3-20. Favorite Son.

Harry finds himself on a planet of beautiful women.

THE PLOT

Voyager encounters a ship belonging to the Nasari, who hail them and welcome them to this sector of space... Whereupon Harry promptly raises Voyager's shields and opens fire. He justifies himself by saying the Nasari were charging weapons, but Tuvok sees no evidence and Harry is relieved of duty.

After having a dream about his mother, Harry wakes to find that his face is covered in Dax's DS9 makeup... um, strange spots, with the Doctor telling him that his genetic makeup has been altered. This isn't a particular cause for concern, however, because Janeway has determined that Harry was right about the Nasari charging weapons and puts him back on active duty.

Voyager soon reaches a planet that is home to the Taresians, a race of beautiful women with the same spots on their head that Harry just sprouted. They explain that Harry is actually a member of their race, planted as an embryo in a human host in order to come back to the Taresians and enrich their gene pool. Which sounds like a really stupid way to procreate, but that doesn't phase Janeway, who takes the Taresians' claim at face value (no, seriously... Neither she nor any member of the crew show the slightest skepticism) and beams Harry to the planet to get to know his newly-discovered people.

That's when the Taresians put up a force field around their world to keep Voyager out and Harry in. Because Harry isn't actually Taresian - He was just lured there for nefarious purposes best served convoluted, leaving him to fend for his life against a bevy of beautiful women who want only to mate with him...

And wow, would this script have been a lot more fun if it had only been produced by Roger Corman in his heyday!


CHARACTERS

Capt. Janeway: Her response to a crew member apparently inciting a conflict with an alien ship for no reason is... to confine him to quarters. No matter how much she likes Harry, shouldn't he be sent to the brig for firing on an enemy ship against orders? Even when Janeway learns that he was actually right, she should still be stern about what he did. For all the information they have at this point in the episode, Harry simply "guessed right" when he fired at the Nasari ship. Encouraging crew members to commandeer and fire the ship's weapons on a hunch isn't exactly a good long-term command strategy. 

Harry Kim: Both The Thaw and The Chute were Harry-centric episodes that succeeded in making him almost interesting: The Thaw, by exploring the human center of his earnest morality; The Chute, by thrusting him into a setting where that very morality became inseparable from weakness. In both cases, good scripts built upon what was already established about Harry. Writer Lisa Klink instead tries to make Harry interesting by trying to convince us that he is actually a completely different person than we believed. It doesn't work, and the script abandons trying to sell that premise by the midpoint, leaving Harry to simply blandly run through a plot that feels like it belongs in a 1950's "B" movie. 

Doctor: So the brilliant Doctor, who has the combined knowledge and intellect of all the Federation's top scientists, only thinks to question the frankly absurd story about Harry originating in the Delta Quadrant after the Taresians raise a shield around their planet to keep Voyager out? Surely he should have been looking at Harry's DNA from a more skeptical point of view to start with - particularly since once he decides to doubt the Taresians' story, he is able to find proof that they are lying extremely quickly and easily. Pure Idiot Plotting that cannot convince no matter how hard actor Robert Picardo tries to sell it. 


THOUGHTS

Favorite Son was probably genetically destined to be bad. Not only is it a Harry Kim episode - It's a Harry Kim episode scripted by Lisa Klink, who previously brought us such gems as Innocence, Sacred Ground, and Blood Fever. All of which managed to be mediocre-to-bad despite centering on members of the ensemble who are substantially stronger than Harry is.

Some bad Trek writers manage to take a potentially interesting premise and ruin it with lousy execution. Klink apparently likes to save time by starting with a lousy premise. Strand Tuvok on an alien world with what appears to be a group of children; have Janeway take a spiritual journey to renounce that silly science stuff; have Torres catch pon farr when it apparently becomes contagious; and now, have aliens appear and claim that Harry has been one of them all along... with the crew taking that claim at face value for half the episode! These aren't shows that might have been good with sharper writing. These were bad ideas that never should have gone past an initial story pitch to start with!

If this wasn't written by a woman, I would wonder whether the Taresians' "honey trap" represents a male fantasy or a male emasculation fear. Harry is plunked down in a society made up entirely of beautiful women, all of whom cluster around him as if eager to satisfy his every whim. But it's quickly clear that the women are the predators here, the "marriage ceremony" that we see consisting of the male being tied up and blindfolded before being carried away by three women. When Harry resists the women's charms, he is pursued, until he is at the center of a circle of attacking women, literally beating them off him with his bare hands. It's quite funny to watch, if nothing else - Almost like a precursor of Nicolas Cage's unintentionally hilarious remake of The Wicker Man.

I'd love to say something about the episode's treatment of Harry, but there isn't much to say. Once Klink gets over trying to make us believe for a second that Harry might be an unwitting alien, all that's left is to extricate Harry from the latest mess he's gotten himself into. Some of it's nutty enough to be funny... But it doesn't even go far enough in that direction to work as a "so-bad-it's-good" episode. 

The final word on this as a character episode comes in the tag, in which Harry condemns himself as boring, to be followed by Tom basically agreeing that Harry is boring by describing him with such adjectives as "punctual." What do you say to a "character spotlight" episode whose closing seconds emphasize just how dull the character truly is?


Overall Rating: 2/10.

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