The Beloved Star Trek Character Who Became A Sex Pest

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 13 seconds ago

Part of what makes Star Trek cool is that, like all good sci-fi, it forces viewers to consider perspectives that are very different from their own. After all, when characters like Kirk and Picard go “seek out new life and new civilizations,” they don’t always find perfect mirrors of Earth culture. Often, they find worlds that are alien in every sense of the word, populated by beings with values very different from those of humanity.

In Voyager, the collision of values came to a head in the Season 2 episode “Elogium.” This episode’s B plot concerned itself with whether Neelix (Ethan Phillips) and Kes (Jennifer Lien) were ready to have children, a discussion made more intense by the fact that she was undergoing a Ponn Farr like mating drive. That seems relatable enough on paper, but these two have an age gap that goes way beyond problematic. You see, Kes was only one year old in this episode, which basically cemented Neelix as (by human standards) the galaxy’s biggest sex pest.

Groomer Has It

The A Plot of “Elogium” has to do with the ship trying to get rid of a swarm of space critters that keep draining power from vital areas like helm and shields. In the B plot, the swarm somehow triggers a premature elogium in Kes. This is the name her people (the Ocampa) use for a special mating cycle where they feel the urge to reproduce. It normally only happens to Ocampa who are four or five years old. Kes is only one year old, and she and Neelix weigh whether to have kids. They ultimately decide against it, and Voyager’s successful escape from the swarm frees Kes from their influence.

These days, the young age of Kes is a source of dark humor for Star Trek fans who joke about Neelix being a creeper for having a one-year-old girlfriend. Interestingly, script writer Kenneth Biller (whose success on “Elogium” landed him a position on the show’s staff as executive story editor) revealed that producers fretted over discussions about Neelix and Kes having sex.

In an interview with Cinefantastique, Biller revealed that he “wanted them to be living together and doing it, but Jeri [Taylor] and Rick [Berman] had some concerns that she is so young.” Collectively, the producers worried, “Are we sending the right message to say that they are screwing?”

Alien Sex: Even Weirder Than You Imagined

Eventually, the producers convinced Biller that it would be “more interesting if we show the time they have to first confront this issue.” However, he felt that the idea that Neelix and Kes hadn’t yet had sex was pretty unbelievable, given when “Elogium” aired. You see, this episode was filmed for Season 1 but ultimately pushed back to Season 2. “I thought it began to feel less believable and a little odd to tell the audience almost a year later that these people have never had any kind of sexual relationship.”

Biller eventually accepted that what would seem weird to us wouldn’t necessarily be weird to aliens. “Who knows what mating is for an Ocampa?” he asked. “Just because they didn’t have a sexual relationship is open to discussion and people can kind of believe what they want.” These words proved quite prophetic: decades after Voyager aired its final episodes, fans still question whether or not Neelix and Kes had an explicitly intimate relationship. 

Neelix And The Week-Long Erection

Biller enjoyed that Kes’s story doubles as a teen pregnancy metaphor, but he mostly liked how this episode was “trying to play with the weirdness of alien sexuality.” This included that the couple would have to be bonded for a full week before any action: “you see the look on Neelix’s face that he was metaphorically going to have to keep it up for seven days.” Sadly, the show never really returned to this level of sexual tension between the two characters again; they would later break up in Season 3 before Kes left the show to make way for Seven of Nine, arguably the biggest source of sexual tension in all of Voyager.

To this day, “Elogium” remains something of a Star Trek anomaly. As a Voyager episode, its A Plot does a good job of illustrating how weird life on the final frontier can be, making for a fascinating bottle episode. Its B Plot, meanwhile, focused on the quirk of Ocampan biology that would effectively give Neelix a pass to get his one-year-old girlfriend pregnant. In that way, this obscure Star Trek episode gives Neelix a new title. He was already the cook and the morale officer; now, thanks to “Elogium,” he’s also the biggest, weirdest sex pest in the entire Delta Quadrant.