When I was 17, I wished on a monkey’s paw that Voyager would bring back Kes, and this is the result.
“Fury” is a good title for this episode, because the first and only time I watched it, I was so infuriated by its character assassination of Kes that I blocked out all other details.
But maybe I was unfair. Rewatching now, I found that “Fury” is actually quite enjoyable, provided you can overlook the bad writing, uneven acting, horrible message and worse wigs.
This is not sarcasm.
SO KES IS BACK, AND SHE’S PISSED
Possibly because her old-age make-up ends at her collarbone, but her costume’s neckline sits an inch or so lower. Not to mention that the make-up department didn’t do her hands at all. Which is fine, because Jennifer Lien has great Cranky Old Lady Body Language but doesn’t bother to change her voice.
Anyhoo, Kes attacks Voyager, kills B’Elanna, and uses the power from the warp core to send herself back in time. How? Don’t ask questions. Why? We’ll get to that. Does killing B’Elanna before the opening credits signal that this is going to be another timey wimey “surprise! this episode didn’t happen!” story? Sort of.
Kes has yeeted herself back to the early seasons of Voyager — season 1 or early season 2, the internal continuity is variable — where she sedates her past self and takes her place, making preparations to hand Voyager over to the Vidiians (remember them?) in exchange for safe passage back to Ocampa. Why doesn’t she just disable Voyager, steal a shuttle and make a break for it? Don’t ask questions.
MEANWHILE, TUVOK’S TIMEY WIMEY SENSES ARE TINGLING
This is the part of “Fury” that’s great. Tuvok doesn’t know Kes is an imposter from the future, but he’s getting glimpses of the time from which she came. He runs into Naomi Wildman, and has memories of the Delta Flyer. He sees the Borg kids regenerating.
It’s good stuff! “Character glimpses a future we’ve already seen” is one of my favourite time travel tropes, and obviously Tuvok makes everything better. There’s just something very soothing about how he approaches these situations like an adult — there’s no, “Oh, nothing is wrong, I’m just being silly!” phase, he goes straight to, “Hey, this is what’s up, I’m gonna get checked out asap,” and meanwhile Janeway trusts him absolutely.
SURPRISE! JANEWAY KILLS KES
If B’Elanna’s death in the teaser persuaded me that I didn’t need to invest emotionally in this episode, the scene where Janeway kills future!Kes almost had me regretting that, because it was genuinely shocking. Not least because I thought we had established that Kes’s psychic abilities were now powerful enough that she could withstanding phaser blasts, but that’s my fault for assuming this episode would be internally consistent. And I was already pretty checked out by this point, since Tuvok was no longer on screen, and I was distracted by Janeway’s terrible wig.
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT THE WIGS
I’ve already criticised the aging make-up used for Kes, but oh my gosh, somehow the wigs are even worse?
…no, that’s not fair. B’Elanna’s season 1 hair looks great. You can’t even see her lace front, which is more than I can say for other episodes.
But Kes’s grey grandma cut wig looks fake. I can’t put my finger on exactly why, but something about the way it sits is wrong. Jennifer Lien has endured worse wigs in her time on Voyager, but this is not great.
And then there’s Janeway. Season 1/2 means we’re back to the bun of steel, but something is different. The colour, for one thing — Janeway’s hair colour varies, but it was never this brown. And the texture is all wrong. There are visible wisps of hair coming out of the bun and her baby hairs — which I think might be Mulgrew’s own hair — are down over the temples. It’s a mess. And once I noticed it, I couldn’t look away.
OKAY, THE ENDING
This is where the episode, if it ever held together, collapses. Past!Janeway has learned that future!Kes planned to take her younger self back to Ocampa because her dream of exploring the universe totally sucked, but future!Kes has Seen Too Much to ever go home again. So, with Kes’s older self dead, she and Tuvok get the young Kes to record a message for her future self.
In a sense, there’s no reset button — years later, when Kes turns up to attack Voyager, Janeway and Tuvok remember what happened in the past, evacuate engineering before anyone can be murdered, and play the holographic message that Kes left for herself. Kes agrees to go home after all, and she is sent off with bittersweet hugs and a sense of, “Welp, this is all a bit embarrassing.”
In principle, I approve of an attempt to bypass the reset. But in practice, I’m like, “So Janeway and Tuvok kept this secret and more or less forgot about it? They just let Kes go in ‘The Gift’, knowing that something deeply traumatic would happen to her?”
You could argue that they had no such opportunity because their memories of these events didn’t exist before Kes’s first attack started the chain of events that culminated here. It’s a paradox, after all. But that’s generally not how time loops in Star Trek work, and it’s just … annoying and unsatisfying.
“ANNOYING AND UNSATISFYING – TITLE OF THIS EPISODE’S SEX TAPE”
The problem with “Fury” is that it’s somewhat clever, but has no heart and no convictions. It wants Kes to be the antagonist, but isn’t interested in exploring that in any depth. It just comes back to this idea that leaving home and exploring the universe was a mistake, and what she needs is to return to her homeworld. And that’s an idea that might work in other contexts, but it’s completely antithetical to Kes as a character and to Star Trek itself.
Now, this has been a tension at the very heart of Voyager from the beginning — are we “boldly going” or are we going home? It was a topic of debate among the characters in the first half of season 1, and “why doesn’t Janeway just take the most direct route at high warp and not stop until they reach the Federation?” remains a popular question among annoying fanboys who don’t understand Star Trek. It’s about the journey as well as the destination, and Kes has always been a character who embodied the desire to learn, to explore, to experience.
“Fury” throws all of that away. It’s depressing, not just for Kes as a character, but for the series as a whole.
OTHER OBSERVATIONS
- This script is credited to Bryan Fuller and Michael Taylor, and gentlemen, I am disappoint.
- In between sabotaging Kate Mulgrew’s wig, the hair department took an inconsistent approach to hair continuity — Robert Duncan McNeill comes close to his season 1/2 volume, but Robert Beltran’s greys are still dyed.
- The past!Doctor’s “cares about doctor/patient confidentiality” toggle is activated this week.
- After many seasons of speculation, it’s finally confirmed that Ensign Wildman had an 18-month pregnancy due to her husband being an alien.
IN CONCLUSION
This one is only for completists and Tuvok fangirls, and I actually don’t know if I’m enough of a Tuvok fangirl. One time loop hologram out of five.