VOY: “Before and After”

Date: November 1, 2020

Season 3, Episode 21

Musical Accompaniment: Some Skyrim music

Interstellar News: Happy first day of Thanksgiving. Christmas season doesn’t start until Black Friday, and that’s only if you celebrate. I watched The Nightmare Before Christmas with a dear friend this morning over Zoom, and it was absolutely delightful. A great movie to watch all the time, but especially after Halloween. As it’s Dia de los Muertos today, you should totally watch Coco if you haven’t already. Prepare yourself with tissues!

TL;DR: The EMH has hair and has chosen a name, Kes is a grandmother to Andrew but she doesn’t know him or anyone else. Chakotay is the captain and Kes is 9. She wakes up and meets her daughter Linnis and realizes she’s experiencing time backwards and doesn’t remember anything about her life before she woke up that morning. She and Paris married, after he lost Torres and the crew lost Janeway, they had Linnis who married Kim, and now they’re all one big weird family. She bounces back again, her 9th birthday, and Neelix is a security officer. She relives her life through medical records and finds out that her aging backwards is because of something the EMH did that activated something in a chroniton torpedo (it’s a lot of technobabble). She keeps jumping back in time, each time explaining she’s from the future and he’s how to fix her, and the EMH almost cures her but then she jumps back to her first day on Voyager and then as a kid with her father, and then her birth. Suddenly she jumps forward in time to present day, stopping at 3 years and 2 months, and decides to tell no one about anything except for the big, bad Krenim that are ahead.

Favorite Quote:

Chakotay: Doctor, any theory about what’s causing this?

EMH: In approximately six months, I will apparently expose Kes to some type of bio-temporal field in a highly experimental but nonetheless brilliant attempt to stop her aging process.

The EMH being not at all sorry for what’s happening. In fact, he’s quite proud.

“If there’s one thing that this experience has taught me, Captain, it’s that there’s no time like the present.”: This was an amazing episode. At the start, you don’t know that it’s Kes and you’re unsure if it’s an alternate timeline or something, but as time goes on you can see where the story is going to culminate. You can see Kes start to regain her tenacity as she focuses on the problem of stopping her Benjamin Button meets Quantum Leap experience. There are lots of nice touches about “the future”, aside from Kes looking old, like the EMH changing his appearance and taking a name, that people would start to take mates and procreate on the ship, and that some people would die and the ship would have to continue on home. While the massive amount of technobabble and constant leaping was a bit frustrating, everyone played their parts well. It was weird, but also not, to see Chakotay in the captain’s chair… but the even bigger bummer is that basically all of the women leads die in that episode. Kes, Torres, and Janeway… all gone and the men are left in charge, boring. Seriously, they’ll never get home at this rate because they won’t stop and ask for directions. Okay, that last bit wasn’t at all serious because I don’t subscribe to stereotypes based on what sexual organs you possess, but I did think it was slightly humorous. Anyway, 9 songs from The Nightmare Before Christmas that have been rolling through my head all day. All hail the Pumpkin King!

TA Out!