I think It's because it ep. has too many elements in what it's about.
It's not about Kes being a monster, it's about Kes growing old and suffering from the Ocampia equivalent of Alzhimers.
Kes has dementia and doesn't clearly remember much of her time with her friends on Voyager. What I think confuses that message is the time travel element. It detracts away from Kes' actions because if you focus on that alone you can see the signs of her senility. The whole point is, Kes is growing older and wants to go home to live out the rest of her life with her people. The ep. is a bookend to "Coldfire" & "Elogium". You have to pay attention to the hologram of Kes at the end. She tells old Kes to "remember" who you are, "remember" who you used to be. Lien's acting is top notch in it, the way she displays the expressions of someone going senile.
Sure, acting was fine and all, but if you really like a character is what you want to see as their final act their suffering from the equivalent of Alzheimer's, bitter over the events of her life, and hostile toward the people she once thought of as family? Just seems...
mean of the writers to do.
Why not bring Kes back as an unlikely hero- a being who has reached a higher plane of existence and has been guarding Voyager all along from the distance of an ethereal place or something like that?
I dunno, maybe that's a horrible idea, but the point is they could have done
anything they wanted and what they chose to do was awful (Kes fans seem to think so and people indifferent to Kes, well, at least me, think so.)
-Withers-