62 – Favorite Son

Grade: D-

Summary

Ensign Kim is experiencing some deja-vu. Suddenly, an alien ship appears, and Kim decides all on his own to raise shields and open fire on them. Voyager takes on heavy damage from the alien ship, and Kim leads them to safety to a planet he seems to be familiar with. A female-dominated race of aliens in the area claims that Kim is one of them.

Commentary

This episode is a total mess. I honestly can’t believe that in 1997, this was even allowed to be on TV. This episode would have fit right in with any campy James Bond spoof from the 1960s. I really got tired of one scene after another in which the women desperately try to get Kim to stay with them.

Not that I care to help improve this episode at all, but the irony did not escape me that here’s Ensign Kim who has seemed to be desperate to get some female attention, and when he finally gets to a planet where at least two women throw themselves at him, he suddenly becomes very skeptical. It’s as if something in his head suddenly clicked and he realized this shouldn’t be taken at face value, because no way would this ever happen to him. I wonder what would have happened if all the women on the planet ignored him like most women on the show. Would he have then decided to stay?

The storyline about the women outnumbering the men by a 10-1 ratio doesn’t make much sense either. Especially when you combine that with the idea that the men end up with 3 wives each. Doesn’t that mean that there are at least 70% of the women who will never marry? Seems to me like it wouldn’t be very long before the ratio would be more even.

Now, it seems we also need a refresher in DNA and what it is and what it can do. But since there are many examples here in this episode, let’s just leave it at this: DNA does not carry memories. Just because you copy someone’s DNA doesn’t mean you duplicate a person with his same memories, experiences, or even personality. Harry Kim could not possibly have memories implanted into his brain through this DNA-altering virus – it just isn’t possible. That’s like throwing a toilet up in the air and expecting it to fly simply because you painted a helicopter on it.

Well, that’s a whole lot more thought than I wanted to put into this episode, and it’s certainly a whole lot more thought than anyone at Paramount put into it either. I seriously wonder how this particular episode was one that they selected for the all-important February Sweeps.

Apparently, this episode started from just the idea that Ensign Kim actually was an alien from the Delta Quadrant, and he would spend the rest of the series as an alien. Though this would open a whole bunch more questions like how in the world a Delta Quadrant alien could make it all the way to Earth, at least it would have been something unexpected. I think I would have liked that, because Voyager was stuck in a rut.

Of Note

It was later revealed that Ensign Kim contracted the supposed virus when he went down to the surface of the planet in “The Darkling” when the Doctor turned into a version of Mr Hyde. It seems that was a worse away mission than we originally thought.