User Reviews

Another one of those episodes that has an interesting premise but required a script doctor to make some alternations to make the episode more engaging.

I was surprised that no one on Voyager decided to ask some follow up questions when the Terseaians explained they had fertilized harry's mom in the alpha quadrant!?! This whole idea seems completely impractical and the command staff aboard Voyager should have thought this through.

Perhaps the conflict between the Nasari and Taresians could have had greater narrative purpose that tied into the black widow storyline?

Maybe further development of the 'all female' society would have added some texture to this story? Let's say the males were all a bunch of knuckleheads creating constant issues and it was agreed that they needed to be purged from society by the females.

This one needed to be kicked around the writers room for a while longer to add some depth to this premise.

As Voyager passes a star system Harry gets a sense of déjà vu, then when an alien ship greets them he claims it is about to attack and fires on it without authorisation. Afterwards he remains convinced that they were in imminent danger but can't say why. He later awakes from a nightmare and when he looks in a mirror he finds he has strange markings developing on his face. When more alien ships approach Voyager he gets the feeling a local planet will provide safety. As Voyager approaches a ship approaches but attacks the other vessels. When the aliens called the Taresians contact Voyager they claim that Harry is one of them; they breed by implanting their embryos into various aliens and the babies look like their parents but are drawn to explore space and find their way back to Taresia. When they beam down to the surface Harry is certainly made to feel welcome as a bevy of beauties virtually throw themselves at him. He learns that women there outnumber men by almost ten to one. All looks good for Harry but after Voyager goes to talk to the first aliens the crew find that they can't return to Taresia as a protective grid has been put up; it looks like somebody doesn't want them getting Harry back. On the surface the woman are making Harry feel very welcome and another recently returned man tells Harry how great life is there for a man; he is about to marry three women. Harry is keen to return to Voyager though and when he evades the female attention he makes a startling discovery concerning the fate of the Taresian men. On Voyager the Doctor has made his own discovery that suggests the Taresians have been less than honest.

This was a decent episode where Harry got to take the leading role, while he isn't my favourite character Garrett Wang does well in the role bringing a nice sense of innocence to the character. The Taresians reminded me of the sort of aliens we'd get in the original series although as this was made in the nineties these had less revealing clothes than we'd have seen in the earlier series!

And Voyager takes a nose dive again as the series fails to maintain its otherwise relentless mediocre course and plunges towards the atrocious in an episode that should have been named: and there be spiders..

Harry Kim gets to be made the main star which is almost worst then making Neelix the main star. Boring vs Annoying. Oh, the choice. Kim gets into danger as spiders in the shape of women lure him down to get eaten for his genes. Do I care? No. Remind me what makes Kim stand out again? He likes to play music? And? Well, he likes to play music. Anything else? No.. not really.

Anyway.. some kind of race greets Voyager with powered down weapons and lowered shields, but they are arming their weapons in secret without Voyager knowing, except for Kim. Fire away he shouts. Nice that Voyager can or cannot detect this depending on what is needed for the moment. This level of bad writing, being super inconsistent, now even occurs in one episode. The bla bla buffers can detect a virus and cannot detect it. The computer cannot detect alien DNA and can detect it five minutes later. Oh, who cares.

That alien DNA turns Kim into spider fodder in a desperate attempt to make him interesting. It fails. He is left behind on a planet on which 90 percent of the populace is women. Nubile women, so those women tell Kim. This means then that ten percent men, I assume, hasn't been devoured yet? Anyway these spi.. women tell him he is actually an alien of their kind who returns home. Except he is male.. And they will eat him. Well, they didn't tell him that. They told him: You're home Kim.. and strangely enough turning into an alien does give you spots, but does not make you interesting. From that moment on every time someone talked about these women I mentally substituted women with spiders. And i didn't even knew they were going to eat him.. It was just obvious they would.

In the mean time that species that got shot at by Voyager - thanks to Kim - is contacted by Voyager to ask them: why did intend to fire on us while pretending not to so we had to fire on you, so you could totally wreck Voyager when you finally did fire at us? Cause we hate that other species! Why? Cause we do. And anyone having one of their species on board will be shot at. For no reason at all. Even if you would have superior firepower! Which Voyager never has, because the weapon systems are always the first to go offline in a battle. For no reason you attack us but because you do not like those women. Because.. well why? Maybe to leave the viewer guessing? So Voyager returns to the spider planet after having squandered the time on nothing. But this was just so they could find out that those spi.. women erected an impenetrable force-field around the whole planet to keep Kim in and Voyager out. Except that it is penetrable if you just plunge Voyager through some holes you made by modulating the shield or bi-polarize the emitters. Or inject a plasma stream into the warpcore. Oh man.. so many words that you can combine. In the meantime a spi.. women ship is then on an intercept course so Janeway can shout: Battle Stations. What does that mean anyway? Everyone is already behind the consoles they sit behind during the explosion scenes. Why shout this pointless line? Cause it sounds cool. Like shield down to whatever percent. Or establishing the cause of things after it has been revealed. We are being fired upon. Oh is that what cause the shaking of the ship and the lowering of the shield.

Anyway Kim.. finds out the spi.. are women.. or was it the other way around? He flees..Comes in one of the most silly pole fights ever and show he has nothing to his credit but playing music. The spi.. women start to prepare him but he gets saved. Oh my, wow that was exciting. They saved him.. Who? Kim? The music player? Yes, him. Say,... whenever did we see him play music?

Anyway Voyager flies off with the spidership hot on their tail when that other species makes in an appearance.. cause you know.. Script. And while earlier into the episode that spider ship knocked out those other ships with one shot, now they can't. Cause script.

At the end Kim tells about the Sirens... if you missed the reference.. we just grab your head and smash you in a full bowl of the painful obvious.

Oh and he says: there was something exciting about having a new identity.

Yeah,, maybe you make for a more interesting character being a meal for spiders.

Harry develops a past, and a personality, only to have it all evaporate by the end of the episode. C'est la vie...

A planet of beautiful females convince Harry he's a natural-born prince and finally home to live a life of royal luxury, including endless sex with three wives of his choosing. Harry, being a wet sponge, declines, because the script tells him to, and we soon learn that these are evil women who only want his spunk for reproductive purposes.

Wouldn't a planet full of women be better off going after EVERY male on Voyager and asking each one to fertilize multiple women? Wouldn't that leave them all pregnant with eventually enough children to continue their population? Of all the men on Voyager, why would these women bypass Tom and Chakotay in favor of shaved panda Harry Kim?

Did the producers really plan on having Harry become an alien to provide him with personality and then chicken out during production? Yes. But nothing excuses this terribly sloppy, instantly forgettable episode.

GRADE: C

Every male's dream (a harem of beautiful and willing females), every male's nightmare (it's a VERY short happy life).

And this one has plot holes you could fly a starship through.

Nor does it advance any story lines or reveal anything interesting about any recurring characters. This is filler through and through.

I really have nothing more to say, but I have to get to 10 lines; the episode doesn't have anything to get your teeth into.

Nothing to analyze.

It's not horrible; it's just plain silly.

And frankly, though I'm not a connoisseur of female beauty from the male perspective, the females in this episode don't look that appealing.

This episode was so dumb, it barely deserves to be commented on. First of all, from a distance, Harry inherits spots which make him ripe for the picking on a planet full of attractive women. Then, with the permission of Captain and crew, he gets to stay and be fondled by them. But there is a dirty secret here. It doesn't take long until he realizes that being snuggled with 24 hours a day would get to be a bit much. In the end, there is a solution (as there always is). Of course, the whole story told to Harry about his lineage should have set off a cannonade of suspicion.

A wildly offensive and misogynistic episode, "Favorite Son" opens with an intriguing premise: a alien species claims to have sent their offspring to other worlds where they gestate inside alien wombs Years later the children return to provide new genetic material into the alien culture. It's a Harry Kim episode this time out, so actor Garrett Wang gets to stretch his (limited) acting chops.

Sadly, the society that Ensign Kim is sent into is so sexist that I'm amazed a show as "progressive" as Star Trek ever let this get produced. The Terisians are made up entirely of beautiful women and of course they turn out to be a society of maneaters - like the preying mantis, they kill the man after sex. They tempt Harry Kim with a single thing: sex. They offer the prospect of 3 wives and the women pretty much hang off him like a harem.

Basically, this episode implies that the only way women can ever conquer men is through the use of sexual temptation - a terrible irony given Voyager is the show with the female captain who most often outwits her opponent and never has to resort to seducing them. What's so awful about this episode is that it's all so unnecessary and illogical: for one, the Terisians are presented to be so technologically advanced and powerful that they could kidnap all the men they needed. Since they attack Harry at the end, they clearly don't need the men to be willing participants in the mating ritual. Finally, if the Terisians really do need to create a society that is tempting to ALL visitors, they would need to have a much wider appeal then just giving men the possibility for a foursome. A alien from a polygmous species, for instance, wouldn't be tempted by something he could get a home. Logically, the Terisians would need to find other means of making their society so tempting At the end of the episode, Harry tells Neelix the story of Odysseus and how he lashed himself to the ship so he could hear the siren's songs. This is a mixed metaphor. Odysseus was not presented with a pre-pubescent fantasy by the siren's: he was presented with a song that cast a spell over him. If the Terisians had done this, "Favorite Son" would have been a much smarter and less offensive bit of TV.