My God I forgot how god-awful Fury was. Not only was it a complete character assassination of a good Voyager character, it also is just stupid. Kes' EEEEEEVILL plot, for example, consisted of an elaborate plot to crash into Voyager, blow up several yards of corridor, kill Torres and use the warp core to travel back in time to "rescue" Kes and deliver Voyager to the Vidiians on a silver platter. So... my question is... why not just travel back to the Caretaker's Array and persuade Kes and Neelix not to join the Voyager crew? Voyager's computer told Kes that Voyager had been in the Delta Quadrant for fifty-some days, so arriving at the Array would prevent Kes from having to do a shitload of backtracking through Vidiian/Kazon-Nistrom space, risking capture or destruction. Seems like some unnecessary stupidity for an already stupid plan.
Kes isn't evil, she going thru the Elogium and is suffering from senility. It's about Kes suffering from the Ocampian version of Alzhimers. Remember "Before & After"? Remember how at first everyone thought Kes was going through the Mor-Elogium and her daughter told us one of the signs was senility? Remember what Kes told us about the Mor-Elogium from "Elogium". Watch "Fury" again, watch Kes' actions. She doesn't know what she's doing, she's suffering from dimentia. ?She doesn't remember the crew as her friends. There are clues all in the ep. She can't remember Tom's name. She doesn't remember how she left Voyager. She doesn't clearly remember Janeway and she's see her friends as an enemy. These are signs of someone suffering from senile dementia. The hologram young Kes makes cements it, she tells old Kes "Do you remember me, the little girl you used to be? ?This isn't you or what you're about. ?Try and remember who you used to be. ?Try and remember me." Then Janeway asks Kes: Do you remember making that recording? ? Kes doesn't, she looks at Janeway and you can see on her face, she doesn't remember her either. Suddenly Kes smiles & her first words are: "I remember now! ?You told me to make it to help me...too help myself. ? All these years, there was so much pain and confusion(message!!! that I had forgotten(message #2!!!..." The last scene with Neelix has it too. Kes to Neelix: See anybody you remember?" (She's serious, she can't remember him now.) Neelix: "Only you." When she gets on the transporter pad before beaming out, she turns to Neelix and smiles. She just remembered who he was. That's what Janeway's words about ":helping a lost friend find there way" was in referance to Kes' condition of Alzhimers. It's not a character assassination, it what the whole puropse of Kes was. Too watch her grow up, grow old and eventually die. If Jen Lien saw the ep. as a assassination of her character, she wouldn't have returned to do it. Instead she said in "Communicator" magizine that she was thrilled to do it and looked forward to it because: " it explored an aspect of the character they couldn't before." Her own words.
It all that there was unique to Kes. Her mental abilities & the fact her people don't live long. I like the fact they didn't sugar coat growing old.
That IS a good interpretation (one I didn't even think of), but how is it she can't remember the circumstances of leaving Voyager, but she can remember an obscure Vidiian attack during a time when Voyager was constantly being bombarded by alien races?
..because that's how senility works. That's why it's considered a form of dimentia. My grandmother had it. She would one day remember things she did as as child but couldn't remember her own husbands name. Remember, "Sarek" or Kor in DS9's "Once More Into the Breach"? They suffered from senilty too & remember things sporadicly as well.
Senility and Alzheimer's affects people oddly. They may remember something in the distant past, but nothing about the near past. That part does actually make sense. Also, I can't imagine a Vidiian attack being obscure.
Yep, Alzhiemer's is the calsification of memory pathway of the brain. It causes the brain to misfire as it were, causing memories to be jumbled. Due to this, Kes isn't even aware of what she is doing is wrong. Her brain can't function properly. At the begining she isn't destroying the ship, it's her mind when she isn't focused.
I only saw the episode through once a few months back, but from what I remember that's not mentioned above, was that she came back to Voyager, attacked them and was setting them up for the Vidiians because she thought they left her out in space alone to die and filled her head with all sorts of corruption when she could have had the simple Ocampa life.... when in reality, she needed to be reminded that what all happened, happened through her own choices in life which they supported as her friends. --------------------- "Meanwhile, Kes makes a covert transmission to the Vidiians, who are currently in conflict with Voyager's crew. They seek the crew, hoping to capture them and harvest their organs and tissues. Kes promises to hand them over in exchange for passage back to Ocampa. She has no affection for her former crewmates, who she believes abandoned her."..... ...... She cries that her life has been miserable since Janeway and crew encouraged her to develop her mental abilities. She feels she wasn't ready to leave the ship and wander the galaxy alone. For this she blames the Voyager crew and is determined to hurt them and rescue her younger, innocent self. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fury_(Star_Trek:_Voyager) ------------------------ ^ It wasn't just the old-age thing making her forget that caused all the problems, it was also the parts she forgot that caused all the problems.
^^That's why I said it was senility. It's very possable to grow old and still keep your facilties. So, it wasn't just that Kes was growing old but that she was going senile too.
But, that’s the point. Because she was becoming senile and forgetting important parts of her past, she began to become paranoid. Through her paranoia, she developed the idea that all the problems and issues that were there or she perceived to be there we somehow Voyager’s fault and Janeway’s specifically. However, senility normally falls upon the old. (Normally, not always). I think exodus is absolutely correct when he says this episode has everything to do with Kes’s age causing dementia. Again, I feel that is an incredibly brilliant interpretation.
How is this a revelation? I'm sure you all knew Kes was suffering from dementia the first and last times you watched Fury, but ironically, you just misplaced the thoughts on the subject till exodus jogged your memory I always assumed that some one manipulated her into attacking Voyager "just so" because of her extremely fragile and suggestible state. Hell, Janeway convinced her to go home to her people at the end of the episode, a people who had already starved to death locked in a box with drained replicator batteries under a barrenworld that can't grow food or hold water surrounded by kazon, on a ship that if it could make the trip home in the few weeks if not months that remained of her life expectancy, Janeway should have "borrowed" the design, if not the ship, and used to get her crew home because Kes was likely to die of old ages heading towards home sometime in the next 3 decades if it was only a little bit faster than Voyager, or forget how to work the controls and corral into a sun after a few days. What a rube. Though if we are really just asking questions about forgetfulness, how is it that they never used Sams plague smog defence against the vidiians ever again, or if they did have this in their arsenal and used it in their altered timeline, how different did all their next adventures go with the viddian? If Kim didn't die, then Naomi might not have been replaced and Sam... Jennifer has an artistic credit for the fury script according to imdb. So it used to be worse, but then she made it good enough to put her name on it, and then Jennifer can hardly speak out against a script she had a hand in making because self loathing is not pretty, as Beltran was wont to prove over and over again.
Who said anything about her ship? We already saw in "The Gift" that Kes' powers gave her the ability to travel space in the matter of seconds with just a thought. Hell, she even travelled thru time by just touching the warp core.
that was Kes at full power at the height of her power and we don't know what sort of hangover that task effected on her the next morning. The woman before us in Fury is hardly the same person. dark kes in her twilight years might not be able to manifest so much as a dribble compared to her salad days which is why she needed to eat voyagers warp core for a top up before the time jump. i haven't seen the episode in awhile, but I'm quite sure the end had her flying off into the "horizon" (starfield?) like the end of a cowboy movie or an episode of Lucky Luke. Even if her superfastspacedrive was biological rather than Technological, janeway could have still "asked" for another 10 thousand light years knocked of their trip like Kes awarded them in the Gift. What does it hurt to ask? Politely begging/requesting is hardly like putting a saddle on her back and a bit in her mouth like Ransom would have, which it was probably within Janeway's power to do so... Actually if Kes was weak enough to be captured, then she wouldn't have been strong enough to use.
Also, I never considered the episode through the interpretation of dementia. I have always seen this episode as a character assassination brought to us by the inconsistent writing for Voyager. My theory on it was that while Kes was out experiencing her new powers, she lost a great part of her 'self'. Not that she was become senile, but that her powers were causing her loose her Ocompaness (read 'humanity'). As she lost that piece of herself, she lost the ability to interpret what had actually happened to her. As she transcended what she was, she essentially shed the personality of her formal self until something (don't know what) brought her back to a more corporal state. As she was pulled back into a shell that more resembled herself prior to transcending, she did not retain all the pieces of her former self. In doing so, she pieced together what was left and rationalized that Voyager and Janeway were responsible for her current situation. Not quite the same thing.
I can see that. Barclay was scared of going back into his fleshy little head after rooming out spaciously in the Enterprises computer core that he wouldn't fit, like trying to get into an old pair of jeans you wore ten years ago and consider that you might leak entrails form your belly button if you purse this task. That's Dark Phoenix thinking from the X-men too. Although it was never discussed (I think?) why she was coporial as a default state these days when she was expected by this point to be just some swirly space cloud goddess.
I just looked at it from the perspective of someone living in complete isolation for years. That would tend to make someone go batty. But I like exodus's take on it--in large part because it uses the one thing that made the character unique in the Trek universe: her short lifespan.
I totally agree. The episode was crap, full of flaws and totally innecessary for the ongoing Voyager story. Kes was the last person on that ship who would go crazy. And I wish to be spared from the "Alzheimers Theory" presented in this forum. It stands on very loose ground and there's enough ranting of it on another forum. Kes didn't suffer from any Alzheimers. First of all, we don't know if the Ocampa have that disease. Second, she was too young to catch that disease. The Ocampa only get similar symptoms in the last weeks of their lives and Kes was barely six years old, not nine. Third, energy-beings shouldn't age. Fourth, Kes had no reason to hate Janeway and the others. She joined the crew of her own free will. Fifth, Kes loved her life on Voyager and her crewmates. She would rather have sacrificed herself than to harm any of them. Sixth, if she had such incredible powers, then she could have cured herself from any disease. Seventh, if she was in such a bad shape as it did seem, Janeway more and less committed a crime by allowing her to leave the ship on a journey which she would never survive. Eight, the creature we saw in "Fury" had no resemblance to the real Kes neither in looks nor in manners. Therefore it can't have been the real Kes but some being from another universe. The "alzheimers Theory" presented above is just another unconvincing attempt to justify the character destruction. As for the reasons to create that episode, those in charge either did it deliberately to insult the Kes fans or they were incredibly stupid. Did they really imagine that the fans of Kes would appreciate or accept that horrible episode?
That is indeed a good interpretation by exodus, I agree. Unfortunately, the intent of an episode just doesn't always come across to me. It's likely mostly my fault for being somewhat of shallow viewer I guess. Braga can explain to me all day about his good intentions and logic behind Threshold, but it doesn't make me enjoy it any more. I guess I'll always feel that if they were going to bring Kes back, that they could have done something a little more enjoyable with it.
it's altogether possible that Energy beings do age, consdering that Tannis from Coldfire must have spent a great deal of his time noncoporial but only claimed, if he lived as long as his father to only live a little longer than Kes at the final tally. it's even possible that if somethign inexplicable happens to an energy being that they could "age" or at least progress towards death, maybe exhibit some sort of accelerated half life much faster than than their corporial for would manifest. Then of course considering Kes's control of her atomic, her sub atomic and beyond her subatomic structure, it's possible that if a villain made her think (Super-hypnosis?) that she was older and getting older that she would in fact "become" what she believes herself to be. Something similar was done to Doctor Doom when he acquired the Beyonders abilities in the first Secret War.