Before and After

****

So I would have to say in closing that this is one of the better episodes of the season. It has the same flaws as the 'TNG' tale 'Cause and Effect' in that it loses some of its impact with repeated viewings, but at the same time, thanks to the Year of Hell being followed up on, it retains importance. It's a sign that the writers were on top form that even after so many years of stories in which reality is manipulated, they were still able to come up with a new take, particularly when it came to time travel. That's the advantage to having a continuous stream of episodes over a number of years, with people that knew well what had come before and a guiding hand that had overseen all those other stories, because it means that there's a certain amount of shorthand for the production and audience who have been following it, and less reason to rehash what had gone before, but to push the envelope creatively. I'm not saying it didn't become harder, but they were still at that stage when not every great story had been developed, with room to expand and explore. The degeneration set in during 'Voyager,' in its later seasons, continuing into 'Enterprise,' but at this time they were experiencing golden years of character and story. It's good to see Kes used again so neatly, even going as far as her dying to learn the vital chroniton torpedo signature without which she was doomed, on course for nonexistence (like O'Brien in 'Visionary' who couldn't take another time jump and died, his counterpart returning to the correct time). It even ends with a happy scene of the main cast all together, so couldn't be much neater and pleasant.

Kes' look is one aspect that sows a little confusion into an episode that needed bedrock familiarity with the 'correct' time she was supposed to be in (it's handy that she came back to the time in which the series currently is, as it would have been rather awkward if she'd ended up in Season 4 or back in Season 2!), yet they chose this episode to be the one in which they change her appearance so radically with long, flowing locks, quite different to the Kes we always knew and loved, so on first viewing it makes you think she still hasn't got back to the right time yet - why make such a drastic change in hair and clothing in an episode that was already topsy-turvy? Is her change of hairstyle to hide the ears, yet another sign of them stripping her character away, ready to dump her? Still, despite some confusion there are little touches that remind us of the continuity of Trek to appreciate, and how they often remember the small details - one that stood out for me was a brief line of dialogue from Neelix, saying how glad he is her lung is working well, because of course she only has one lung after donating the other to her beau in 'Phage' when his organs were stolen by the Vidiians. We also get a mention of the Beta Quadrant (timely, since last episode featured a reference to the Alpha Quadrant), another homely reminder that this all takes place in the same galaxy.

Something else we wouldn't necessarily have expected to see were Kes' parents. I can't remember if they were dead by the time she joined Voyager, but we certainly never met them in the pilot. 'TNG' Season 7 may have been known as the season of family, but this season has had its share of relatives, too! Only last episode we had Harry Kim's Mum show up in a dream, then earlier we'd had Janeway's Dad, and now we get not only potential descendants in Linnis, Kes' daughter, and Andrew, her grandson (Harry actually got married and had a child, making him Tom's son-in-law which was weird, but funny!), a sad extrapolation when you realise they never existed, just like the 'DS9' crew's descendants in 'Children of Time,' but more importantly we meet her parents, Benaren and Martis and see her actual birth (twice! - another thing we learn about Ocampa is their births are exceedingly clean, with Paris not getting a speck of slime on his hands when he plays midwife to his and Kes' child in a shuttle). As much fun as seeing Kes' past life is revisiting a scene from the pilot episode (the first time they did that?), in which Neelix holds forth with reasons why Janeway should let Kes and he remain aboard, only this time Kes is acting weirdly and messing up his carefully prepared speech with nonsense, which is both funny and brilliant to see, especially considering how different Kes looked then.

It was fortunate for Janeway and Torres that Kes' future didn't pan out, or they'd have died in a blaze of… well, disappointment, really. Just as in Torres' less than horrific accident in engineering in previous episode 'Favourite Son,' I was underwhelmed by hers and the Captain's deaths, ignobly blasted by one of their own consoles! They really should stop running high voltage currents through or storing gunpowder in those things, or someone's going to get hurt. It's not like we haven't seen this happen many times before (even in 'All Good Things…' the helmswoman of Beverly's ship is killed in this manner), which is okay for minor characters whose function is to illustrate that death is around every corner in space (if space had corners), but for a main character you expect more, especially as the opportunity to have serious loss comes around so rarely. So, for the pair to go out in a console burst was a missed opportunity for something spectacular - just as the 60s style and tropes of 'TOS' are easy to smile at, this is one of those things that in future will be thought of in the same way about 90s Trek (if it isn't already). It was good to see Chakotay as Captain, though of course he'd already had experience in the role as leader of his Maquis ship, so it's not like he wasn't ready. It would have been a fascinating situation if Janeway really had died on the series (not that I would wish it on her), just to see how Chakotay would get on, and how much longer or shorter it might have taken to fulfil the crew's central mission. Who would have been promoted to First Officer, and if Tuvok, how would that dynamic have been?

For Kes, her confusion at events is increased tenfold by her great age (we learn the approach of old age and death is known as the morilogium, as opposed to the elogium that denotes birth - maybe they should have called the episode by that title since we'd already had 'Elogium'), and so, while we don't recognise her daughter and grandson any more than she does, we're quicker to pick up on what's happening. It takes her a number of temporal jumps before she's got the hang of what's going on. If nothing else could be garnered from the episode, we uncover new facts about the Ocampa - Kes ages rapidly in the last few weeks of her life, and before that she looked the same as she did throughout the series, so, although we already knew ageing was rapidly accelerated in comparison with other species (putting Klingon and even Ktarians to shame in the speed of their children maturing!), now we have a better understanding of that instead of Kes just telling us that she's a one-year-old. We see it as a fact, making all the difference. The only downside is, like the oversight of Kes' abilities having the potential to give her a longer life, there also isn't enough change seen in the Voyager crew, who all look exactly the same six or seven years into the future. We know they would look different in hair and face by the end of the series, and it would have been preferable that a little ageing had been done, nothing too drastic, but if the Doc was allowed a change of appearance they ought to have considered others, too.

The other things that make this episode special is seeing future events that are closer to home, as in just a season away. I'm so glad they followed up on this story's introduction of the Krenim and the Year of Hell, though I'm very much intrigued as to how the original idea of actually making it last a season, would have played out. It made a great two-parter in the 'Voyager' tradition, and adds something extra to this episode for being such a success. Though much of the future Kes lived through failed to transpire, this was a key moment, and though it could easily have been glossed over when it came to the time frame of Season 4, it was an opportunity that the series fully grasped. Other things that would stay true, despite Kes' leaving (that's a point - how did she manage to push them so much closer to home, and yet they still came upon the Krenim, or was it a predestination paradox that couldn't be escaped?), were that Tom and B'Elanna really did get together (there were already signs of that likelihood this season), and that Joe Carey would die before the conclusion of the series, though in her timeline he was killed in a Krenim attack rather than surviving almost to the end - another predestination paradox? At least Kes bought him a few precious years with her gift.

Of course she was shortly to leave, and I do wonder if the makers of the series knew her fate at this time, whether they'd already decided she was going to be off the show, or whether it was her own decision, like Denise Crosby or Terry Farrell before her, not being entirely content with how the character was being used? Even after all these years I still don't know the truth of why she left. But anyway, back to the old Kes and the reason she doesn't immediately begin to puzzle out her conundrum: it's because she really is that old, her memories lost or patchy, and this situation is something that's activated when the Doctor tries to extend her life artificially using a bio-temporal chamber. Would this really be considered had Kes reached that point in the series, assuming 'Voyager' had continued for nine or ten seasons? I'm not sure if the Doc would have been happy to tinker with her natural span, but it's a shame for one thing, that the series didn't last long enough to see that happen, and for another, that Kes didn't stay for the full duration. So we're getting a glimpse of something we were never going to see, something that makes this episode feel more special (I wonder if Stephen Moffat, the 'Dr. Who' producer, got his idea for River Song, a character who is shown to be experiencing time from the opposite direction in each successive appearance, from this - it's possible).

This time we don't have the checklist, partly because Kes is the subject, so she isn't going to be as well-versed in these well-trodden aberrations as a fully trained Starfleet officer would be, and also because of her age at the time the episode begins. Because it begins just before her death, or an attempt to stave off that inevitable death since she has passed nine years of age, the natural lifespan of a member of the Ocampa. But hang on a minute, judging by the emigrants of 'Cold Fire' who left the Ocampan homeworld to follow Suspiria, the female Caretaker, the lifespan can actually be a good deal longer for those that have explored their potential mental powers, just as Kes has been doing under the tutelage of Tuvok. Not that we've seen so much of that this season, which is a shame as Kes' burgeoning abilities were another aspect of her character that made her compelling because we never knew what she might be capable of or when a new power might surface (like Clark Kent in 'Smallville'). It's not that this was stripped away from her, but the way this episode deals with her character is another example of not paying full attention to her arc and the things that made her interesting.

From the opening shot we're placed into the story as the participant, a bit like the opening to 'Prototype' where we experience the point of view of a robot floating damaged in space. It's an immediately intriguing scenario, not the least because the Doctor has hair and there's a child, so we're dealing with some kind of alternate situation, whether that could be alien interference, time, reality, holographic trickery… the list is almost endless, and nowadays when a crewmember wakes up in one of these extraordinary positions, they run through the possibilities like a checklist - for the audience as much as themselves since we've seen so many variations on the reality being wrong that they have to 'hang a lantern' and let us know that they know that we know that this could go down a number of paths we've seen before. The real challenge is getting that expectation out of the way and riding the story, sucking us in so that, while we still care about the mechanics of how they're going to pull off this particular unreality on this particular occasion, that out-of-narrative thought process sinks into the background as we enjoy the unfolding mystery.

DVD, Voyager S3 (Before and After)