Kes (Star Trek)
Kes is a female television character who features in Star Trek: Voyager.
Contents |
Biography
Kes
About 500 generations ago, a race of explorers from a distant galaxy, called the Nacene, had inadvertently damaged the atmosphere of the planet so badly that all nucleogenic particles were lost, thus rendering the atmosphere incapable of producing rain. The Nacene deeply regretted what they had done and left two of their kind behind to protect and provide for the Ocampa. While the female Nacene settler left in order to further explore the galaxy, the male Nacene, known as the Caretaker, stayed. He built a vast underground city, provided the Ocampa with food, entertainment and water from subterranean sources, as well as energy from the Array in space. The Ocampa civilization was sealed in by the Caretaker with a force barrier, and the ruling Elders were subsequently charged with discerning the wishes of the Caretaker, who had attained an almost godlike status among the Ocampa. The Ocampa remained in this state for five hundred generations. Over the years, some had found a way to circumvent the energy barrier and reach the surface. They were part of a rebellious minority who wanted to explore other possibilities, and no longer wished to remain dependent on the Caretaker. Among them was Kes. She was frustrated that the Ocampa had been dependent on the Caretaker for so long that they couldn't even think for themselves anymore. She knew that before they had given up their independence for comfort and security, they had been a people with full command of their minds' abilities, abilities they had lost because they stopped using them and began to just take what they were given. Kes did not want to walk the path the Caretaker had set for her and other Ocampa anymore; she believed her people needed to evolve, and that they could only do so by learning to survive on their own and on their own terms. (VOY: Caretaker)
Her yearning to see the outside world led her to leave the city in 2371 through some ancient tunnels. However, upon reaching the surface, she was captured by members of the Kazon-Ogla sect, who had established a camp near the city. There, she was mistreated and tortured for information regarding the entrance to the city. The Kazon were a crude and rather technologically deficient race and finding a way to the fruitful underground oasis of the Ocampa city would have provided them with abundant resources. During her time with the Ogla, she met the Talaxian Neelix and the two fell in love. Neelix promised to rescue her. He managed this with the aid of Captain Janeway's USS Voyager and Chakotay's Maquis crew that had been transported to the Delta Quadrant by the Caretaker's Array. In return, Kes agreed to help them retrieve crewmembers that had been sent to the Ocampa city for care, after the experiments the Caretaker had done on them. After the Array – which could have taken Voyager back to the Alpha Quadrant – had to be destroyed by Janeway so that the Ocampa would not fall victim to the ruthless Kazon, Kes and Neelix asked to join the Voyager crew on their journey, promising to serve the ship and its crew as valuable crewmembers. (VOY: Caretaker)
As one of her first acts on Voyager, Kes volunteered to establish a hydroponics garden in cargo bay two in order to provide fresh fruits and vegetables to allow for more variety in meals for the crew. Her requirement of nitrogenated soil for her garden from sickbay started her friendship and sympathy with the Doctor. (VOY: Parallax) Shortly after joining the crew, Kes began to exhibit some of the mental powers her species had long since lost. She experienced a telepathic vision of the devastation of a nearby planet by a polaric ion explosion. She also started to exhibit temporal telepathy while investigating the disaster, eventually locating the exact spot where Captain Janeway died. Even after the explosion was averted and the timeline containing the disaster completely unraveled, her vision not only remained, but became more vivid. (VOY: Time and Again) Kes quickly settled in to life aboard Voyager and began growing vegetables in her hydroponics bay. She also began to study medicine under The Doctor in order to become The Doctor's nurse. When Neelix was attacked by the Vidiians and they removed his lungs, she donated one of her own to save his life. After the operation, The Doctor allowed her to commence training to become his medical assistant. (VOY: Phage) Soon Kes started to help The Doctor in sickbay. She was shocked at the way The Doctor was treated by the crew. After explaining the situation to Captain Janeway, the captain agreed with her. Janeway told The Doctor that he was a member of the crew and she gave him control of the deactivation of his program. The Doctor found Kes' intellectual curiosity intriguing, and in the course of instructing her in her medical studies, he postulated that Kes had an eidetic memory. (VOY: Eye of the Needle) With Kes acting as his medical assistant, this gave Voyager a physician that could act as a medic in cases where patients couldn't be immediately transferred to sickbay, also allowing The Doctor to be kept offline rather than be constantly activated to deal with any minor injuries. Despite her respect for his lessons, Kes also lectured The Doctor on his bedside manner; when The Doctor programmed a holographic "flu" to better his bedside manner, Kes secretly modified it to last longer than the expected duration, telling him that "it wouldn't be an effective lesson" if he knew when his illness would end. (VOY: Tattoo)
Overview
Personality and attributes
In appearance, Kes was a short, slender, and exceptionally delicate female humanoid of the alien Ocampa race who possessed a fragile, youthful physical build. She had fair skin, large blue eyes, and a highly distinct head of short, straight cropped blonde hair styled into a soft, layered cut that naturally framed her face, highlighted by noticeably elongated, pointed ears characteristic of her species. During her debut as a captive on the desert surface, her countenance bore the marks of severe physical duress, showing visible bruising and a split lower lip before undergoing treatment. She wore a simple, casual civilian textile tunic consisting of an earth-toned, pale yellow or cream-coloured draped top worn over matching loose-fitting trousers designed for basic desert mobility. Her attire entirely lacked any specialized military protective gear, Starfleet rank insignias, or advanced technological armor plating, and her feet were enclosed in plain, soft-soled fabric shoes during her initial introduction. (VOY: Caretaker)
Powers and abilities
Kes was born a member of the Ocampa race, granting her a unique biological legacy that yielded a highly restricted nine-year total lifespan but imbued her with a highly profound, latent capacity for extrasensory perception and telepathic tracking. She operated as an independent guide and future medical trainee within the stranded Voyager division, demonstrating that her baseline memory tracking, mental discipline, and determination were exceptional compared to her coddled underground peers. She possessed the unique power of Latent Telepathy, allowing her mind to voluntarily perceive hidden environmental variables, track spiritual or energetic fluctuations, and experience precognitive flashes of distant geographical sectors without requiring optical sight lines. Kes possessed a highly unique internal resistance to psychological conditioning, enabling her mind to break through structural societal illusions and navigate dangerous wilderness rifts safely, operating effectively without requiring standard hand-to-hand martial arts forms, Starfleet firearms, or external cybernetic enhancements. (VOY: Caretaker)
Kes' native telepathic powers continued to grow during her time in space, and she received training from Tuvok to control her powers. When Voyager encountered another group of Ocampa and the entity Suspiria, Kes' powers increased so fast that she began to lose control of them, incinerating the hydroponics bay and nearly killing Tuvok due to her new power of pyrokinesis. Fortunately, she saw how twisted these Ocampa had become and used her powers to fight them off. With the escape of Suspiria, her powers returned to their normal levels. (VOY: Cold Fire)
In an artificially-created hallucination, it was Kes who telepathically sensed that Janeway's spirit was still present on Voyager, but attempts by Tuvok and Kes to make contact with her failed. Janeway soon learned that she was simply being pursued by an alien who was trying to convince her that she was dead and wanted her energy to feed off. (VOY: Coda)
Notes
- Kes was portrayed by actress Jennifer Lien where she featured in the setting of the Star Trek universe.
In other media
Video games
Other
Appearances
- Star Trek: Voyager:
External Links
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