483. ParturitionFORMULA: Elogium + The Enemy
WHY WE LIKE IT: The inside joke.
WHY WE DON'T: The Paris-Kes-Neelix love triangle.
REVIEW: Parturition is the process of giving birth. I didn't know and never bothered to check. Imagine that. Neelix's jealousy about Tom Paris comes to a head in this episode, showcasing the very worst of his nature. Unfortunately, Neelix is a comedy relief character, and largely played as a caricature, so it's comedy jealousy, extreme and cartoonish in its presentation. It's very difficult to do proper dramatic or emotional scenes with such a character, so it seems like Neelix gets into a food fight out of the blue, and later bonds with Paris also out of the blue. By the reconciliation, you've had a complete character arc in less than 40 minutes (and Voyager guts another conflict it could have milked for years).
Tom Paris has definitely appeared interested in Kes, but he's not the best character to explore unrequited love. He's one of those Casanovas of the stars, like Kirk and Riker, and while I believe he's attracted to her, all out love is a bit much. At least he's enough of a straight shooter to tell Neelix about it. As far as reconciliations go, it's not a bad one. Man to man talk and all that. Of course, their bonding over an alien baby that precedes it is another matter.
After their immature fighting, the boys find an animatronic reptilian baby on "Planet Hell" (named after the cave set we've seen in all three modern series to date) and having disrupted its birth, they try to care for it. The science of it all is ok, and the baby is cute in a Dinosaurs kind of way (I'm not saying that's a good thing). Meanwhile, in orbit, there's some fairly boring fighting between Voyager and the baby's mother, and oh, Janeway sports her less mumsy haircut from seasons 4 through 7 (but she's back to the bun in the next episode).
LESSON: Don't touch my baby. And that goes double for my infant.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium-Low: Not quite as bad as I thought it was, but it plays very lightly with character arcs.
Comments
It says something, although I'm not sure quite what...