3x10 Warlord

[7.1/10] I think I owe Jennifer Lien an apology. Kes is a wet rag, but it’s increasingly clear that it’s because the character is written that way. I won’t deny that I think Lien gives a mild, almost to the point of being soporific, performance, but as we round out the first third of the series, it’s apparent that she’s simply doing what’s asked of her.

Because in an episode like this, where the script and the director lets her off the leash, Lien shows that she has much more range and potential than she normally gets to show off on Voyager.

True to the title, the episode sees Kes’ body possessed by a local warmonger named Tieran who rules through fear, intimidation, and manipulation. And freed from the shackles of having to play a provincial naif, Lien’s character is suddenly sly, dangerous, cruel, taunting, and even a little scary in ways you’d never expect given two-and-a-half seasons of Kes’ drollery. Hell, even when Lien is back to playing Kes, simply standing her ground against Tieran in the theater of the mind, she’s more confident and forceful in a way that shows what the character could have become.

Is she perfect in the role? Of course not. The deep-voiced commands occasionally sound a little silly, and there's a bit of over-theatricality in places. But she does a fair bit better than Alexander Siddig or Marina Sirtis when their characters were possessed by evil forces in the early seasons of Deep Space Nine and Next Generation respectively. I’d dare to compare her to Leonard Nimoy’s turn as Henoch, the malevolent energy being who possessed Spock in “Return to Tomorrow” from The Original Series.

The problem with “Warlord” is that “Hey, the actress who plays Kes gets to be really different!” is pretty much the only trick the episode has. There's not really anything in the way of new wrinkles added once it’s revealed that Tieran is in control of Kes. And there's little in the way of escalation once Tieran-as-Kes takes over the planet-of-the-week and aims to protect it from his rivals and Voyager. You just sort of wait around for Kes’ inevitable rescue, and hope that Lien unexpectedly vamping it up will be enough to fill the rest of the hour.

It kind of works? There's definitely a novelty to seeing Kes being an evil general for an episode. But there's not enough story there for it to carry the whole runtime. Kes is possessed. The in-control Tieran does the usual bad guy things to consolidate power. Janeway wants to find a way to rescue her. The rival leader would rather kill Kes to ensure that Tieran dies with her, which should theoretically be a major sticking point, but it’s never much of an issue beyond the usual boardroom debates. For a solid twenty minutes in the middle of the episode, the narrative feels like it’s running in place before the real fireworks happen.

Maybe it’s just because I’m over familiar with this setup. I often wonder how Voyager plays to people who haven't seen hundreds of episodes doing a similar thing by way of TOS/TNG/DS9. For me at this point, if you’ve seen one warring planet in Star Trek, you’ve seen them all, so the Ilari kerfuffle doesn’t do much for me. But maybe if you’re not jaded by the franchise’s ready-made conflict like I am, the middle sections about the struggles to hold and maintain power will have more resonance.

There's only a couple of saving graces here. One is the confrontation between Tuvok and Tieran-as-Kes. The two have a bond given their student and mentor relationship. Seeing Tieran take advantage of that, particularly with his willingness to abuse Kes’ psychic powers against Tuvok’s practiced control, is compelling. Hell, even Tieran trying to use Kes’ wiles to jostle Tuvok is an interesting angle, even if you can practically hear Rick Berman salivating over it on set during a season that's been much hornier on average. (And don’t get me started on the weird foot stuff with Neelix that opens the episode.)

Weird foot stuff or not, this is a good episode for Neelix! Despite getting rejected by Tieran-as-Kes and feeling stung, he gets to play hero in one of those rare non-bumbling outings for him in the show’s early years. His willingness to risk his life to rescue Kes, despite minimal combat training, and the gutsiness it takes to fire on someone he loves because he rationally knows it will help save her, gives him a solid win.

More to the point, the episode cleverly lets Neelix have his moment in the sun while ensuring that Kes still has agency as the protagonist of the episode. Her back and forth with Tieran in the mindscape is a highlight, with her showing a strength and even a fearsomeness in response to his angry threats and recriminations. Lien plays Tieran’s slipping sanity well. And most of all, Kes perceiving that Tieran jumped out of her head at the last minute and into another host lets her be the one to triumphantly eliminate her tormentor, not Tuvok, or Neelix, or even Janeway.

I still don’t really care about Ilari politics. And the show runs around in circles for a long time there, hitting the same beats about Tieran’s schemes and headaches and frustrations over and over again. But there's a bold choice to give Kes, and Lien, the hour here in an unusual way, and I’ll give tons of credit to anything that can offer such a pleasant surprise with what Lien could do.

But in a way, it’s an indictment of what the show’s done with Kes and Lien up to this point (give or take “Elogium”). Charitably, you can see the wisps of a seven season arc for Kes, where she starts as meek and diffident, but eventually evolves into the stronger and more self-possessed person we see glimpses of here. Unfortunately, Voyager never took much time to develop her in that direction before it was too late, and as a result, this is one of the vanishingly few episodes where Lien was able to prove what she was capable of.