ST: VOY episode review: Fortunate Son

[ILikeDeathNote]

In my last Voyager episode review I argued that Threshold wasn't the worst episode of Star Trek ever made. Sure, the science was outright atrocious, and Jeri Taylor reveals that she thinks the ultimate form of "evolved" sentient life is a belly-crawling amphibian, but other than that there was really nothing that made this episode stand out, good or bad. It was just an average episode, something you could watch if nothing better was on.

So, if I think Threshold is nothing special either way, what do I think is the worst episode of Voyager? Or how about the worst episode of Trek period? Well it just so happens to be that they're both one in the same - Voyager's season 3 episode "Favorite Son."

Now, let's start with what may actually be the least offensive part of this episode, its abuse of science. Once again, we have a plot revolving around genetic manipulation; this time, Ensign Whipping Bo...Ensign Harry Kim's DNA is discovered to have alien sequences within it. It was originally believed that Harry was in fact an alien from a race who goes to extreme lengths to spread their seed across the galaxy, but it turns out that these aliens used random technobabble to scramble his DNA to match theirs surreptitiously while Harry was on an away mission. Now I'll admit that I'm far from an expert on genetics - even though my own stories feature a heavy genetic angle, I often have to refer to the best genetics expert sources I have available and deal with what I have. But I at least know enough to know that genetic manipulation is far from a mundane thing, and at the very least Voyager's transport buffers would have likely picked up something when Harry was beamed up from that away mission, to say nothing of subsequent physicals - and Star Trek and Voyager in particular have demonstrated that they're capable of making biological scans to the molecular level, something which they do in this very episode to prove the aliens' fraud. As for the actual realism of the genetic manipulation shown in this episode, I honestly lack the background or the expertise to make a judgment, so take it as you will.

That said, the aliens themselves are utterly ridiculous in terms of realism, but furthermore the lengths in which this episode takes them to further along this garbage plot make them outright offensive (which I'll get into later). The aliens are unable to conceive males, so they need to modify the DNA of males of alien species, and kill them to harvest that DNA. I hope I don't need to explain why this is just plain stupid - in fact it's so stupid from so many angles that it's honestly hard for me to comprehend just how stupid this becomes in its totality at once. Now some of you may argue that certain real-life species such as the praying mantis and black widow spider do this, and are probably the ultimate inspiration of this episode. The difference is that, first of all, such species consume the male only after a genetic exchange has been made, and that the only reason why the male is consumed is to provide sufficient protein for the female to consist on - genetic material have nothing to do with the actual cannibalism. Secondly, the method of genetic reproduction employed by the aliens requires ensnaring an alien male, changing his DNA, and then killing him - eventually, people will become smart enough to avoid you, and indeed the one thing they got right in this episode is that there's another alien species which has in effect placed an interplanetary blockade upon them. And thirdly, well...it's just stupid. Killing the male of the species may work for praying mantises and black widow spiders but its hardly conductive towards repeated attempts at conception - you effectively are forced to place all your eggs in the basket at one time, in a somewhat literal sense.

There are other stupidities with this as well - if this species is only able to produce females, how the &*^#! hell were they able to procreate before contact with alien species?!?! Perhaps at one point they did have males, and they "used them all up," but if that were the case, if they were able to conceive males once, they should be able to conceive males at any given time. TNG's The Perfect Mate (another atrocious episode for many of the same plot-driven reasons as this one) is at least a more realistic portrayal of this dilemma - the female sex slaves (and let's face it, that's what she was, a sex slave, and of course the writers were too stupid and oblivious to realize this) may be far more rare than the male sex slaves, but there are still female sex slaves being conceived every now and then. Besides, if they have the genetic expertise to modify an alien's DNA to suit their needs, ummmmm...can't they just cultivate and harvest the needed genetic material themselves? Atomic Rockets of the Space Patrol, a website put together by "nyrath" of Stardestroyer.net fame, has an excellent discussion about possible alien life forms - his "Ain't Gonna Look Like Mr. Spock" discussion points out many possible DNA configurations for aliens as postulated by Isaac Asimov (and I believe Carl Sagan did extensive studies on this as well) which include such exotic possibilities as silicon-based life; if they can modify a silicon-based life form and a carbon-based life form with equal ease, then you'd think they have the technology to just be able to cultivate whatever they need. Either way, there's no way to guarantee that every form of sentient life they meet will just happen to be carbon-based, so either way, going though all these lengths to capture males (not to mention piss a lot of people off) rather than just cultivating what they need (which they clearly have the technology for) is just...stupid!

But that's far from the stupidest or most offensive thing this episode has to offer, sadly. The main point I was trying to make in my Threshold review was that audiences are more than willing to forgive the egregious abuse of science or logic if the storytelling manages to carry the episode. Threshold's failing was that it had an average plot, so people ignored it and attacked its bad science - in a lot of ways, Threshold becomes a case study and a hard-learned lesson about why telling a mediocre story is a bad thing. Favorite Son takes this to the next level - the plot is simply so bad, it overshadows everything else bad about it, and once again it goes back to the aliens it revolves around.

At this point it should be pretty clear that the aliens of this episode are meant to be this episode's version of the succubus, a mythical creature which thrives on the souls of, to put it bluntly, single and horny men. There are ways to do a succubus story properly, and Star Trek has done succubus stories properly - TOS's That Which Survives is arguably a succubus story done exceedingly well, and Mudd's Women has elements of a temptress/siren story in it with an amazing, beautiful twist in the end. I guess we just can't count on the B&B crew to do it well - TNG's Sub Rosa, written by usual suspects Jeri Taylor and Brannon Braga about an Incubus (the male version) just utterly stinks by being just so damn boring - it's pretty much 35 minutes of nothing followed by 5 minutes of crap that actually matter but is still boring. Favorite Son at least manages to avoid being boring, but reaches a level of banality of truly staggering height.

Favorite Son's ultimate failure is that it comes off too much like a cheap fanfic written to be a Trekkie's ultimate wet dream (perhaps too literally). Seriously, to the point where I honestly began searching through every Star Trek fanfic and Usenet archive I could find that would've existed back in 1995/1996 to make sure Berman, Braga and Taylor didn't just plagiarize off of some pathetic nerd. You have Harry Kim, arguably a Mary Sue for the stereotypical Trekkie nerd - he can't get a girlfriend to save his life (once again, sometimes almost too literally), and for the most part he just stands in the background acting stupid and ignored. All of a sudden, he's plopped into a world filled with nothing but beautiful women, with a promise of multiple wives. What then follows is about 15 minutes or so of pure Trekkie sexual wet dream (and at this point we're well past the episode's half-way mark as it is) until Harry discovers that, yes, he might be in trouble after all. So how does he escape? He tricks one of his would-be wives into softcore BSDM play and then runs away until he's finally encircled by women in a scene so cheesy it makes the original BBC production of The Wicker Man weep with envy, and then he gets beamed up.

Thus, the moral of the story is: girls are icky and they want to touch your no-no parts while doing weird interpretive dance, so stay away from them.

If that doesn't convince you that this is the worst episode of Trek, I don't know what will.

In Conclusion: this episode is utter tripe, truly the worst of the worst. It stands against everything Trek is supposed to stand for, and comes off more like a wet dream written up by some poor 7th-grader fanboy whose desperately searching for and answer to why girls keep a 10-foot radius away from him. I just cannot truly express or articulate the sheer awfulness of this episode. Whenever this episode is on, do yourself a favor and go channel surfing. Or read a book. Driving a rusty nail through your right testicle is more satisfying than watching this episode. I'd rather play around with dog turds. I'd rather drink diarrhea straight out of a buffalo's anus. I'd rather eat out the asshole of a roadkill skunk. I'd rather....

*Angry Video Game Nerd fanboys storm in and tell me to quit ripping off the Angry Video Game Nerd*

...just do yourself a favor, and stay away from this episode.