In the fourth episode of the second season of Voyager, a chance meeting with a new life form affects Kes drastically. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.
Hey, y’all know that I love when Star Trek goes for broke when it comes to weirdness. And good lord, this is a weird episode. VERY WEIRD. It’s a little muddled at times, but I enjoyed it. LET’S TALK.
The Creatures
You know, I’m thinking back on the opening of this episode, and it cracks me up. Someone actually stated that maybe they shouldn’t get too close to the swarm of aliens, and yet, Voyager got too close and was nearly destroyed by it. This is why I won’t ever run starships. I would have seen that pulsing crowd of aliens, I would have recorded a video of it or something, and then I would have kept working my way home. I get that the crew is aware of the unique position they’re in here. They’re the first explorers for Starfleet who are in the Delta Quadrant! It’s the opportunity of a lifetime, but my ass would be thinking about surviving the lifetime instead of documenting it.
All right, I’m not actually criticizing the story here. I truly love the idea that a species would think that the Voyager was a living organism and would be SEXUALLY ATTRACTED TO IT. In “Elogium,†I am reminded of the beautiful and hilarious capacity of science fiction. The many writers for this episode took a very real scientific concept – sexual attraction and competition – and turned it into a funny and surreal adventure for the crew. That’s admirable, y’all. But let’s be honest. There’s only one justification for this plot that needs to be made: Tuvok saying, “Captain, I believe we’ve lost our sex appeal.â€
Thank you so much for this, Star Trek: Voyager.
Kes
Sometimes, a writer chooses a topic that is loaded before they ever commit a word to the page. I admire the greater conversation brought up in “Elogium†– concerning Voyager being a generational ship – because it needed to happen. If it’s going to take the crew over seventy years to get home, then they must consider that they’ve got to procreate at some point in order to replace the crew with new people. It is inevitable at this point that unless Voyager takes on more people on the way, the crew will shrink in size. There’s no way around that. It’s only a matter of time before the next crew member dies on an away mission or because of some horrible thing they encounter on the way home.
There are just a lot of unspoken implications that come with Kes’s pregnancy plot. First, let me state that Jennifer Lien is absolutely incredible here, switching between her brilliant comic timing to the most emotional scenes we’ve ever gotten with her character. And the story, as messy as it felt at times, was a fantastic medium for Lien to show us how talented she is. I guess my issue comes with how jumbled the script feels. Initially, I thought the writers were making a reference to teenage pregnancy in Kes, since Kes was younger than she wanted to be to have children. But then she stated that she was less than two years old, and the whole thing felt REALLY FUCKING CREEPY.
Yet I accepted that this was a metaphorical story. Kes was an adult, if a young one, so that didn’t quite match up. But then the story changed into one about puberty? Then it seemed to touch on the pro-choice movement? Then it seemed to be saying that all women wanted children? And then the show spent way more time on Neelix’s crisis over Kes asking to mate with him than it did on Kes… who would be having the child. Not Neelix. WHY DO WRITERS DO THIS. (We know why.) As electrifying as it was to watch Lien act, I felt like the story pulled me from one extreme to the other in trying to make its point.
That’s what I mean by this being a challenging topic. Even if a writer doesn’t intend for that response, there are certain ideas that will inevitably cause people to draw from their own experiences in order to understand them. In this case, I felt like the writers were trying to address multiple real-world things, but all at the same time. This totally could not be the case, but I couldn’t tell otherwise!
There are definitely a number of wonderful scenes mixed in, though. I loved watching Tuvok talk about his children and how unfortunate it was that he couldn’t see them. Janeway and Chakotay’s conversations were also fulfilling, and I always love scenes where Janeway allows herself to be vulnerable in front of him while she ponders a new conundrum. Overall, I still liked this episode a lot. Bravo, Voyager! Season 2 is shaping up nicely.
The video for “Elogium†can be downloaded here for $0.99.
Mark Links Stuff
– I am now on Patreon!!! MANY SURPRISES ARE IN STORE FOR YOU IF YOU SUPPORT ME.
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