Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 76

72 Popular Culture Review In “Favorite Son”, Voyager crew member Harry Kim begins to experience deja vu, even though the ship is travelling through an area of space never before explored by Voyager. Undergoing a series of genetic transformations, Harry directs the ship to a planet on which he is warmly greeted. The inhabitants inform Harry that he is, in fact, not human, but rather an alien who has fulfilled his latent genetic urge to return home to take a mate. On a planet with a population of ninety per cent women, this revelation seems too good to be true. Unfortunately, the imbalances of the sexes on the planet Tauresia has led its people to infect male aliens such as Harry with a genetically altering virus, changing the victims to make them suitable for procreation. The combination of the virus and an abundance of women provides them with enough willing husbands. The men, however, are killed du ring the mating process - as Harry finds out just in time when he stumbles across the corpse of an unlucky husband. In the tag of the episode, Harry sits in the Mess Hall telling fellow crew members about Odysseus and the Sirens. Harry tells them: “But Odysseus had been warned that these women, the sirens, sang a song so beautiful that any man who heard it would be lured to his death. [. . .] He told his crew to cover their ears so they couldn’t hear the sirens’ song. But he also had them tie him to the mast of the ship so he could listen himself without being led astray as they sailed past.” Though remodeled to fit the concerns of a primarily science fiction program, ancient Greek myth forms the basic framework for this episode’s narrative. Harry briefly retells the original source, providing not only a short lesson in the original myth but also another means of quotation. The Sirens story is, therefore, told twice within the context of the episode, but it has a third resonance in relation to Voyager's series structure of the return home. While Homer’s O dyssey tells of Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens in flashback, the episodic nature of Odysseus’ adventures within a quest to return home against great odds is a structure which Voyager follows as a series. Whether or not the viewer is aware of this alignment is another matter, given that “Favorite Son” gives no more information about the O dyssey than Harry’s brief retelling of the Sirens at the end of the episode (quoted above). The use of the Odyssey nonetheless situates Voyager within its mythic framework, inviting the viewer to relate the two tales to one another and directing us specifically to Odysseus over a myriad of other Siren myths. In the Odyssey, Odysseus is forewarned by Circe of the Sirens’ deadly allure, and is, therefore, able to make preparations to protect himself and his men from the effects of their song (12.39-54, 12.165-200). In “Favorite Son,” Harry gradually