running through select episodes on Netflix and reading these reviews...well, I'm not surprised certain commenters turned out to be trolls.

Anyway. I'm with the majority here. A complete rape of a controversial but--for some--beloved character. For no discernible reason other than to provide a villain-of-the-week combined with a time travel story. They wrecked our memories of her Seaon 4 send off and managed to give her no motivation here at all. Terrible to the point of maliciousness; it had to be purposeful.

This episode convinces me that the producers were hellbent on shutting up the few still concerned with Lien's departure.

Michael may have different priorities for finding entertainment in this show but I don't think that makes him a troll. I wish people on the internet weren't so quick to label dissent against a popular opinion as trolling. In fact, to his credit, he realized early on what many of us took a long time or never realized: attention to detail and character growth on this show is a path to great frustration. That said, I get the impression that he gets a bit of a thrill from playing the odd-man-out role and overplays the role sometimes.

Regarding the episode: the reason I disagree with the people citing dementia is that there was no effort to indicate dementia. She had a clear plan that involved some fairly intricate steps and seemed fully in control of her abilities. She recognized everybody. She was simply evil because the script said she was evil. Arbitrary character traits for the sake of the story are cheap devices and were outdated even in the late 90s when this was made.

This episode is the worst "let's give a struggling friend an episode" in the history of television.

Just horrible.

After revisiting the show all these years later, I am reminded why Voyager is so lost as a series with episodes like this one. So much gets established for a series, the science and characters and then thrown out the proverbial airlock for the sake of boosting ratings.
I love Trek, but abandoning temporal mechanics and Kes' evolution/ascension for the sake of character assassination makes no sense. She left her body behind to evolve. At least a higher state of being and this message of revenge contradicts 'the gift'. Voyager shows promise every so often, but the writers abandon the science and history of previous eps and Star Trek as a whole that at times I wonder why the powers that be didn't just drop Star Trek off the title and call it Voyager. A shame that the actors couldn't stop the writers by saying, 'my character would never do that.'

If we had Lord Sith video-gamely super powered Dukat in more than a whole season of DS9, why not a Lord Sith video-gamely super powered Kes to haunt Voyager once more as well? At least here this crap lasted just for one episode and a bit of other couple in the past seasons, so Voyager beats DS9 on this one.

It is incredible how almost all dramatic decisions regarding this character were wrong, poor or underdeveloped since ever. Not to mention that all attempts to add layers to Kes were always forced, sudden, felling really bizarre. Not an horrendous episode, but still quite a bad hour of Trek.

"There's of course a time paradox in "Fury" that beggars logical analysis, so I'll resist trying. Okay, I won't. Where does the circle of events start (or end), and if Kes never goes back in time to ruin the Voyager crew, how can information of her plan be remembered in order to prevent her from going back in time in the first place (last place, no place, etc.)? Usually somewhere in the dialog is a joke about the time paradox, but here it's ignored completely, hoping we'll do the same. I dunno. Somehow—and I'm not sure why—that approach seems wrong. In any case, this is one of the least convincing time paradoxes in a long time. It turns the story into a mess."

Jammer this is the paradox of the DS9 episode Children of Time. In the same episode you have the problem that if they're able to get out of the atmosphere of the planet, they would crash land on it the next time as there's no settlement and no Odo to get them out of the atmosphere. But then if they crash on it, they don't escape. It's a double time loop as is the case with this episode. In one universe, the crew has been trapped on the planet and builds a society, in another universe, the crew has escaped that situation entirely.

When Kes arrives, she goes back in time and gets killed. But her doing that causes younger Kes and Janeway to use their foreknowledge to stop her. But because they stopped her, the next time it happens, she goes back in time again. Hence double time loop. In one universe Kes dies in the past. In another, the situation is avoided entirely.

While this episode is infinitely worse, obviously, then Children of Time (given its lack of motivation, or flimsiest of motivations, and its mindless action and Children of Time's much more interesting and heartfelt story and dialogue), it's the same time loop going on as that episode. Hopefully that clarifies it.

Don't think I've ever heard the term 'rape' tossed around in reference to male characters, or so casually in a discussion. There's a little too much relish in its use by people here towards JL and it comes across as more than conceptual expression.

It was definetly a disappointing episode for many reasons that others have already mentioned.

Jammer notes that Lien's performance was subpar. Lien herself has gone on the record that she was unhappy with her acting choices in the episode.

Disappointing that they couldn't come up with a better reunion episode.

Really surprised at the negative reaction.. I liked this one a lot. Just a cool time travel plot with an nice character cameo, I found it fun.

@Andrew - It's not so much that it was an awful episode. It was actually a decent time travel plot and I liked the cameo of the Vidiians. It was just that "The Gift" was about 1000x more of a satisfying ending for Kes. If they were going to bother I just wish they had done something other than this.

I had felt that Voyager had made a change for the better recently. Characters introduced and return (Borg kids); continuity in an episode (infection of Borg). And then here, Kes walks into the engine room and sees Seven. The actress who replaced her. Kes is going to kill someone. Ha, she's taking out Seven! NOT! Ugh. Just that start could have made this episode in my eyes, but no, we got Fury. *sigh*

Well, there we finally have it. The worst episode of Voyager. Yes, that includes Treshold.

This episode is painful to watch. It's like Jennifer Lien didn't even want to do this. She comes across completely uninterested and she doesn't put in any effort.
Did I want to see a 'Kes returns' episode? You better believe I did. Kes is one of my favorite Voyager characters.
Did I want to see Kes tearing Voyager to pieces with her powers? Yes, I did. A beloved character blowing stuff up with her mind and going all 'Carrie' on Voyager? Sign me up!
And then she explained why she was doing it. After having to watch her skulk around the ship and deliver unconvincing dialogue.
I won't even get into that stupid Janeway/Kes fight. Just... just no. If I had to vote for any scene of Voyager as absolute worst, this would be it.

Poor Kes. Voyager did not treat you well. Even your final goodbyes are once again gravely underplayed and underwhelming. That's twice in a row now. And also twice that the Doctor completely misses it, despite being one of her closest friends.
Where did they even send her off to? Ocampa? Isn't that like 40 years away at the highest warp? Through Borg space and everything?

Just so many stupid things in this episode. Ugh. Kes deserved better. She deserved a better send off. Both times.

This episode wasn't as bad as you're making it out to be. Part of the problem here is that the writers and producers never gave Kes much character development in the first place, so seeing this flip side of her seemed a bit disingenuous. I liked the idea of her coming back, but would have chosen something different. Still think this is a 2, maybe 2.5 star episode... They all can't be great. But hey, Star Trek is like sex, even when it's bad, it's still pretty good.

Jennifer Lien was arrested again--this time for indecent exposure involving children.

I didn't think this episode was all that bad except for the explanation of why Kes was so angry--that was stupid. But that needed to be good for the episode to work, so this just failed badly.

What is ironic is that this kind of non-reason for being angry is like real life. In real life, we go downhill sometimes for no logical reason. And sadly, this is what seems to be happening with the real Jennifer Lien. I hope she is able to regain her life.

She sounds like quite a character haha! Wish I'd have been there for the breasts ;)

I tried watching this but turned it off after 10 minutes. It's biggest crime it's just so boring. Zero stars.

what a poorly written episode. so many layers, it apparently got too complex for them to resolve logically so they instead tried to conceal the mess with action scenes. in the end, a disgraceful final product.

my primary issues:

- how did Tuvok foresee the future events that eventually led to their overcoming Kes' traitorous action?

- why is this the first we hear about a biological weapon against the videans?

- what happens to the crew that continues in the timeline when Torres is murdered?

- why didn't Kes just kill Janeway?

- why didn't Kes just go back in time to before leaving Ocampa?

- why didn't Kes blame Neelix for taking her from her home?

this episode could have been a great way to use the very real drama concerning loss of brain function relating to aging. but short of the grey hair and wrinkles, there's really no direct mention of it. this leaves the opening sequence as nothing more than a fit of rage from a menopausal Kes. so lame.

they should have left out the videans, and focused on rebuilding the bond between Kes and Janeway as well as Neelix. There's plenty of real drama available from the tragedy of dementia. And they could have found a way to restore our faith in the character, as well as the integrity of the primary timeline. And explained that extra weight on Kes that only Neelix noticed as she beamed out to who knows where.

lots of potential, can't believe they let this get on the air. i definitely would have done better myself.

You know what I think would have been a really good idea? If they used this episode to bring Kes back for Season 7 as a recurring guest star. Honestlynwhen I first aaw this episode that's the direction I thought they were going. It could have worked by having old Kea stay, or (and this is stretching it a bit) have older Kes' actions change the timeline so that Janeway somehow prevented Kes from leaving in 'The Gift' so she'd be around for the final season. Yeah I know it's a stretch but a guy can dream, right?

I thought this episode was pretty good, with it being an interesting risk and mostly working to make Kes a (somewhat reluctant) villain and Tuvok's visions being interesting if pretty random (but agreed that Kes repeatedly knocking Janeway was cheap), until the ridiculous ending, for Janeway, Tuvok and young Kes to think that that message would be convincing and for it to actually be.

It would have been cool if the ending retroactively revealed that Kes had never left or even if Kes did return angry but not to a murderous level or wanted to and did rejoin/spend time with the crew, instead her suddenly changing dropping her anger but still wanting to instantly leave and go to her people and not helping Voyager more really didn't make sense.

Some thoughts.

Some have said maybe she was suffering from some kind of dementia. That does seem plausible, except for two things. If she ascended to a higher plane of existence, she wouldn't have a physical body with a physical brain to get dementia. Also if she did get her real body back, she wasn't old enough to get dementia. It was established in "Before and After", that didn't start until an Ocampa was nine years old. Kes would only have been about six. Unless there was something else going on to cause it.

Some other theories. She was from an alternate universe. Or she was the female caretaker pretending to be Kes, out to get Voyager again.

Something else. Why did she kill B'Elanna other than she was trying to stop her. The first (and maybe only time) I've watched this, my first impression was, maybe Kes thought about how saving Torres and Janeway in the alternate timeline of "Before and After", had cost her a family and a whole future and she was pissed. But that's just my opinion at the time.

Hold onto your hats, Voyager fans, Chrome actually thinks this episode is good. Or at least it looks cool and brings an interesting enough premise to the table that it keeps you entertained.

I really liked Evil Kes (despite never caring for regular Kes), and I thought the show gave a nice thriller vibe. We saw what she was capable of, but then when she started working as a covert op, her actions became all the more ominous.

Half of me wishes Tuvok's visions and Janeway's final showdown with Kes could've been handled better. I'll just assume for the moment that Kes had some sentiment left over somewhere in her head that stopped her from seriously harming Janeway in person.

2.5 - 3 stars.

Overall, as a story, I thought this episode was OK. This may upset some people, but I've known many women who act this way. They don't have dementia, but one minute they are nice and the next they are full of venomous rage, and I'm talking over what I would consider small stuff. It's obviously not small stuff to them. I can definitely buy the fact a woman would want vengeance and then suddenly 180 and change their mind. Sounds normal to me.

Yes, I could list a hundred ways to make a better Kes return story, and some were suggested above, so I won't.

For those who didn't understand why she kept stunning Janeway instead of killing her; I took it as Kes wanted her to suffer at the hands of the Vidiians. Janeway didn't deserve a quick death in Kes' mind.

I said on 'The Gift' that I rarely get irritated by an episode, but that I thought the way Kes was written out was a bit of a travesty. While I thought Kes offered some really strong story options, I think it's fair to say that the series benefited from Seven's introduction. But the peremptory manner of Kes' departure still rankled.

If I was irritated by that episode though, this one actually got me angry, and everyone else has hit the nail on the head. This subverts the character of Kes so badly as to almost be a "fuck you" to the audience. So we still don't know what happened to Kes after 'The Gift', only that whatever it was she got bitter and vindictive to the point of selling the crew out to the Vidiians? That's not entirely uplifting, is it? And not least of which because after making the effort to get Jennifer Lien back you'd think there would be more effort at a decent conclusion - writing wise this is such a mess as to be a write off.

Ironically there is a lot to like here. Evil Kes' entrance is a marvelous image and the first season flashback is full of nice touches and a note perfect recreation of the state of play at that time - with some seriously updated FX. But that can't overwrite the disservice we were done here. 1.5 stars.

I admit to being a bit conflicted on this one. I mean, yes, of course I agree with everyone that this was a horrible return for Kes. The reasoning for her craziness is completely absurd at worst and greatly hidden at best. The episode doesn't spend any time focusing on why Kes is now the way she is, nor giving her a worthy sendoff at the end (yet again, the Doctor doesn't get to say goodbye?). In short, it's a bad episode, I know that.

But I liked this potential. I can agree with the idea of turning Kes into a bad guy. I like the possibility of Ocampa being, well, fairies: creatures of exceptional power but without a normal human morality. Y'know, like we saw in Cold Fire. Also, there was potential in the reason for her anger: she was merely a child when she was taken from Ocampa.

Of course, it sounded strange to us, since she never felt like she was "taken" in the first three seasons. But let's face it, she was less than a year old when Caretaker happened. She was, by all accounts, a child. Tell me, are you the same person you were when you were 14? Would you accept that you could make a complete life-altering decision at the age of 14, such as running away from your only home? Isn't that the reason we have age of consent? "Yes honey, I'm sure you love him deeply and you'll never love another boy the same way, but you aren't marrying him before graduating from middle school." Neelix definitely came off as a creepy predator in the first season, and even though Janeway couldn't be expected to know how fast Ocampa mature, she did make sure Kes would never see her home again. Isn't it possible, when she was all alone, trying to learn her knew psychic abilities, that she got severely homesick? That she became scared of what she had become? That she, being permanently alone, began to regret her decision? That, with no one around to ground her, she began to lose sight of her previous way of life? Stopped having the same morals as we do?

Isn't it possible that, while she gained so many powers, she might have lost something too?

I think that would have been a worthwhile avenue to explore, but of course we didn't. We desperately needed more interactions with Kes and the rest of the crew. Whether it be Janeway, Neelix, young Kes, I don't know, but it would have been worthwhile to get more out of her. It could have been a race in time to allow her to regain her humanity, allow her to come to grips with what she was planning to do. Give her at least a little bit of guilt over it. Play up some inner angst over her decision, or play up the conflict between her and young Kes. Just do something with it! I know it's a bit of a cliche to say that it should have been a two-parter, but heck, this episode was clearly designed to be a ratings-grabber. Why not make it a two-parter then, so that all these issues could be thought out? I mean, on its own, the cat-and-mouse game with the Vidiians was pretty good (I especially liked that they were herding Voyager into a trap; that was quite reminiscent of their first episode and was pretty clever), as was Kes sneaking around. So I'd be a bit hesitant to say all of that should be excised. But because it took so long, it meant there was absolutely no emotional impact of Kes' fury. And not just because Lien delivered her lines with such a complete lack of emotion as to make a Vulcan burst with pride. I'd blame her for a poor performance, but given how insulting this script was, maybe she did it on purpose.

As an aside, I must once again commend the Voyager crew for being stupid. Now, I'd like to think that I had no advanced knowledge here. I'm honestly not sure I ever saw this episode before; after all, the time travel plot surprised me, and I'm sure I would have remembered that. But when she was walking toward Engineering, with destruction in her wake, I kept thinking "why aren't they shutting down the reactor?" Shouldn't that be obvious? You've got two options here. Either Kes can't help making everything go explody (like in The Gift), in which case it would behoove the crew to lock up the antimatter tightly; or she's purposely making everything go explodey, in which case... you lock up the antimatter! We know the reactor can be shut down fairly rapidly, so why didn't they do that as a safety precaution? I wouldn't want antimatter flowing through pipes while all the pipes behind her keep snapping...

And as an even smaller aside, so the Season 1 EMH, who wasn't supposed to be sentient, can just break his Doctor/Patient confidentiality if the captain says pretty please? Bleh... Seriously, Samantha was right there! Just ask her instead!

Despite all there is to lament and criticize about this episode, it was refreshing to revisit all those season one-isms, even the gratutious ones like Ensign Carey (it was said that Carey's appearance here contributes to the myth that he died at some point later on, but the same could be said of Ensign Wildman who also makes an appearance in this episode's past yet it would make much more sense for her to appear instead in the present for once where she actually has a daughter she is supposed to be taking care of!!)

I also think it's easier to view this episode more sympathetically now than when it was released because it's now possible to read in the chilling parallels to Jennifer Lien's tragic fall from grace, when before you could only scratch your head and wonder, "what the hell is this character's motivation for becoming a crazy bitch all of the sudden?" and then decry character assassination on the part of the writers.

Whereas Kes' excuse that her downfall was perpetrated by Voyager taking her from her home where life was simple and filled her head with overly idealistic hopes and dreams that were later crushed after she had to leave, would have rung hollow to viewers 16 years ago, it now resonates with ironic pertinence when you consider that Voyager did indeed take an impressionable young actress from humble beginnings and then instilled high hopes, seeming to assure a place among the stars before summarily casting her out. She never quite caught herself with no one to break her fall and eventually her fragility became known to all even though no one saw it coming.

Knowing what we do now, that confrontation between Kes and Janeway is especially touching, even a bit heartbreaking.

I can't even watch this episode.

Kes taken?
Kes hates?
Kes revenge?

I'm STILL trying to make sense of the time travel thingy...

It's all lunacy.

I feel sorry for Jennifer.

.5 stars for the opening... it looked very cool.

@Yanks - I wish I could upvote your comment.

Yeah, this was pretty awful. Kes's characterization isn't even consistent within the episode itself. Everything indicates that Old Kes is consumed with implacable rage and a desire for revenge, or she wouldn't be acting the way she is, and yet she's talked down pretty easily at the end. LIke Jammer says, it's a 180 on top of a 180.

And while this gets into the realm of time travel paradoxes, are we supposed to believe that Young Kes, despite knowing that she's destined to have some sort of horrible experience after leaving Voyager, lose her marbles, and embark on a plan to kill her former crewmates, manages to behave as if she doesn't know any of this for the rest of the events of S2 and S3?

Robert.

I'm honored.

and FlyingSquirrel,

"And while this gets into the realm of time travel paradoxes, are we supposed to believe that Young Kes, despite knowing that she's destined to have some sort of horrible experience after leaving Voyager, lose her marbles, and embark on a plan to kill her former crewmates, manages to behave as if she doesn't know any of this for the rest of the events of S2 and S3? "

Glad you mentioned that as I don't believe it for a second either.

The commenters who seem to think the only trait required of good sci-fi is PEW PEW LAYZERS certainly explains the success of Michael Bay films, but if all you care about is shiny special effects I don't see how you can call yourself a science *fiction* fan - good sci-fi tells a story, it doesn't just loom pretty.

not bad (***)

Lol all the Ked lovers are fired up. I never liked Kes so I couldn't care less how out of character they portrayed her. The show was a ratings grab that Jennifer Liens agreed to do. If she didn't care, why should I?
Wasn't the greatest time travel story but I've seen worse.

Unlike some commentators here, I always enjoyed Kes. I enjoyed the concept of the character and the direction she took. I enjoyed Jennifer Lien's mature performance of the character, and I enjoyed the sendoff the show originally gave her.

Unlike some other commentators here, I thought the idea behind "Fury" was a good one. One of the reasons I appreciate Star Trek, The Motion Picture is that it took the risk of portraying the holy trinity of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy as not actually having lived happily ever after the conclusion of the original series. Similarly, I think Kes' psychic voyage of self-discovery not working out the way she'd hoped it might have done, even leading to bitterness and resentment on her part, could have been an interesting direction to take her story.

However, turning her into some cartoon villain version of herself was a terrible idea, particularly because her long absence meant that even if there were a concrete series of events precipitating such a radical change in her character, we're not privy to those. This works out especially poorly for viewers like myself, who've come (very) late to the show and are binge-watching it for the first time. For me, this improbable transformation happens off-camera over a span of a few weeks, rather than years.

For me (as for others) the only real poignancy this episode has is as a precognitive commentary on the real life story of Jennifer Lien, A young, talented, beautiful actress with a promising future in television, whose career was cut short, and whose serious mental health issues have only really come to public light in the last few years. Whether those issues were the cause or the result of her career troubles, I have no idea. Either way, I wish her well and hope she's getting the help she needs to live long and prosper.

The more I think about it, the more the time paradox issues just destroy any credibility this episode might have had. I mean, clearly the crew aren't concerned about paradoxes, so why doesn't Young Kes just write herself a note along the lines of, "Reminder: After going through a weird transformation that forces you to leave Voyager, do not go insane and attempt to kill your friends over something that isn't their fault." Or, heck, just set a course for Ocampa immediately after leaving the ship. After all, according to this episode's continuity, she already knows that all this is going to happen at the time of "The Gift," because she experienced it as Young Kes too. Why would she willingly set off on a journey that she knows is going to bring her nothing but grief?

Unless she doesn't remember, but that brings me to perhaps the most ridiculous part of the episode. From the transcript, when we're back in the "present":

CHAKOTAY: We're receiving a distress call. A small vessel on an intercept course.
JANEWAY: Life signs?
KIM: One. It's Ocampan.
(Janeway turns and looks at Tuvok.)
JANEWAY: I'd almost forgotten.

You'd...almost forgotten? You'd almost forgotten that a former crew member is on schedule to travel back in time and try to murder everybody? How the hell do you "almost forget" that?! This is almost enough for me to join the "Janeway should be court-martialed when the crew gets home" crowd.

And then there's Kes herself, also suffering selective amnesia, after viewing the holo-recording of her younger self urging her not to go through with this:

JANEWAY: You told me you had the ability to get home, but you were afraid the Ocampans wouldn't accept you. Why?
KES: I remember.
JANEWAY: What? What do you remember?
KES: The holo-recording. I remember making it. You asked me to help you, to help myself. You wanted me to remember who I was. These years were so filled with confusion and anger. I buried the memory. I'd almost forgotten.

: sigh: Seriously, Kes? We're talking about SEEING YOUR OWN FUTURE SELF TRY TO MURDER YOUR FRIENDS. Now, in a sense, I could *sort of* understand this if they'd established that, for example, they had to erase Young Kes's memory after she made the holo-recording because she was just too disturbed and distraught by all this, or that she developed full-blown psychosis during whatever happened to her after leaving the ship. But the episode doesn't even address this. As I mentioned in my earlier post, it's as if Kes simply put up a "front" all through the rest of S1-S3 and acted like she didn't know that any of this was going to happen. Or at least we have to assume she did - if her behavior was any different, it evidently wasn't enough to change anything else of significance in the timeline.

I get all of the criticisms of this episode and it is indeed bad but I still find it to be of the, it's so bad it's good category. Lol. Just like "Spock's Brain". You literally have to turn off your brain and go along for the ride and have fun. Good SFX, action, direction, nods to first season Voyager characterization/appearances, the return of an important character and the mystery of her 180 degree turn in attitude. Just terrible in execution though and a disservice to the character. But then Voyager the series was often like that: good premise but poor execution.

And I feel bad for Jennifer Lien as well and hope that maybe if any good will come out of her troubles and notoriety is that she'll receive proper medical attention. Mental disorders can be just as devastating as an outwardly obvious physical injury or disease and needs to be taken care of promptly before self-harm or harm to others can occur.

Waaaaaaaaaay better than the last episode "Muse", which somehow got 3.5 stars.

Still pretty bad though...

The crew seems woefully undertrained. As Kes walks around reeking havoc the crew just stands there watching. A couple of redshirts shoot her once and then....stand there.

Sentencing Voyager to the mercies of the Vidiians is more than just vengeance based on disillusionment. It pretty much makes Kes a psychopath somewhere akin to jack the Ripper or Jeffrey Dahmer.

Talk about character assasination.

The reason for Kes turn 180 is weak. For no good reason just turned into 'Hot Headed Allien' of the weak. If she's even that angry brought to Voyager, why dont go to earlier time and dont join Voyager the first place?

Why they even brought back Jennifer Lien just to ruin her character and at the end of the stories it doesn't even matter anymore? Nothing change.
Although nothing has change itself doesn't make sense. Do we can believe the young Kes will act the same way after know the Captain will kill her in the future? That will change the future dont it. No reason to believe it will be the same after all that been done.

The stories is messed up all over. Full of hole as many already mention. It's not even beliavable and stand a reason!

Heck. I'll give 1 (*) star just for the kewl Visual Effects

I just watched this episode and I'm sitting here with my mouth open staring at the screen. I don't even know why I'm surprised that Voyager took such a magnificent deuce all over the character Kes. They did it to the Borg. Hands down the most fearsome aliens ever introduced in Trek history. And they let loose a turd the size of Texas on their portrayal in Voyager. They did it to species 8472. The writers created a species every bit as dominating, menacing, and lethal as the Borg and then they went and squatted, spread their ass cheeks, and took a humongous crap all over the concept. This shouldn't even be surprising that they've gotten bored and started targeting individual characters.

To be clear, I never liked Kes. The Kes/Ocampa concept was interesting if not for the icky relationship with Neelix, another character I couldn't stand. (Robbing the cradle was too conformist. Neelix had to assjack the incubator.) However, the actress that played Kes (hated her so much I refuse to look up her name) was atrocious. Her perpetual monotone drone was like 9 inch nails on my eardrums. Originally, the woman who played Ensign Kim's girlfriend, Libby, was supposed to play Kes. I really wish they'd gone with her instead. Maybe she would've been a better fit, maybe not. In any case, I was ecstatic that they replaced her with 7 of 9. There hasn't been a smarter roster change since Lincoln appointed Ulysses S. Grant to take over the union army.

The Gift was the most adequate send off anyone could hope for, but this is just kicking a dead horse and then sending its dead ass to the glue factory for poop and giggles. The character would never crap all over the people who were so good to her without a damned good reason, which the writers failed to provide. This whole episode was one big ginormogantualossal ass pull. Can't change direction at warp without tearing the ship apart?!? That didn't seem to be a problem when they changed directions using the Quantum Slipstream drive in "Hope and Fear," which leaves regular warp in the dust. I guess the QS has that much needed greased lightning lubrication that makes warp juke moves so easy.

Ridiculous.

Jay Chattaway titled the closing cue to this episode: M55 Rev -- End To Pathetic Episode.

I think that pretty much says it all.

This episode pissed me off. But it wasn't the Kes mess that did it. It was the "return" of the Vidiians (or the reminder, I guess). Yes, the Kes story was really botched and they screwed up what could've been a wonderful Coda to a character I liked. But it's the Vidiians that enfuriate me.

Well, maybe I should be honest and say it's not the Vidiians, but Voyager's reaction/handling of them. Here is a species that LITERALLY looks at every other sentient species as consumable. They're not desperate, they're evil. They may have begun as desperate, but now they only look to consume. Why would you treat them with kid gloves...ever? If you don't put them down when you meet them, they will turn on you without exception.

When the grappling things were broken off, Voyager fired torpedoes at it and they obviously got through the shielding. They should've kept firing until there was nothing left. Anything left alive would just attack and consume whoever passed by.

They were an excellent villainous force in the show - my angry reaction to them is a good indication for me, but it was the kid glove treatment that pissed me off. Voyager should've built a coalition of species predated by the Vidiians and led a massive fleet to wipe them all out. (Hmm...maybe they should've done that with the Borg, too...but hell, I like the Borg. Yeah, I know. But at least the Borg want to use you as a living being to increase their own. The Vidiians want to literally rip you to pieces to fix themselves.)

3 stars

I'm fully aware of the issues in this episode--chief among them Kes' reason for doing all this--but despite them I enjoyed it on its action adventure terms. The episode did a great job stirring my nostalgia of yesteryear with the Doc confined to sickbay, the Vidiians, bio neural gel packs, janeways bun, pre-Borg days, hydroponics, the Foctorvtrying to determine a name etc

The battle with the Vidiians was thrilling and the subspace vacuole field provided a nice backdrop. And the ending with Kes was bittersweet

I have no real problem with this episode. It seems those that do just can't cope with taking a "nice" but dull character and making something more interesting.

The Bitch Kes I recall thinking on airing that I wasn't happy for reasons above, in that it's not the Kes I knew. Having re-watched it many times I appreciate it far more. Though I feel the ending could have killed her off. Disappearing off to a higher form of existence in The Gift was a rubbish ending for Kes.

It's not perfect, but it's a fun bit of sci-fi entertainment. Paradox flaws, but Star Trek is full of them.

Time travel, mystery and powerful person wanting to alter history. If that person wasn't Kes and it hadn't "insulted" people's memories of her (dull) character ;) , then I wonder if people would feel so bad about it.

This episode is not just a, but THE prime example of how poorly thought out the entire VOY series was. Decent premise, piss poor execution most of the time. Here we have a ship which has spent six years in the Delta quadrant and is now what would normally have been about 50 years into their journey, if not for the dozens of shortcuts, pieces of technology they vowed to never use again because they were too dangerous, not to mention strokes of pure luck (getting to a place just at the time someone had a sling shot set up and were about to use it, conveniently letting them know they could too).

Well, now we have an aged Kes on death's doorstep who, by some means has managed to replicate these feats in what amounts to a piece of crap little shuttlepod. Was it powered by her psychic abilities? And how is it going to get her back to Ocampa before she croaks?

What would have made this episode for me would be if Neelix had asked her in the mess hall, "Sweeting, have you put on a little weight?"

Yeah, so, I don't actually mind that Kes went evil. It's been sort of one of the possible directions since Cold Fire, and certainly in Warlord. And you know, the first episode featuring Kirk was having to kill his best friend because he got godlike powers. Kes having incredible powers combined with intense isolation is something for which some psychosis is a plausible point. However, the episode only vaguely gestures to what her experience has actually been over the last two years and seems uninterested in actually engaging with what might have driven her to this state. The actual motives assigned to her -- she wants to get her younger self back to Ocampa and will kill anyone in her way to do it -- are vaguely plausible until you realize that she could have just travelled back a little further and knocked out Kes before leaving Ocampa in the first place, and even if not for some reason, we still have no idea how she's going to sell "oh yeah I killed your ship and family, thank me later" to Kes The Younger. Not only that, but the meat in the crew reckoning with the possibility that Kes' life was not improved by her time with them, after all, is cut out for time travel shenanigans. And those not only lead to the dumb, syrupy end where simply *remembering* that she recorded a hologram once is enough to stop her rampage, but -- much more importantly! -- the show retroactively trashes the entire period from sometime in season one to Kes' departure, revealing that Janeway, Tuvok and *Kes herself* somehow knew that she was going to go evil and try to destroy the ship, and that *somehow* this changed absolutely none of Janeway, Tuvok and Kes' behaviour, including in episodes like Cold Fire and The Gift. Again, I don't object in principle to the idea that power, isolation, and perhaps some untold pain would drive Kes into a murderous rage, or even that this is inconsistent with the character arc we were seeing, but it *has* to be done a lot better than this to be worthwhile.

The main thing I'll give this episode is Kes' sarcastic glances when dealing with these people she used to like and now views with contempt. Her agony as the Doctor pontificates about his name or Paris incompetently flirts with her or Neelix is saccharine feels genuine and even funny, and is also a recognizable emotion -- where she's angry primarily at herself for ever loving these rubes. (I'm not really trying to criticize Doc, Paris or Neelix here -- just that I think this is Kes' POV.) It's even kind of a neat metaphor, the idea of Kes a bitter old woman in the body of a young one back in season one.

1 star probably.

FWIW, I do think Kes returning to Ocampa in the end is a reasonable end for her character.

Kes episodes, ranked by quality and Kes-ness (IMO):

Before and After
Tuvix (some good material)
The Gift
Warlord
The Swarm (role as Doctor's advocate)
Darkling
Cold Fire
Elogium
Fury

Kes was generally neglected and then offered poor episodes, but there are a few exceptions, and I really like Before & After in particular.

A confused (and confusing) mess, with no discernible purpose. “Threshold” was much better. 1 star.

@Jammer

"Why didn't [Kes] simply travel back in time and prevent herself from leaving her homeworld rather than messing with Voyager?"

Maybe she can travel only in time and not in space -- in Voyager's present day, she traveled back in time while touching the warp core, and when she arrived in the past (conveniently, no one was looking at the warp core at the time) she was still touching the warp core. Though you'd think that for Old Kes, traveling in space would be easier than traveling in time.

I started watching Voyager when it first aired back in the 90s. I gave up on it somewhere in Season 5 (mostly because I couldn't stand how the show became Star Trek: Seven of Nine). Only recently did I decide to watch it again - mostly because it is the only Trek series I've never finished. I watched this episode for the first time with no preconceived notions and without ever having seen any previews for it. I have to say, I think it is about as bad as Jammer's review says. I see what they were going for, and I think it could have worked if not for the huge plot holes and a poor performance by Jennifer Lien. However, those who think it was as bad as "Threshold" are fooling themselves. The thing that bothered me the most is something that no one else has mentioned: Why did Tuvok have the rank insignia of a Lieutenant Commander in the scenes that took place in the past (during season one)? If you go back and watch season one his rank insignia was either junior lieutenant or full lieutenant (apparently it took awhile for the writers to decide what his rank really was). And of course, his promotion to LC was portrayed in an episode. Since Tuvok was having visions of the future, I kept expecting his incorrect rank insignia to play into the plot, but alas it did not. Just another detail in a line of many this series could never get right...And yet they managed to get Tom Paris' rank right.

@Bubba, I think the thing is that Threshold is an easy episode to ignore, as terrible and crazy as it is. The series is basically unchanged if you pretend it didn't exist. Fury completely changes the final state of Kes' character and is the last time she appears. That said, it's probably mostly possible to ignore it too. It's probably not really any more extreme to ignore that Kes, Tuvok and Janeway knew for years she was going to attempt to murder the crew than that Janeway and Paris left their lizard babies on some random planet.

What the hell did I just watch?

Simply unforgivable. Takes a basic tenet of Trek - a crew to believe in - and tells every person who ever liked Kes their feelings meant nothing. Utter contempt from super hack Brannon Braga. Glad he has now found his true level of The Orville.

@PJ

Even though I completely agree that this is nothing but a slap in the face to all Kes fans, myself included, I have defend Braga on this one.

He was only one of four people involved in the writing.... including Rick Berman himself. That means Braga and the other two were most likely only doing what Berman commanded them to do.

Berman deserves all the blame for this train-wreck.

@Luke

And if we liked this one, who deserves all the credit?

This ep is awful, but in fairness a Dark Phoenix story for Kes was set up in Scorpion, Warlord, Cold Fire and maybe as early as Caretaker. Nor do I think suggesting that tragedy, extreme isolation and godlike nearly uncontrollable powers would break someone is an insult to their character, since I think this is true of even the best of us. The problem is that it is really badly executed, and there is not enough dramatic quality or insight to offset the hurt feelings the ep generates.

I liked the original Kes character so looked forward to this episode but, yeah, pretty awful. However I thought the episode now carries a lot of tragic irony given the real-life struggles of Jennifer Lien. I wonder if any Trek people have reached out to her and tried to help her?

Pointless ruining of the character of Kes.

And not a very good ep. Just . . . pointless.

The best part of the ep was Chakotay getting them out of the mess with the Viddeans. He makes a good crisis Captain.

All that Kes-fury unexplained really, yet so easily abandoned . . . murderously angry to calm and accepting in just a few seconds?

One of the worst Voyager eps ever. Almost rivals Threshold.

I give this ep 1 salamander.

Comments on the commentary:

--Dementia? Yes, that occurred to me, but it doesn't really help. I've seen how dementia can result in unreasoning fury over imagined or misunderstood "slights," but in that case the person isn't suddenly made calm and reasonable by a few words. And if by some miracle, you do manage to get thru, it's never in a lengthy or permanent way. It's momentary.

--Kes was so angry, she was willing to help see that the whole crew got sliced and diced!! She was willing to be instrumental to them experiencing this extremely cruel fate. She was really, really angry! Just made no sense, no matter how you slice it (pun intentional).

--Carey: He must have died somewhere along the way. True, we didn't see him die, but it sure seems like he did.

Ok, well, Bedtime for Springy.

I agree with navamske that Kes' use of the warp core probably meant she could only travel back in time with it, rather than to somewhere else. She also wasn't sure exactly when she'd arrive, so it seems like her control over her time traveling abilities was not all that precise.

During her "fight" with Janeway, Kes suggested that they sent her away to explore her abilities. Never mind that they had to put her on that shuttle during The Gift because she was *destroying* Voyager with her uncontrollable powers. She then threw them 10,000 lightyears away. Maybe if Kes hadn't thrown Voyager so far they could've hung with her and helped her out some, but that wasn't an option. Voyager was literally powerless to help Kes in any way at that point.

Now, had the writers come up with a better motivation for Kes' anger, I think this would be a decent episode. Not great, but not the turd that it is. Anything would be better than "I was a child, you corrupted me with your ideas...exploration, discovery, I believed you." That line is so bad, and the delivery is atrocious too. Senility or the fairies with no morals, like Skeptical mentioned about Cold Fire, or some combination would at least be a start. She should be mad at Neelix more than anyone, do something with that. As for convincing old Kes to do her 180º at the end, I think that's a harder problem to solve. It happens so quickly and in such a pat way, ugh.

Chakotay really did get to be a badass in this episode, that was nice.

Question: What was Jennifer Lien like to work with??

Cuz if she was a pain in the arse, then the writers probably just wanted to have a good laugh shi*&^% on her character after they forced her off the show. I wouldn't blame them in that case...

Any episode featuring Kes gets an automatic two-star reduction in my view. Perhaps the biggest "who gives a feck" character in the Trek universe.

Here's an episode with so many flaws and stuff that makes no sense but there are plenty of VOY episodes that are worse to watch. Ultimately it's pointless and lacks substance, but benefits from bringing an old character back and it not just being another hard-headed alien that nobody gives a shit about. Too bad it doesn't add anything to Kes's character and actually makes little sense given what we know from "The Gift". Kes helped the Voyager crew then but a few years later, she's back older and bitter.

What bugged me (in addition to the nonsensical use of time travel) is Kes's arbitrary powers (which also bugged me big time in "The Gift"). These power just do whatever the writers want them to. Like how many times was Janeway stunned by Kes' powers, yet she still gets up and phasers Kes?? What a stupid scene.

But I also liked the Vidiians who are a good, original enemy VOY created (much better than the Kazon) getting back into the mix. That added some needed threat in addition to old Kes getting vengeful. Kes and the Vidiians reminded me of Seska and the Kazon -- it was as if VOY had gone back to S1/S2 to remind us in S6 how things used to be.

A lot of handwaving is needed to enjoy this episode and I wasn't prepared to do all that's needed. The writers are sloppy here and given that it's Berman & Braga, one would expect much better. How we get to Janeway in the present time knowing how to react to Kes's approaching shuttle made no sense. And then when all is said and done Kes is supposed to go back like 40K light years back to Ocampa in her shuttle again? Not buying it.

A low 2 stars for "Fury" -- too much nonsense here and a poor use of a returning character, but the episode had its moments. You gotta shut off your mind to get something out of it. Think too hard and this one's a dud. I thought Tuvok's premonitions were interesting but also unjustified. Overall sloppy and poorly conceived but not terrible.

Having finally watched this episode, in some ways it was worse than I could have imagined. Voyager has plenty of jaw-droppingly poor episodes, but as far as insulting the audience goes, this may be the worst. This isn't the usual one-off, easily forgotten pile of lazy writing, poor execution, and half-baked ideas that make up many of the worst Voyager episodes - it's the final episode of a main character from the first half of the show up until this point. To think they waste it on Kes skulking around, having no legitimate interactions with her former crewmates until the very end, and attempting to send all her formerly beloved friends to a horrific death for a completely shallow (and even retcon-based) reason is just...shockingly frustrating.

How sad is it that the closest we get to a real character moment is that final scene with Neelix sadly looking at aged Kes, trying to show her affection while downplaying how much her appearance upsets him? It's hardly even there as a scene, and yet its so much deeper than anything else we get here. As so many others have said, all we're allowed is a huge wasted opportunity coupled with character assassination. I preferred Threshold over this. At least I could laugh at that one. This was just the destruction of a character as pure ratings ploy.

One thing I haven't noticed anyone mention - the attempt at giving Chakotay a crowning moment of glory. He orders "Reverse thrusters, full power!" to which Kim replies "that'll tear the hull apart." In what the writers clearly wanted to be Chakotay's Captain Sulu moment, he yells "then tear it apart!" Alas, despite clearly aping that incredible, character defining moment from STVI, the direction and Beltrand's delivery just can't hold a candle to Takei in that film (the knowledge that no damage on Voyager has consequence making the whole thing feel hollow doesn't help).

Overall, I've really been enjoying Voyager these past two seasons, but this episode almost makes me want to rethink my positive feelings for the show as a whole (and just "Live Fast and Prosper, feels strangly like the terrible episodes of seasons 1-3 of the show). I'm glad the next outing is supposedly much better. Too bad there was never another outing for Kes. In some ways, the lasting insult here feels a bit like what happened to Kurn in DS9 - a horrible end to a beloved character that should have been reversed, but never was. But at least the episode in which Kurn's fate was sealed was itself a compelling episode. This, alas, was simply not.

This episode was awful. That being said, Carey died in the friendship one episode.

I actually didn't mind this one at all - in fact I always thought it was kind of cool. (Though the episode title deserved a cooler episode to serve as the title for)

What really should concern folk is how the fact that Kes caught up with Voyager with a ship with MAYBE a similar top speed shows how much Janeway & crew dilly-dallied on their way home (which ends up being moot in the end, but they didn't know that)

I always thought that it should have been mandated in the series writers' "bible" that every episode (unless there was a specific reason to the contrary) should end showing Voyager travelling at warp.

@PM

"I always thought that it should have been mandated in the series writers' "bible" that every episode (unless there was a specific reason to the contrary) should end showing Voyager travelling at warp."

They're constantly traveling towards the AQ. Janeway says it in every other Captain's log - something along the lines of "we've traveled X lightyears which puts us X amount of time closer home". This isn't even including episodes where the random friendly phenomenon shaves a few years off their trip. In fact, one of the real issues about the Kazon being "recurring villains" is that in order to keep up with Voyager they'd have to be unbelievably large (like, larger than The Dominion) for Voyager to remain in their space. Considering the Kazon are considered *primitive* in the series and have trouble with basic necessities like water, it was just impossible to believe and they had to dropped.

I don't mind beings like Kes catching up to them because she has what appear to us as supernatural abilities, but the other humanoids that work on conventional physics? Just no.

Kes got fat (not important, just true). Acting got worse (important and true). WTF is up with that stupid hunch-back evil-eyes slow-walk thing she does? Just makes her look even more ridiculous. I'm really not one that gets easily annoyed or judges characters for superficial reasons, but this episode just reminded me how happy I was when I didn't have to look at her stupid face and half baked acting anymore. I know I probably sound like an asshole, but she's the only Trek character that ever really rubbed me the wrong way. Much easier to tolerate Troi's monochrome portrayal or laughable attempts at seeming seriously upset (oh and the way she power walks and looks in that onesie), and Crusher's simply boring persona (except for Sub Rosa, that was truly difficult to get through). I mean, I even like Neelix!!! And at least I can laugh at Wesley's gayness (which transcends cultural barriers, my Chinese friends are just baffled by how ridiculously gay he acts, and we all know what I mean by gay, so don't go there).

It's 2019 so I really have to be careful. I don't mean 'gay' as in homosexual, but there really isn't any other word that accurately describes what Wesley acts like. Silly kind of works, but not really. Goofy maybe? Nope, the original adjective is the only one.

So fascinating to see an authentic post from 1990.

Strange how no one noticed Kes gained 20lbs overnight

Could very well be the worst VOY episode ever. I just pretend it doesn't exist.

"Back to season 1" should be a fun gimmick, but the only significant difference here is that Janeway's hair is up, which, um, says a lot about how little these characters have developed over the years. But yeah, total crap and a waste of a returning Kes.

No doubt amswered at length, but the way Carey was treated is very annoying. Here's a guy who graduated the academy and was competent enough at both engineering and being a Starfleet officer to be assigned to Voyager as Chief Engineer. What happens? A dropout terrorist with no discipline or respect for the institution is promoted past him because the XO has a raging corncob for her. There are also implications that Janeway wants to ride her forehead ridges.

I don't remember this being that bad first time round but on re-run, yea this was a WASTED opportunity.

Lien said in an interview years after she was not happy with her performance in this...

Voyager really seemed to suffer with good ideas by season 6, forcing 26 episodes out of a season meant many are rubbish... yet DS9 was always consistently good.

I think it's interesting that Lien complained about the script after the fact .... when she was the one who forced them to change the original script so she could show a bigger "acting range" and use the episode as a demo reel to get other gigs.

The irony in her torpedoing her own future job prospects is hard to overlook.

The idea of an aged Kes returning to visit Voyager is a good one, but this episode really is a mess. There's some novelty in traveling back in time and seeing the characters back in the setting of season one, but otherwise I agree with the sentiment of most of the previous comments that the plot really needed to be tightened up. Kes finding Voyager nearly 3 years after her voluntary departure to exact revenge because she felt abandoned, even though there's really no moment from 'The Gift' that can be retconned to legitimize this storyline? Just weird and unconvincing.

Any why does Kes hail Voyager to ask Captain Janeway if she can come aboard if she just was going to immediately crash her shuttle into the ship? I never understood that.

I do like watching this episode though because Jennifer Lien's commitment to the role is so hilariously half-hearted that it inadvertently turns into a meta take on her feelings about her dismissal from the show for me. It's hard to tell if the annoyance and impatience that Kes exhibits toward her former crewmates are completely Lien's acting choice, or if Lien was just not into being there for this episode and her resentment bled into her performance. Either way, I'm entertained but probably not for the right reasons.

Didn’t they crap on Kes’ character enough? Already they proved that they had no idea how to treat her character, so why bother bringing her back? To prove you never knew what to do with her? Through her initial run, she was either underused or overpowered, and now the writers show they can’t even decide what to do with her powers for 1 hour. Hard to watch, poor Kess and poor Lien.

What never made sense was WHY Kes went crazy...oh she lost her memory and blah blah but that never made sense. She left as an all powerful transcendent and thankful being and comes back as a decrepit demented psychopath.

Rewatching this the other day made me wonder about Kes's age. She turned 2 years old sometime in season 2 I think, so here she's very near the end of her natural lifespan, 7 or 8, the human equivalent of 70 or 80, meaning that memory problems and confusion are not all that farfetched. That only partially works as an explanation though, given that she seems quite rational and able to plan out her scheme, so her mental acuity is not all gone. But for the character to say "I had forgotten..." is not as much of a stretch for her as it would be for human characters. 3 years is a lot longer for the Ocampa.

The bottom line is that it's just difficult to make a former main cast member (credited in the episode with an "also starring" I note, which is nice) into the villain for the week. We're all sympathizing with Kes, we want to see that long lost friend return and relive memories of Voyager past. We don't want to see her acting out some plan for revenge, so the episode has an uphill climb in the first place.

I'll be very curious to hear their take on the episode if Garrett Wang and Robert McNeill's Delta Flyers podcast gets this far.

They could have given a much darker reason for her Fury--like finding out that the Kazon wiped out everyone on her homeworld after she left.

@Robert

Good idea. That would have been much better. Would have been a nice tie-in with earlier seasons and 'Caretaker' as well.

Sadly Jennifer Lien, the actress who played Kes, went crazy in real life. Her last acting credit was in 2001, been arrested numerous times since and sent to a mental health facility for a while. Last info I could find was an arrest from 2019 for driving on a suspended license. It's really sad how her life turned out.

Beautiful woman and a solid actress. To be honest I found Kes a boring character but that's no fault of the actress, who was also good in other things.

Her psychosis or whatever it is is tragic.

I think Yanks pretty much nailed this in a single sentence.

It's not hard to figure out the actress-suddenly-canned -- show-formula-changed -- actress-has-3-yr-dry-spell -- actress-brought-back-for-weird-coda -- actress-stops-working-after-Voyager-coda -- actress-later-revealed-to-have-substance-and-mental-health-issues progression. She was having trouble; they cut her loose, then tried (halfheartedly) to help her out; things didn't go well.

See also: Glenn Quinn (Doyle) on Angel, Johnny Lewis (Kip) on Sons of Anarchy.

Before discussing the more poignant aspects of Fury, I must ask the question: When a person travels through time they are still composed of one set of stuff (molecules), yes?

Two life signs in the Airponics lab. Both read as Kes.
Next we see aged Kes holding younger Kes....

Snookered once again.

A melange of an episode...difficult to watch for a variety of reasons, but I have to say that the next to last scene (seeing Kes off in the transporter room) was rather powerful.

Kes (to Neelix) "See anyone you know?"
Neelix (awkwardly) "Only You."

Kes' appearance and world-weary distant gaze really reminded me of Vina (Susan Oliver) at the point at which she was revealed by the Talosians as that 'lump of flesh'. (TOS--"The Cage")

Lien's performance was muted...not bad...just muted, conveying the total exhaustion she no doubt was actually feeling.

AND the last point of dialogue sounded like something one would hear in a somber episode from TOS.

Tuvok: "What should we tell the others?"
Janeway: "A friend got lost. We helped her find her way."

Too ironic.

While ‘Fury’ is an unnecessary episode, it was intended as a vehicle for the producers to try and repent for their previous mistreatment of Jennifer Lien, and to do right by her in trying to give her a way to advance her career (which her dismissal from VOY did not help), and for a cast reunion. It is well-known that Lien was greatly liked among the cast – the famously strong bond between Mulgrew and Lien is all too clear in the art-imitating-life transporter room scene at the end of ‘Fury’, where Mulgrew is welling up. These are all actually reasonable justifications for facilitating a one-off return for Lien and Kes, in my opinion.

In content terms, of course, ‘Fury’ is a seriously missed opportunity. The most striking failure here – as many, many posters above have pointed out – is simply the utter failure of the writers to articulate a plausible justification for Kes’ extreme (by any measure) change of character. Kes’ dementia, which seems to be the most logical explanation, is only ever implicit; that Kes could not just simply turn on her former friends and hate them, but actually have come to hate them so much that she would conspire to deliver them to a grisly fate on a Vidiian dissection table, is absolutely appalling. It makes no sense; it is as if the producers began with that (admittedly) striking image of an aged Kes trudging determinedly through the deck with the bulkheads sparking and crumpling behind her, and then worked backwards to find a reason for it. Their ultimate explanation was not a believable one.

As Robert rightly suggested above, there is potential for a much better episode and end to Kes’ arc here, specifically explaining Kes’ sudden rage as the outcome of her energy form returning to the Ocampan homeworld only to find all the Ocampa murdered by the Kazon in a fit of unforeseeable post-Voyager vengeance. After all, Kes only wanted to see the surface, not get her people killed. Or, one step further, a scenario in which Kes could have been moving back in time – perhaps even to the Alpha Quadrant – to try and stop Voyager ever being drawn to the Delta Quadrant, thereby also preventing the events that led to the Kazon (presumably) slaughtering the Ocampa. Or perhaps even multiple alternate events in which Kes, as an energy being, actually successfully stops Voyager’s arrival in the Delta Quadrant only to see the Kazon take over the Caretaker’s array and kill all the Ocampa anyway, or an alternative future in which Kes never makes it to the surface at all.

All of this shows there is rich potential here, and none of it necessarily involved Kes being entirely re-written as a bitterness-crazed fury. I was actually intrigued by the idea that Kes, as an energy being (or whatever she becomes in ‘The Gift’) might nevertheless *descend* from that presumed higher plan of existence because she missed her homeworld, or her family, or that it wasn’t all it had cracked up to be. That Kes might then regret squandering her brief lifespan, lured away by the stars being brighter on the other side type of thinking, is also interesting. Kes might have even decided to settle on that other Ocampan colony Exosia (‘Cold Fire’) to live out her days. There could have been a peculiarly Trekkian exploration of the old adage of be careful what you wish for here.

But none of this is the crew of Voyager’s fault, so it makes no sense that Kes would turn on them, much less turn on them so viciously and vindictively. It is definitely a frustrating – some might say *infuriating* – ending to Kes’ arc and that of the Ocampa (not to mention Lien’s contribution to the show), but more than anything I feel it is simple a terribly, terribly missed opportunity. While not a great character, Kes (and Lien and the rest of the cast for that matter) deserved better.

@Smitty

"However I thought the episode now carries a lot of tragic irony given the real-life struggles of Jennifer Lien. I wonder if any Trek people have reached out to her and tried to help her?"

A lot of people have been saying for years that taking care of one's mental health is as important as taking care of one's physical health. The Doctor, who has been pre-loaded with the information from 47 bazillion medical texts, can tend to the crew's physical health. What about their mental/emotional health, especially given their unique situation? Evidently Dr. Zimmerman didn’t equip the EMH with any information about Freud or Jung or any of those guys. Janeway mentioned once that she wished Voyager had a counselor, but "the nature of our mission didn’t require one." Leaving aside the issue of whether the crew should be cavorting on the holodeck while replicator rations are at a premium, why couldn’t they have a holo-counselor? Not Troi, because they’d probably have to pay Sirtis more than they’d pay some no-name actor.

@Rahul

"But I also liked the Vidiians who are a good, original enemy VOY created (much better than the Kazon) getting back into the mix."

The Kazon were basically low-rent Klingons with big piles of dog shit on their heads.

Two things I might like to know:

Where was Kes between "The Gift" and "Fury," and what was she doing?

Where did she get her ship? It wasn’t the Starfleet shuttle she left Voyager in — it was (at least on the inside) Captain Braxton's ship from "Future's End."

This story was conceived by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, the eventual show runners for Enterprise who kept all creativity (if you can call it that) to themselves... Enough said.

Hmm. I kinda got the vibe that Kes' memory loss and the way she was behaving was the result of some kind of mental illness. But maybe that's me trying to save it because "just, because" doesn't make much sense and "felt lonely and abandoned" doesn't feel good enough.

For some reason, Tuvok saying "we should use the Delta Flyer" 3 years before they built it in that timeline really tickled me. I also thought the "flash-forward" to Seven and the borg children in the storage bay was well done.

As has been said, what was the point of bringing Kes back just to say goodbye to her all over again when it's already been done better. And I also felt really sorry for old Neelix in all those scenes where Kes was just using and manipulating him, and then again at the end where he has to say goodbye to her again, three years after he already did that and was probably getting over it by now!

Wow, they really crapped the Kes character in this one. I'm shocked that Jennifer Lien even agreed to guest star.

From what I've read it was originally supposed to be one of two stories for writing Kes out in season 4, with the other one being "The Gift". At the time they weren't supposed to both be used. The episode gets an F for effort, because "Fury" as a sequel to "The Gift" was a disaster.

I’ve never been a big fan of:
-Time travel
-Plot incompetence
-Character inconsistency
-Kes
So this episode gets a big no thanks.
A few thoughts:

- It took a while, but turns out Kes is just another hardheaded DQ alien. It’s nice to know that that patented delta quadrant hostile irrationality is alive and well in the ocampan home world.

- Kes mentioned that she considered herself a child while on voyager, “corrupted” and misled. This makes her and neelix’s relationship all kinds of fucked up in retrospect.

- When Kes travels back in time shouldn’t she have arrived at the same location from where she left? I mean, five years previous voyager was, what, 30,000 light years deeper into the DQ? So why would Kes still be on voyager when she time jumps? She should have wound up floating in the vacuum of space in the location where voyager would eventually occupy, right? Right?? I hate time travel.

Hmm.

I feel this episode could have been epic. And the crux of it is... Kes's motivation.

Voyager ended over 20 years ago, and during that time I myself have aged over 20 years (sounds impossible I know) and unfortunately have had to deal with the effects of dementia (not in myself but older relatives).

Dementia is a funny thing, it can alter your perception of things, confuse you, make you paranoid and twist your feelings over those you live 180⁰... see where I'm going with this?

Kes was a 9 year old Ocampan, in her Twilight year. She could have done what she had done in the 'future' travelled into the past in order to take young Kes home, before the crew dealt with the ever more evident signs of dementia.

Also, her DYING on Voyager of old age, with her mental faculties restored (magic space medicine) surrounded by (re)loved ones would have been a much more fitting ending than her... flying off to die alone.

Jammer: "As played by Lien, a better title for this show might've been 'Mildly Miffed, But Everyone's Gonna Die Anyway'."

A better title may have been "Kes Is Back, and She's Really Pissed Off."