Story By: Rick Berman and Brannon Braga
Directed By: John Bruno
Rating: ** (out of 5)
�Fury� is about Kes and about how she is angry at the Voyager crew for letting her go and abandoning her. �Fury� wants us to believe that Kes blames Voyager for the bad years she has had since leaving about two years ago. So, what does she do? She comes to Voyager, damages it with her enormous powers and then uses the Warp core to travel back in time to Season 1 were she hatches a plan to get her younger self back to Ocampa before it�s too late, and she uses the Viddians for help.
But her plan backfires and it doesn�t work. She ends up being killed by Janeway and Janeway then tells the normal Kes about what�s happened and makes a recording so when this all happens again in the future Janeway can change Kes�s mind.
No. I don�t think so. �Fury� makes it�s major mistake right there. The episode assumes that Kes will do all this again. But if Kes remembers making the recording and being told by Janeway what she might do, wouldn�t Kes reconsider and realize that those actions are wrong? Besides that, Kes�s plan is a complete waste of time. We didn�t need to see all that we saw here, all Kes needed to do was go back to any time before Voyager and stop herself from being captured by the Kazon like she was in �Caretaker� when we first met her. It seemed that Kes could control the time that she traveled back too making this even more a waste of time.
�Fury� should�ve been a kind of �Pathfinder� episode where the Voyager crew isn�t apart of the episode too much. What we should�ve had was Kes returning to Voyager in the past and kidnapping her younger self to take back home, without injuring any of the crew, but Voyager decides to try and rescue Kes. Kes realizes through the crew dedication to her and through memories that she is doing the wrong thing. Even better; Voyager never discovers who the captor is except for a few clues. In my story Kes uses her powers a lot to help her, to even propel her ship or whatever. The point is my story is more of a personal journey for Kes and not an episode to simply have �Kes returns, Viddian returns, cool SFX, cool CGI and alotta action� like �Fury� is.
�Fury� doesn�t even make Kes�s feelings crystal clear to us, even once she leaves at the end. Instead of relating to her personal anguish we get some really bad lines that make no sense. We needed to understand why she was doing what she was doing and not how, even though �how� was not clear either but you get what I mean!
I was also disappointed that Kes still hasn�t had a good sendoff. In �The Gift� her sendoff was appropriate but we needed some goodbye scenes. The one goodbye was done so well in �The Gift� between Kes and Janeway but we needed more. Even here we don�t get a good sendoff. We don�t even get a good hello scene! She did live with the crew for three years, the least we could�ve seen is the entire crew socializing with her in the Mess Hall.
The story, while bad, isn�t helped by anything else. The directing doesn�t try to make us like �Fury� too much, and the acting tries even less. No one was doing anything, not even Kate Mulgrew or, even more surprisingly Robert Picardo were trying to have fun on this one. Jennifer Lien does an awful job as the angry Kes, her acting only improving enormously in the last five minutes when Kes shows more obvious feelings.
You�d think after really pushing time episode plausibility with the last time episode, �Relativity� late season 5 that we would dispense with the nonsense with time-travel, but no. So I�m glad that �Fury� has been the only time episode of Season 6. (�Blink of an Eye� doesn�t count.)
�Fury� is a waste of a possibly good premise. I wanted to see Kes again and I didn�t want her to leave in �The Gift�, but now I don�t want her to return. �Fury� is the biggest disappointment of the season.